The Productivity Edge | Mark Ellwood | Ep 198

Mark Ellwood  00:00

Women are spending 22% of their time on their top priority activities, and men are only at 18% the women are more concentrated on their top priority activities than men are.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:15

One of the curses of to do lists is that people kind of just keep carrying stuff forward and carrying stuff forward and carrying stuff forward, which means suddenly you're working on things that have got zero importance, but they're just things that you want to be able to tick off and say that you've done.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:37

Welcome to another episode of Better Business, Better Life. I'm your host, Debra Chantry Taylor, and I'm passionate about helping entrepreneurs lead their ideal lives by creating better businesses.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  00:54

I'm a certified EOS implementer and FBA accredited family business advisor and a business owner myself with several business interests, I work with established business owners and their leadership teams to help them live their ideal entrepreneurial life using EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. Today's guest is the inventor of the time COVID device. He has collected 500,000 hours of real time data on productivity and is the author of three books, including The Poetic Path to Getting More Done. Today, he's going to share with us the astounding findings in his 34 years of scientific research and data about the time use difference between men and women at work, and is going to reveal who is more productive and why. Mark Ellwood is an internationally known productivity consultant from Toronto, Canada, who works with people from all around the world. Welcome to the show, Mark, great to have you here.

Mark Ellwood  01:47

Hi Debra, nice to be here.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  01:48

So we've just been having a bit of a chat, as I always do with my guests, before you come onto the podcast, and you have got quite an interesting back story, don't you? So why don't you start by telling us a bit about how you got into what you're doing today.

Mark Ellwood  02:00

I'm a productivity consultant. I have an electronic device that people use for tracking how they spend their time and when you go way, way back. My grounding in productivity started when I was a little paper boy. I don't know if people have paper routes anymore, but when I was young, they did, and so I wanted to finish delivering my papers as quickly as I could. So I just got these ideas about being productive. The first was the use of technology. Well, I bought a wagon. Lot easier to pull a wagon behind you than carrying those heavy bags on your shoulders. The next thing I did it was I could fold the papers up and throw them now, there's a bit of a trick to that. I could probably still do it. The thing is, how much time do you spend folding the papers and how many steps do you save by walking up to someone's door or being able to throw it up on their porch or whatever? So it's a little bit of a calculation there. Another calculation you make is this sort of logistics. Think of pulling this wagon up the street on one side. Okay, do I take three papers to the other side of the street, or do I move up farther? So there's a little bit of calculation, determining how to plot out the route to minimise the number of steps. Here's a third one, blocking or batching your tasks, so you had to go and collect every single week from your customers.

And I thought, hmm, I got 120 customers. Maybe if I split the route in half, I'll go to half of the route for two weeks, and then the other half the collect for two weeks, and then the other half of the route and collect for two weeks. So really, I was only going to 60 every week, but then the other 60 on the other weeks, there was one last thing I might have done. People had the option to pay from the office. They could send a check in or something like that. The thing there is that would have saved me collecting time, but you don't get as many tips, because when you go and collect door to door, people give you tips. So all these things, oh yeah, sorry. One other, last one on the weekends, the two the newspapers, came separately from an insert, kind of a colour insert, and you had to put the two of them together. So I would sit there, and this is pure time and motion, figuring out how to get those inserts into paper as fast as possible. So all those were ways I got my grounding and thinking about productivity, about how to be more efficient, about how to get stuff done. And I guess that's where it all started, as a paper boy.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  04:37

I love it, and I'm really keen to find out. So from when you started to when you finished, how much did you shave off the time?

