Accelerate Your Career #4: My Process for Productivity (Classic)

What is up everyone, this is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder's Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. 

For this week on Founder's Journal, we're doing things a little differently. It's our very first mini series, and it's all about helping you to accelerate your career. And instead of just one episode today and Friday, we're giving you two: a new show you won't want to miss, plus a classic episode you might not have heard before. You're listening to the classic episode right now, number four in the series, but make sure you catch today's new episode as well. All these shows together, give you a mini curriculum on taking your career to the next level. If you miss number one and number two in the series from Monday, go back and check those out. And we can't wait to find out what you think of this whole new series that we're trying out. Today, I'm talking about my process for productivity. So let's hop into it. 

I have one goal at the start of every day, and that is to do things that I said I was going to do. By the end of the day, there are some days where I feel like I've been in a zone. I've cranked through the things that need to get done, and I didn't get distracted by social media, slack, and the other things that tend to distract us. Those days feel great. But there are some days where I never hit my flow, where as soon as I got working on or began to think about the things that must get done, all of the things that compete for my attention get in the way. My goal is to have more of the former than the latter. And while my system isn't perfect, I do have a system for trying to make that happen for myself, and I want to share that system with you. There are three parts to it: the setup, the allocation and the environment. Let me take you through each. 

Setup

First step is the setup. For long-time Founder's Journal listeners, you may remember that I had an episode where I talk about Charlie, my golf instructor. And he talks about the importance of pre-shot routines in golf. The setup is the pre-shot routine of your workday. It is the list of the non-negotiables that you do each day prior to getting your work started. And while none of these non-negotiables may seem unique on their own, the bundle of them will be unique to you, and it is so important that you never deviate too far from your bundle. Here's my setup. I always wake up between seven and 7:30 AM Eastern, but always have my alarm set to a random number like 7:11 or 7:21. Don't ask me why I have no idea, I've just always done it that way. 

While it's probably the healthiest practice mentally, I'll grab my phone and I'll spend 20 minutes just reading the internet, being mindless. This morning, for example, I read an article about Marques Brownlee, who is the super successful YouTube tech reviewer, and then I read another article about Buzzfeed wanting to launch a digital shopping mall. While these two stories were media related, I actually try as much as possible to reserve at least 50% of my reading for things outside of my industry. 

Once I finished my morning scrolling, I'll get up, wash my face, brush my teeth and get ready for a quick Peloton workout. I'll usually start my day with a workout three to four times a week. And while it's painful to do the Peloton every single time, I just try as hard as possible to remind myself how good I feel after the workout and how good it sets up the rest of my day. I can't emphasize how important sweating daily has been for my mental health during the pandemic. On days where I don't start with exercise, I find myself drinking more coffee depleted of energy earlier, and just generally feeling less confident in my abilities throughout the day. 

After my morning workout, I'll take a quick shower, I'll get ready for work, which for the last 11 months of the pandemic has meant shorts and a Morning Brew crew neck, I'll brew a pot of coffee, or just make a cup if my girlfriend already brewed one and I'll make my way to my office.

The next few things I do are crucial for getting my day going with momentum.  I'll do a calendar check to make sure I know when, if at all, I'll have time to actually do focused or deep work. Normally I try to schedule all of my calls before 9:30 AM or after 4:00 PM, but that typically is more idealistic than realistic because the meetings will start to pile up and my midday will fill up as well. I'll then take it to the to-do list. I find to do lists to be my best tool for understanding what I need to do, what I want to do and what I'll be able to do. Given the constraints of my day. This is where my setup ends, and the second step of my work process begins.

Allocation 

Like I said, I call it the allocation. Allocation refers to the things that I do to ensure that I'm spending my time, how I should be bending it. Like I said, my to-do list is important, but it's about what I put on my to-do list that matters most. I start every to-do list by writing down my quarterly goals. As a senior leader at Morning Brew, I have a number of measurable goals that must be achieved each 90 days. For example, last quarter I had three goals. First, was set up management training for Morning Brew's managers. Second was setting up three initiatives to connect our values as a company to our business. And third is to get 60,000 downloads of Founder's Journal. We're way past that now, folks. 

By listing those at the top of my to-do list, I am forcing myself to think about how am I pushing forward the most important initiatives on a daily and weekly basis, so I never get too behind and don't accomplish the things that matter most. So for example, by having setup management training for Morning Brew's managers on the top of my to-do list, it will remind me that, "Hey, I need to schedule an informational call with XYZ training company so that I can lock in a partner by next week so that we do our training and I hit this goal that I said I would hit the quarter."

Below my quarterly goals. I list out all of the individual things that I think I need to get done. I won't prioritize them yet, I'll just get everything down on paper in a long list. This could range from having a check-in with a Morning Brew employee, which is already on the calendar, to reading a content brief about an upcoming project that we're about to launch. I hate this process so much because it makes you realize just how valuable and scarce your time is and just how little you can get done on a daily basis. I love this process so much because it forces you to be really thoughtful in how you spend your time. 

So once everything I start bolding, the things I bold are the things that I would really like to get done that day. I first bold the calls and meetings in my calendar that are non-negotiable. And then I bold the two to four other things that I view as non-negotiable in my day. This exercise also makes you realize just how much of a time suck calls and meetings are. By the end of my process, there are usually five to 10 things bolded, half of which are calls and the other half are individual tasks that I will work on. Now, if this process seems pretty structured and rigid, that's because it is. I've always found that I need to force more structure on myself to do my best work or else I'll never know when to stop working on a single bolded item that I get really interested in.

