One of the most effective ways to get more done is to find and eliminate productivity bottlenecks. What do I mean by bottlenecks? These are simply the limiting steps in a process. If it takes you ten minutes to drive to your office, but an hour to find parking, then finding parking is a bottleneck in trying to get to work. Bottlenecks destroy your productivity and they might be hiding in your schedule without you realizing it.

Why is Eliminating Bottlenecks Critical?

Bottlenecks are the perfect example of a small change that can have a huge impact on your productivity. If an activity takes four hours, but three and a half are spent on just one step, speeding up that step could make you 7-8x more productive. If something that normally takes an entire day could be finished in an hour, wouldn’t you want to know how?

What Causes Productivity Bottlenecks?

There are a lot of ways you can get caught in a bottleneck. Here are just a few of the possible causes:
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Scott Young, a frequent contributor to PickTheBrain, has a great post up on a his personal blog that deals with an issue I’ve been facing recently.

Email, for many purposes, is a terrible form of communication. Scott’s main reasons:

1. Email is One-to-One. Although you can use Reply to All and mailing lists, email works best between two people. This means group conversations are difficult to continue.
2. Email is Time Delayed. Conversations work best when there is a rapid flow of feedback. If your messages are hours or days apart, this makes chatting difficult.
3. Email is Written. While there are written mediums of communication that work well for chatting, it is never as good as human speech. Text removes the tonality, body language and subtle cues that make a conversation interesting.
4. Email is Bloated. People already get too many emails. Adding to that pile lengthy conversations means your messages will get ignored or skimmed.

I couldn’t agree more. We tend to rely on email because it’s convenient and universal, but if you aren’t careful it can ruin your communications. There are just so many opportunities for confusion and, in terms of building relationships, it’s terribly inadequate.

Much of my new job involves forming partnerships with people I’ve never met in person. I’ve found email is a good way to initiate contact, but once a conversation starts it’s a bad medium.

Something as simple as a 5 minute phone call (or even an IM conversation) is vastly more effective for building trust and rapport.

So if you aren’t getting the results you want from your email dialogue, try something else! And go read the full post on Scott’s blog, he recommends some great alternatives.

[Don’t Use Email for Conversations]

Do your friends, spouse or significant other think interest in productivity is silly, pointless or a waste of time? Then you need help being productive in a hostile environment.

The corner of the internet occupied by personal productivity blogs and resources is quite a little community. But it’s sometimes easy to forget that outside the community there’s a widespread lack of understanding as to what it’s all about. Many are prone to laugh and scoff at the whole concept.

For example, my partner can’t understand how I can possibly want to spend time reading blogs in the niche. Common questions I get are along the lines of “why don’t you spend less time reading about productivity and more time being productive?” and “did you do the washing up or were you too busy being productive?”

Maybe it’s just me, but I sometimes have a hard time getting across that I spend time both reading about and doing, that learning about productivity is both a means to a more productive end and an enjoyable activity in its own right.

I realized I was clearly losing the battle for hearts and minds and I fear others may be too. So I’ve come up with five tactics to make easier the pursuit and practice of productivity in a hostile environment:
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In the art of productivity, a key skill is being able to motivate yourself without hard deadlines. These are the deadlines that if you don’t finish on time, you’re screwed. And if you’ve ever scrambled to get your taxes finished in April, you can see why relying on them for motivation isn’t a good idea.

Hard deadlines tend to clump up. If your “soft” deadlines, or deadlines you impose on your own schedule are just as motivating as hard deadlines, you become the one in control. Instead of having your schedule be at the mercy of your boss, professor or the world, you can decide how to finish work in advance so you don’t drive yourself crazy.

Hardening Soft Deadlines

How hard are your soft deadlines? When you decide to finish a project today, how likely are you to finish it? Some people can effectively use these self-imposed deadlines to get work done early. Other people make the deadline, but end up procrastinating until a real deadline forces them to work.

At first glance, the difference between these people might just look like different personalities. One is more disciplined, the other is lazy. Some people can motivate themselves, others need outside pressure.

But even if you are a chronic procrastinator, you can harden your soft deadlines. A few years ago my soft deadlines didn’t have nearly the same weight they do today. By tweaking how I setup my soft deadlines, I figured out how to use them to combat procrastination.

Be the Master of Your To-Do List

I’ve found there are only three main keys for making harder soft deadlines:

1. Set Reasonable Expectations.
2. Cycling Hard and Easy Days.
3. Schedule Calibration.

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