Mark Ellwood  04:43

Oh, gosh. Well, I wasn't measuring it back then, and that came later. And so when I was working in a big corporation, like everybody, I experienced meetings that were late, and that got really frustrated me, because I was a guy like to be on time, and so I was looking around for. How much you know, how late were you and his time? And we could add that up, or maybe we could measure it, or we have a device. And so the aha moment happened where I thought of inventing a small electronic device to track all your time, not just on meetings, but on paperwork or sales calls or marketing projects or whatever. So I invented an electronic device. This is the second version called the time quarter. So it's a small device that we program with different activities. And every time you begin a different activity, you just press one button. And so I'm selling, I'll press button number A, I'm traveling, I'll press button B, and so on. So since 1990 I've been lending out my stock. I've got about 400 of these. I've been lending them out to corporations where people can use them to track how they spend their time.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  05:55

Excellent. Okay, and I know you've been gathering all that data as well as you've been working with those companies, what has been the most interesting thing you found out from tracking all those different times?

Mark Ellwood  06:05

I guess a macro conclusion would be that people don't get the time they want to spend on their highest priority activities, and they get a lot of time gets consumed by non-priority activities, administrative tasks. You know, I started in 1990 before voicemail, if people know what that is, before email, before the internet, before there were some laptops, and certainly before websites. And we've had all those things developed since, people are spending the same amount of time as they used to on administrative tasks today. So as we continue to have knowledge workers, which is my area, those knowledge workers are always burdened by administrative tasks.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  06:56

And that’s fascinating, isn't it? Because we were promised, with all this technology, things were going to become a whole lot easier. We could work from anywhere. We wouldn't have all this stuff to do, and yet it hasn't changed.

Mark Ellwood  07:05

Correct. And I saw a video recently, some guy talking to his computer and using AI to book sales meetings and so on. It all sounded very smart, but I saw that some same or a similar video back in 1990 here's the wonderful world of the future. And listen that future has come, and it's terrific. And we use technology however we have to deal with the side effects and the spin offs like, well, I've measured time spent on unnecessary email. It's 3.4 hours per week people talk about meetings and so on and so forth. So there's, I don't call it wasted time, but it's non value added time. More recently, I looked at my database, and I was intrigued to look at differences between men and women at work, and so I that's the subject of my most recent research.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  07:55

So tell me a little bit about that differences between men and women that must be fascinating.

Mark Ellwood  07:59

You can actually start with many differences at home. So I'm part of the, a member of the International Association of time use research, and lots of countries, particularly in the West, as well as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, but Western Europe tends to, or not, tends they run a lot of these time use studies, and you call people up on the phone and ask them what they did yesterday, or you asked them to fill out a diary. My I like to think my approach is a little better, but they're doing 1000s of these things, so there's a lot of time use research out there, and one of the consistent trends is that women spend more time on household tasks than men unpaid work. So it's shopping and childcare and cooking and cleaning, and in Canada, for instance. And these are similar in other countries, women spend about 3.6 hours per day on that, and men about 2.1 hours as an hour and a half drupals. So women continue to do more of these domestic tasks. And I thought, well, what does the picture look like at work? I've got a lot of data, so maybe I can see, Are there similar trends in the workplace? Because that's pretty big as well. So that's where I started diving into.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  09:11

Right? So tell me what happens in the workplace.

Mark Ellwood  09:15

Then first thing, of course, I had to figure out who's a men and men and women. I don't get that many demographic details for my clients, it's, you know, this type of employee in that city, but they don't tell me ages and things. So I had to go through and think, okay, Susan, that's a woman. Jim, that's a man. Kelly, not sure. So I split the database in two and basically looking at time use differences, the major conclusion I came to is that women are better at managing their time at work than men, and there are four major findings.

So the first finding is women spend fewer hours at work than men. So these are knowledge workers, so I'm not looking too much at concern. Construction workers or people changing sheets in a hotel or whatever, but it's knowledge workers. So men are about 48 hours per week, and women are about 45 now that includes some personal time, because they're at the workplace and you know, you're there, and so personal time is included, which is only about three hours per week. So men are working longer hours than women. Why is that? Well, we just talked about who's taking care of all those domestic duties, who's going to get home take care of the kids and shop and prepare dinner and so on. So that was the first of the four major findings that indicated women are better at managing their time than men.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  10:41

Okay, interesting. So what else? What else did you find out?