But this structure also has a downside: by creating an expectation of the activities that I'm going to do, it creates an implicit relationship with success and failure. If I do the bullet items by the end of the day, it's a success. If I don't complete the bolded items, by the end of the day, it's a failure. Given in six years of working on Morning Brew, I have finished my bolded list maybe 10 times, and I think that's generous, I've needed to reorient myself to this list. What I tell myself now is that my to-do list is a tool for accountability and treating my time as a precious resource, but my definition of success should be directional and not absolute.

What that means is if in the time that I had in my day, I worked on the things that I said I'd work on, it was a good day. If in the time I had, in my day, I got distracted and only spend 50% of my time on the bolded items, it wasn't a good day. This reframing has allowed me to maintain a healthy relationship with to-do lists and my time. That does call into question though, what do I do to try and avoid the days where 50% of my time isn't spent on bolded items? 

Curating the Right Environment

That's what leads to the third step of my work process: the environment. You can have the best setup to start your day with momentum, you can even have the best plan for how you spend your time, but if your environment isn't conducive to effective work, your process blows up.

For me, environment is the most important part of my work process. Let's be honest, I have a crazy brain. It's always thinking, always changing directions, always looking for the next thing to grab onto. It's great for being creative, thinking originally and working in a flexible and intuitive way. But it's horrible when it comes to sitting, focusing, and grinding out a one bolded task for hours. I obviously can't change myself or how my brain works, so I've had to be really thoughtful about changing my environment to make it work for me and my brain. Bear with me for a second, but the way that I structure my environment is honestly exactly how I structure my dog's environment.

Just like my mini Bernedoodle Rambo, I’ve proven to myself that I can't fight the temptation when an interesting distraction is put in front of me, so I need to eliminate the temptation together. For Rambo, that means the orange ball that makes him go insane in the closet and closing doors to rooms that he shouldn't be in so he doesn't tear up our toilet paper, or putting away shoes where he'll chew up the laces without fail. For me, social media is the orange ball. Communication tools, like iMessage, email, and slack are the rooms, and shoes are all of the other distractions of the internet and media. It's pretty simple. When I allow myself to be tempted by Twitter, Slack, and TV in the background, I will be tempted and I will be distracted. Not 80% of the time, not 90% of the time, a hundred percent of the time. 

I am by no means perfect in removing these distractions completely, but there are tools and tricks that I've accumulated over the years to make things way better than they used to be. So on my computer I've disconnected iMessage so I can only look at it on my phone, and then I use a site called freedom that disables social media and a list of websites that I put in for however long I choose. On my phone, I use downtime, which is in anyone's iPhone settings, which disallows Twitter, LinkedIn, Clubhouse, Instagram for large chunks of my day. And I also make a habit of closing Slack while I'm doing focused work because 99% of the time a slack message does not need to be answered right now, or even in the next hours. Again, if this seems pretty restrictive, it is, but it works for me. This process isn't for everyone, but it is what allows me to get my best work done over the long-term.

Improving My Process

I started this conversation by saying my process is imperfect and I'll finish by saying it is imperfect. There are a few things that I'm actively thinking about improving as I continue my lifelong journey to be a just smarter, better, more productive worker. The first is maintaining a better balance of doing versus thinking time, as I've grown as an entrepreneur, I've noticed that while I've been able to effectively move from doer to manager to delegator, my ability to shift my time from doing to thinking and strategizing has lagged behind. I need to learn how to attribute the same value to thinking and strategizing as I do to building and doin. The second is I want to be more disciplined about working when it's work time and not working when it's not work time. I am just bad at maintaining work-life balance, and I think it's because I always feel like I'm not being productive enough when I'm working.

I need to give myself the permission to unplug when doing things in life that are just as important as work, like spending time with my family, my girlfriend, my friends. And the third thing I'm trying to improve on is getting smarter about when I do certain work better. You often hear entrepreneurs say how they do their most creative work in the morning and their most analytical work in the late afternoon. I personally haven't noticed or created that distinction at all for myself. This isn't because I don't think that my brain is better suited to do certain types of work at different times of the day, but because I don't think I've been self aware enough to notice these nuances in how my body works at different times.

For me to get there, I think I need to spend time reflecting on the patterns that tie together my most productive and fulfilling work days. And that's it. That is my process for staying productive and the things that I want to improve on. As I said, you have the setup, the allocation and the environment that is the three ingredient recipe for being a smarter, more productive worker that does the things you say you want to do. I hope that this has given you some level of clarity surrounding just one entrepreneur's way of doing work and the tools that I use to do my best work. But at the same time, I hope you feel permission to not always feel productive because my adult life has been spent feeling unsatisfied and anxious about the way in which I work and constantly thinking about ways to level up my relationship with working.

You are not alone. And with that, I would love to hear from you. What's your work process? What's your setup, your allocation and your environment? What do you like most about your process for working and where do you want to improve? Your way of working is a constant evolution, and I just want to be there for you to help it evolve. Send me an email to alex@morningbrew.com or DM me on Twitter at business barista with any thoughts or questions that you have as always thank you so much for listening to Founder's Journal, and if you enjoyed, please let others know who you think would enjoy the show as well. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next episode.