Mark Ellwood  10:44

Through one, so if you read time management literature, they tell you to spend your time on important tasks. And there's this well-known Eisenhower Matrix, which is the important, urgent matrix. It's two by two.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  11:01

We use it a lot with my clients, yeah.

Mark Ellwood  11:02

Yeah. Don't spend all your time on urgent stuff, spend on important. Now, I think that's a particularly great diagnostic tool to see where all that time is going. It's harder to use as a planning tool because you don't know what urgent things are going to happen this afternoon. You can't plan for those customer complaints or the roof caving in, or whatever. But nonetheless, many of the time management experts in me too ask us to spend our time on quadrant two, which is important and non-urgent activities, but it's rarely defined as to what those are. And I thought, well, let's look through the literature, and I couldn't find a whole lot. COVID talked about relationship building a little bit, but I thought maybe we could map this. So interestingly, in my time studies, I always ask people in advance four questions, and one of them is, what are the most important things you need to do in your job? You could say, well, sales.

Mark Ellwood  12:00

People should be selling. Well, really, some of them say they should be providing customer service. Some they say they should be processing orders or whatever. But if you look at the answers to my question, salespeople will say they're supposed to be prospecting and selling. Managers are supposed to be managing, leading, directing and coaching. So if those are those important activities that we can map those that we can see, are they spending their time on those activities or not? So it turns out, overall, if you look at across 1000s of people in my database, the average time spent on top priorities activities, is only 20% now I've reported on sales people who are at 23% but that's outside sales reps. If you add in inside, it's a little higher. But if you look at managers and construction supervisors and customer reps and so on the average, it's 20% that's it. You can't get too much higher. Some people can't get to 80% so when you look at the differences between men and women, women are spending 22% of their time on their top priority activities, and men are only at 18% so women are more concentrated on their top priority activities than men are.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  13:22

Interesting. And it's actually really cool to hear that, because I know that when I work with my clients and leadership teams, I always say to them that they should really be spending 20% of their time doing that non urgent but important stuff. That's their rocks. That's the stuff that's going to move the needle. So interesting to see that is about what it comes out at as well in reality.

Mark Ellwood  13:40

Well now, you can do that for your now, some people talk about the 20-80 rule. This is not that. That was the idea that a small number of activities create a large number of results. If you do nothing at all on that 20% you'll get zero results. So you could argue that those 20% are responsible for 100% result results. But within that, you've got some that are more important and create greater sales, for instance, for sales reps, but 20% from top priority activities, you can get that higher. So it's some of my data shows that you can get that up to 30% that's about an extra hour per day. And so that's a possibility for some.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  14:19

And that must make a huge difference, right? That extra 10% would probably add a huge amount. The bottom line in terms of doing more of those important things.

Mark Ellwood  14:28

Exactly. So that's the second finding. The third one is duration. So when you're pushing buttons on the time quarter device, we're getting a sense of frequency. How frequent are you doing things? And overall, the average is about every 18 minutes or so. There are long meetings, but there are shorter customer calls and so on. Well, men are at 22 minutes, and women are at 16. So they're getting things done faster than men. So that suggests, as well, that they're men. Edging their time well. And then the final finding is one that most time studies don't look at, which is ideal time. So when I started, I thought, well, I don't have any data. So what am I going to compare to? I need some benchmarks. So ask people to give me where they ideally think they should spend their time. And so ever since I've been gathering that so we can look at the ideal profiles and see how close people are to that. And when you look at that by individual activity, you can create a sort of a proxy for pro for productivity. So the famous example is the wisdom of the crowd, that the jars in the or, sorry, the number of jelly beans in a jar. If you have a whole bunch of people, guess how many jellybeans there are in the jar. If you average their results, that will be pretty close to the actual number.

Mark Ellwood  16:01

Similarly, if you average everybody's ideal expectations, that becomes then a best practice. And so if you look at how close you are on individual activities, maybe you want to spend your five hours a week selling, but you're only at four weeks four hours if you think you should be managing for six hours a week, and you're at age, well, that's close too. You're over a little bit. So going through the database and going through individual profiles, we can look at how close people are to their ideal profiles across a number of activities, you can add up the sum of the differences. Turns out, long explanation that men are the proxy number is 45 hours per week, you could say, but the addition adding a whole bunch of individual activities and women are about 45 hours per week. So difference, actually, sorry, let me correct that, 45 and 42 so there's a difference of three hours. So women are closer to their ideal profile by about three hours per week than men. So that's the fourth of the findings that led me to conclude that women are doing a better job of managing their time than men.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  17:17

I’m very pleased to hear that that is really fascinating. What? So do you think it's because they have a lot more stuff on that they have to be more organised? I've always wondered what the stuff because I'm super organised. I do get a lot of stuff done. Some people say, but I don't know how you do it, but just, well, I just have to, so I get it on with it.

Mark Ellwood  17:34

So I'm holding up the data and saying, This is the reality. This is what's going on. So you've asked, Well, why is that? So I've got three ideas, and it's hard to make those connections, but nonetheless, the first is the one that I kind of hinted at, women who are more responsible for those domestic tasks got to get home and take care of the kids, so they better be more efficient at work. And, you know, find time to get things done during that shorter work week of about three hours shorter per week. The second is, we just don't do enough training. And so where do you get your training? It's quite possible that those women, who are often mothers, are learning some skills in the household that they can then translate to the workplace. Women will tell you a busy, complex job of being a mother, cooking those meals, taking care of kids and so on. And so perhaps those skills, as I said, are transferable, more so than men who may not have had that kind of experience.

But if we could train people, and there's some evidence that training makes a difference, then everyone would be better. The third and much more tenuous conclusion, or a connection, is possible, brain differences, the data here is not that solid about differences between men and women, cognitive differences and so on. I looked around, I thought, now maybe I'll just steer clear of that one. But if there are brain differences, those might be contributing factors as well. I'll leave someone else to come up with that data.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  19:06

That’s great. Hey, I'm just really interested. You've been to this for a long time now. I mean, I started back in 19 kind of, 1989 1990 Has anything changed in that time period? Like, have you seen any significant shifts? Because in theory, we're told that, you know, men are helping out more at home, that there's less of a distinction between roles that we have. You know, lots of not just males and females as a whole, kind of gender fluid diversity. I'm just wondering, has the data changed in in that time or not really?

Mark Ellwood  19:36

Yes, if you go to these time use conferences, you'll find there is a kind of a catch up, so to speak. And look, we went go back a couple of 100 years, everybody's working equally. I mean, women might have been more in the household. Men were more out in the fields, farming and so on. But if you think about more recent, the last 70 or 80 years, there was a time when women stayed at home all the time in. In since maybe World War II or so, and that when men were out working, so women were doing all the child care, but when women started to enter the workforce, we did see those changes. And so now you get more equal sharing of tasks at home, where men are starting to catch up and pray play a greater role in terms of household management, childcare, elder care, and so on. So, yes, those are changing to some degree, some degree.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  20:26

And I suppose that that might also mean that that might change. Then other statistics as well, in terms of the amount of time they spend at work and how effective they become.

Mark Ellwood  20:34

Yes, we'll see timing struggle change that fast. And so, you know, I've looked at administrative time, and back in 1990 it was 25% of the week, and today it's 25% of the week. I I've concluded that you could take knowledge work and you could outsource it to another country, you could automate it where now you could replace it with AI. Well, okay, but as long as you have people doing knowledge work, some point in the future, I'm convinced that they will convince that they will continue to be burdened by administrative time, and so we can reduce that administrative time and find ways to spend more time on their high priority tasks. That's how to get people more productive. You mentioned changes. Since then we've had all kinds of technological changes, voicemail, email, laptops, you know, the internet, smartphones and so on. And one of the things that those do is they create terrific productivity advantages, but they also come with unexpected spin offs and side effects. Well, I remember, you know, I used to do spreadsheets when I started my career by hand and when we got computers. Wow, that made that easier. But somebody just asked for, instead of one promotion plan, you do three different versions at 5% 10 and 15% growth. So we're just doing more. We've also eliminated administrative help. Not many people have assistants or secretaries. They're doing all that work themselves, and so if you can delegate that to people that nonvalue added work, that's one way to become more productive.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:17

Yeah, it’s one of the things I actually teach my clients, is around delegate and elevate, making sure that you're doing the work where you really love and are great at and adds the most value, and try to delegate. And as you said, there's different ways of doing that. It could be outsourcing it. It could be somebody else in the team. It could be automating it. It could be just completely stopping it. But it's not as easy as it sounds at times. It's about really being very clear. So I'm really interested to find out in terms of the productivity studies. I knew this went on in the remember, I did my degree back in the early 80s. We talked about the whole-time management stuff. What's, how does it work in business, and what benefits do the businesses get from actually doing it.

Mark Ellwood  22:55

From my studies, or time management in general?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  22:58

No, for the time management in general. So I mean, I love the idea of having a device that makes it nice, easy to capture it, but then, then what? So now you've got this information. So what?

Mark Ellwood  23:06

Companies are interested in becoming more productive, although that sometimes doesn't take front and centre. They're thinking about automating a plant or create an acquisition or something, but I believe that have a lot of people, then those people can make a big difference. And largely it's kind of being overlooked because, well, they'll work long hours, and people do, they choose to work long hours for the same amount of pay. And so companies benefit from that, because they get this sort of free labour, in a sense, and but going along with that is burnout and turnover and stress and so on. It's interesting, because stress was a popular topic in the 80s and 90s. It kind of quieted down, but then it's come to rear its ugly head again, and I think stress is becoming closer to us just looking on social media, all the yelling and ranting is creating grief for people, the kinds of things in the workplace, think of the pandemic and working from home and so on that that was really close to people, and so they struggled with that.

Mark Ellwood  24:17

And now, you know, do I go into the office to work, or do I work from home? I don't see my boss and so on. So that creates a whole new series of stresses. So those are there, and they've reared their ugly head. And so again, does the corporation care or not? And lots maybe don't as much, but others have introduced work life balance practices. So whether it's a shorter week or allowing people to leave early on Fridays or flex time or, of course, the one that's most popular now is work from home. And so allowing people the flexibility to work from home, now that we figure out how to do that, is a terrific how. Terrific productivity advantages, but we've got to be careful about it as well, because now people are isolated. They never beat their boss and so on so. But you asked what companies could do if you understand that all your sales reps are being burdened by this administrative work or processing or spending all their time, you know, updating client information and so on. There's a re-engineering opportunity there. Let's take that task and find ways to minimise the time spent on it so that people are spending their time on their higher priority tasks and not on these lower ones. So that's what organisations can do.

We already talked about bringing, you, know, using assistance. And so sometimes that's outsourcing, and we've seen that with customer service right when you call an organisation, maybe it's somebody who's being paid a little less than the customer service rep, because you've outsourced it to an area where the labour rates are less expensive, and so there's pros and cons to that as well. I mentioned training. That's another thing that organisations can do, and whether it's training in time management or communication skills or leadership or meeting management or writing skills, like all those should happen, and people coming out of university or high school may not have all those skills. So I think organisations need to continue to invest in training and development, particularly on soft skills, so that their employees are keen to stay and not leave to go somewhere else where they can get that kind of help.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  26:42

Okay. And so just in terms of where you get started, so you think you might have a productivity issue, potentially, the whole working from home thing has changed, the dynamics and whatnot. What are the, what are the kind of the key indicators that there might be some time loss in the business, I suppose, what are the red flags that make you go, this is not quite right.

Mark Ellwood  27:05

Sometimes people talk about wasted time at work. And I'm a little cautious about that because, because I think So my philosophy, and I think everyone should be that employees care about their jobs. They want to do a good job. They want work that's of value, and so if they're sitting around or grumbling or whatever, maybe you're not giving them work of value, or you keep changing directions on them. Changing directions seems to happen a lot. I was intrigued recently by a couple of rejection letters that I got. Oh, sorry, we're not ready to go ahead yet. It's and they had come to me originally, but it's companies not making up their minds about which direction they could head in, so organisations could do a better job of being really clear about this is direction we're heading in in terms of growth and changes and so on, and provide training to employees. So, okay, so where are those problems you asked about?

Mark Ellwood  28:05

You know, what are the red flags? So there is wasted time, although I'm really cautious about that. Sometimes it's the individual, all right, they're shopping on Amazon or something while they're at work, but that's not a huge amount. What you find is meetings that take a long time, that where decisions are being made. I've got a a simple definition for why meetings should be held. It's dead simple. Meetings should be held so that stakeholders can make decisions that lead action. Anything else is not needed. You don't need to upgrade, update people. You don't need to brainstorm, whatever. You need to make decisions that lead to action now, so use other media to do some of the other things, like update people and send them reports and so on. So you know, what are the indicators? Long meetings would be an indicator, stress levels that go up, and that's measured in different ways, physical stress or behavioural stress. People are reacting to stuff and having trouble. Turnover could be one. Employees are leaving the organisation. Why is that? It's because they're not happy with what they're doing. So organisations need to be sensitive to all this if you're not doing a time study. Another is to do an employee satisfaction study and find out, are we on track to where we want to be, or are there levels of dissatisfaction. Either way, you're diagnosing what's going on out there and just back to the time thing. By the way, during COVID, there were a bunch of companies that that came up that were doing employee monitoring, because everyone's at home, and employees didn't like that. When I do my studies, they're completely anonymous. I never get back names of individuals to the to the client, and so employees can go, Oh, good, Somebody's listened to me about how I spend my time.

Mark Ellwood  30:00

And all this non value added time, great, and so we got an amazing participation rate of 94% that's a little bit of bragging, but you anyone can achieve that if you tell people what the objectives of your program are or is and what the objectives are, or if you make it easy, make it anonymous, listen to employees, and when you're doing that, then those improvements start to become fairly obvious. But that COVID monitoring stuff, people didn't like it at all. The second thing about that is companies said we don't care about how they spend their time. We just care about what they get done. And my response to that would be sure, when you run 100-meter race, really, you mostly care about how many seconds it took to run the race, but you should also care about how many steps per second, about gait, about heart rate, about oxygen intake, those are the diagnostic tools. And similarly, time use can be a diagnostic tool to understand performance, and if people are getting dragged down by all those forms they got to fill out, that's a diagnostic that organisations need to be sensitive to. There you go.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  31:13

No, I love it. Love it. Well, speaking the same language, we use a thing called level 10 meetings, and they're all about basically cutting the crap and getting on with the what really needs to happen, and getting actions out of it. And I always say to my clients, it's like, you know, when you say, when you talk to your teams, it's like, we don't really care what you're doing. We don't need updates. If you're on track, you're achieving what you need to do, you're feeling happy. This meeting is about what's the next step? What do we need to do? What are the stuff that's stopping us from getting there? And it always leads to actions seven days of to do items. So yeah, I'm completely on the same page there, and I understand the whole COVID thing, because I think it felt more like a big brother rather than a trying to help you. I think that's the challenge. And I know when I work with sales team, CRM, can sometimes have the same kind of if it's put if it's positioned incorrectly, people to understand the benefit of it. They see it as being big brother, tracking what you're doing, whereas I say no, CRM is about making your job easier. It's about facilitating the way that you work to actually get the best results. It's not about monitoring what you're doing. So it's really about people understanding, as you said, it's clarity from the leaders to say, Hey, this is why we're doing it, and this is the benefit to you, as opposed to we're here to start watching you and see what you're doing. So in terms of people listening into this, what would you recommend they could do if they feel they might have potentially some burnout, or some in that, in efficiencies, or any of those sort of time productivity issues?

Mark Ellwood  32:37

Well, on the burnout, you know, I did a stress management workshop recently. And the thing about burnout is it's not always connected. I play squash, and if I run into the wall it hurts, and I can directly connect that, but the boss yelled at you a week ago, and today you've got a headache or a stomach ache or something. And so those are stress symptoms. Sometimes it's not always direct, but if something's going on in a sort of queer way with your body, or you're not feeling right, or you're behaving strangely, or whatever, something's not right, you kind of have to say to yourself, What are those stress factors? Might have been a death in the family, might have been a teenager who's misbehaving. Might have been your boss yelling at you. So you kind of have to look at those and find out what those are. So some self-assessment on stress makes sense. You can also assess yourself. You don't have to do one of my time studies, just trying to understand your own productivity and write something down or keep a diary or do it electronically or whatever. But just try and assess yourself now and then to see where you are. That's the first step, and then you can start to make some improvements after that. So you're probably curious about what those might be.

Mark Ellwood  33:52

So I'm a big fan of daily planning, and you probably are as well a to do list. And here's my magic tip for filling out your to do list, start with a blank slate. Nothing on your to do list at all, no meetings, no phone calls, nothing. And ask yourself this question, if I had nothing to do today, what would I do to affect my results a month from now, I'll repeat that, if I had nothing to do today, what would I do to affect my results a month from now, you'll write down the items you can complete. So I need to hire a new employee. Well, I can't do that today, but I can go through the resumes, or I can post the job on a job board or so on. And so those are your priorities, the ones we talked about earlier. And so that goes first on your to do to do list, and those need to get done first. And people go, Okay, after I've done everything else. No, no plan for those first, and set out some time for those. Then fill in all the other stuff on your to do list. And that should be, as we said earlier, at least 20% of your time on those high priority tasks. What's a way of what your to do list and what's important for you?

Debra Chantry-Taylor  35:10

Just writing a few notes here, that's great. Okay, yeah. I mean, that's really important. I think that one of the curses of to do lists is that people kind of just keep carrying stuff forward and carrying stuff forward and carrying stuff forward, which means suddenly you're working on things that have got zero importance, but they're just things that you want to be able to tick off and say that you've done, rather than actually the things that will make a difference in the future.

Mark Ellwood  35:30

Where am I delaying all these things? And why am I delaying? So that's worth looking into.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  35:35

And sometimes you get to a point where you know the things that are on there just are no longer important. You know things change, and it's no longer actually something you should be doing. So should be doing. So I love the idea of starting completely with a blank page. Any other tips or pointers?

Mark Ellwood  35:47

Meetings come a lot and, you know, an email, I'll give you a couple of notes. People are meetings. I got all these meetings. Work is collaborative. There are very few people that work independently, maybe fine artists, maybe a farmer out in the fields, but most of us work in collaborative organisations, even solo entrepreneurs, and some of those are listening, even those people work collaboratively. And so meetings are not evil, and that can work well. So my philosophy on meetings is this, everybody who attends a meeting has the right and the responsibility to improve the dynamics of the meeting. You may not be able to be the final person who makes a decision, but you can be or anyone can be the person who says, we seem to be off track. Can we get back on track? Or could we get an agenda for this? Or it's five minutes late? Can we start on time? Nobody, but nobody ever got fired for trying to improve the dynamics of a meeting, and so everyone can take responsibility for that and focus on are we heading towards a decision, and maybe we're floundering a little bit. Someone could say, gee whiz, maybe a couple of us need to take this offline and explore this, or do some more research or something. Because if the meeting manager doesn't do that, then you can do that and see what happens.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  37:13

Yeah. Yes, again, you're speaking my language. I have all of my teams actually have to score their meetings every time they run one, and with the rule is that, you know, a meeting starts at 10. Every meeting is perfect before you get started, and you only take points off when things go wrong. And I remember seeing this, this one, one team's results coming through every week, and all of them were kind of an eight or a nine, apart from one person who was a six all the time. I picked up the phone, I said to her, hey, you know what's going on. Why? Why is this meeting a six? And everybody else thinks it's an eight or a night? Well, you know, the boys, they keep going off track, and the boys they keep doing this, and the boys they keep doing that. I said, are you in this meeting? She said, Yes. I said, So what are you doing about it? She What do you mean? I said, Well, you're, you're part of this meeting. It's your responsibility to actually go, Hey, this isn't working for me. Or this is, you know, we're going off track here. You have to take responsibility and make that meeting attend. That's what you're there for. It's like, Oh, okay. And it just turned it on its head. She was much, much more comfortable with writing everything down than actually putting her hand up and doing something about it.

Mark Ellwood  38:08

We are of the same mind about that. And I'll go to things and say, God, let's get started. And the ideas for starting on time, do something minor, go over the agenda, or introduce each other, or give an update, or something like that, so that when people arrive, they know they're late. But indeed, anyone can do that, not just the meeting manager.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  38:33

Okay, you also mentioned something about emails. So what's your tip around emails?

Mark Ellwood  38:36

I do a little exercise. Sometimes I say, can we, I just do a little survey here, there are a lot of bad drivers out there, vehicle drivers. And could we just do a survey? How many bad drivers are out there? And I go around the room and, you know, 20% 20% this that, whatever, if you do that survey, I enjoy, I invite people to try it sometime, the average is about 33% where I am, so about a third of drivers are bad drivers, and then I go, would all the bad drivers please stand up? And nobody does well, we'll attribute bad behaviour to others, and we always, don't always take responsibility ourselves. Ah, email, right? It's us. It's not someone else. There's no evil person down in the basement sending out emails all day. It's all of us. We all need to take responsibility. If you send out one email and copy 20 people, you've sent out 20 emails, and my data is showing the unnecessary email to the degree that people thought that measured themselves is 3.4 hours per week. That's massive and Mr. Stava, so what do you do there? First, be aware that we're all responsible. Take yourself off email distribution list. Tell people that you don't need to be copied. Well, I need to know what's going. On. No, you don't, you will, when it's something important, and write brief emails. Don't tell stories through emails. Pick up the phone instead. Don't try and correct someone's behaviour through emails. That never works. So use the right medium when you have different media available to phone, meeting, in person, whatever. Keep your emails short, one idea, one paragraph, and take responsibility. And don't just accuse everyone else of sending out all these emails.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  40:33

But nobody ever stands up. I get it completely, hey, <ark it. It's, that's, that's fascinating. I mean, I'm, I must admit, I when I first saw your brief come through and you wanted to go on the podcast, I was like, Oh my God, this sounds really fascinating. It has been, seriously, it's been an absolute pleasure to kind of find out more. I can see the benefits of actually, you know, taking the time to work out where you're spending your time, what effect it has on the business, and also, you know, making sure we get the most out of each day so thank you very much for that. You've obviously got a website getmoredone.com, which is where you can find all the tips and tools and things. And you've also got a book The Poetic Path to Getting More Done, which I believe is a book of poems. Tell me a little bit about that.

Mark Ellwood  41:14

Yes. Well, our book of poems like productivity, time, meeting, management, goal setting. I sometimes use them in workshops. So you can call me if you want one of those. It's not on Amazon anymore, but I, or I can send you one of the poems, goal settings.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  41:31

I would, I would love one of those books. I think that sounds absolutely fascinating, so I'll definitely go on those. But if anybody else wants to get hard one I get to, if you get to go to getmoredone.com, they'll be able to find you, get in contact with you, both for the consulting work, but also for books and any tips and tools, right?

Mark Ellwood  41:46

You bet. Absolutely.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  41:49

Well, hey, look, thank you so much for your time. I really, really appreciate it. I'm really excited to hear that women get more done, but, but, but we're working on everybody. I mean, I think that's the thing, right? Training, training can actually help everybody improve. And understanding where you've got those issues, obviously, is the first step towards that. So thank you. Mark

Mark Ellwood  42:06

Your time is worth it.

Debra Chantry-Taylor  42:10

Indeed. Well, thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your day, and we will keep in contact. Thank you.