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075: Managing productivity with Donna McGeorge
3.7k Plays1 year ago
In this episode we interview productivity coach, Donna McGeorge.
Donna is passionate about enhancing the large amount of time we spend in our workplace (too much, for many) to ensure it is effective and productive, as well as enjoyable. More often than not it’s getting the simple things right, consistently, that has the greatest impact. She also knows that when we decide to be intentional, we can surprise ourselves with what we can achieve. Known as THE productivity coach, she has a range of sessions, books, products and services to help you improve your productivity.
Donna McGeorge shares her insights on maintaining energy and managing productivity. Her advice includes:
- the importance of sleep and space as crucial factors for maintaining energy and focus for work and life admin tasks. Donna believes that giving her brain rest and space allows her to tap into creativity and problem-solving abilities.
- Donna challenges the notion that any time not spent actively doing something is wasted time.
- the significance of creating a system for organizing tasks and belongings, making everything have a designated home, which reduces friction and increases efficiency.
- hacks for taking control of unruly inboxes. She recommends clearing out old emails into a folder called "done" or "stuff" and processing the remaining emails regularly to maintain a zero inbox. Donna advises checking emails only 2-3 times a day and turning off notifications to avoid being constantly distracted by emails.
- the importance of creating thinking space and outlines her three-step approach: stop, take stock, and decide.
- the concept of "wipe the mind," a stream-of-consciousness exercise to clear the mind of clutter and improve focus.
- best times for planning - Donna advises using the late afternoon hours to plan, as they typically require less mental intensity and can set the stage for a productive day ahead.
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Transcript
Introduction to Life Admin Efficiency
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony.
00:00:12
Speaker
I'm Donna Roberts, an operations manager who truly believes in the power of planning to make sure you spend your time on what's truly important to
Meet the Hosts: Donna & Mia
00:00:20
Speaker
you. I'm Mia Lothrop, a researcher and writer who's fully embraced the importance of rest and recovery as fuel for powerful productivity.
Interview with Productivity Coach Donna McGeorge
00:00:27
Speaker
In this episode, we interview Donna McGeorge, world leading productivity coach.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. Getting your life admin under control isn't just about being more productive, but it certainly helps if you want to streamline your approach. Making the most of your time is a quest for the ages. So we talk to an expert to expand our thinking about the dimensions of productivity and
Q&A: How to Boost Productivity through Rest and Planning
00:00:50
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efficiency.
00:00:50
Speaker
So in this episode, we talk to Donna McGeorge, who gives us her top hacks for productivity. She talks about the importance of giving your brain time to rest, how making time for planning is crucial to making sure you focus on the right things, and the key steps to getting your email under control.
00:01:08
Speaker
Donna McGeorge is passionate about enhancing the large amount of time we spend in our workplace, too much for many, to ensure it's effective and productive as well as enjoyable. More often than not, it's getting the simple things right consistently that has the greatest impact. She also knows that when we decide to be intentional, we can surprise ourselves with what we can achieve. Known as the Productivity Coach, she has a range of sessions, books, products, and services to help you improve your productivity. Donna, thanks so much for coming on the show today.
00:01:36
Speaker
Absolutely my pleasure. Dinah, thanks for having me. Oh, before we get started, love to hear from you when it comes to life admin. What's most important? Is it that peace of mind? Is it saving money or time or is it about household harmony? You know, I've thought a lot about this question and I came back to sleeping. I reckon that's one of my biggest levers in the world that I pull
00:01:57
Speaker
for myself in terms of maintaining my energy for my work and everything I need to do. And so I thought, if I can sleep at night knowing that things are all under control, so maybe it's control, I don't know, then I'm good. And probably the other part of it is space, giving myself the breathing space.
00:02:14
Speaker
My hubby and I typically have our household admin well and truly under control, well in advance. Sometimes we might even pre-do stuff we don't need to. It's not urgent because we just love having that feeling of we've got plenty of space, which means I get to sleep at night well.
00:02:31
Speaker
It's so interesting, Donna, because we've spoken to lots of people who are all about efficiency and time management. And actually, most people come back with that same reason that they're not into time management around time in and of itself, but it is really that.
Debunking Resting Myths
00:02:44
Speaker
And I think that when you understand that that's what your goal is, it's around having that calm and, yes, space to do the things that are important to you rather than just time and of itself. So very interesting.
00:02:55
Speaker
So you're a productivity expert. So here we are. We'd love to hear about what we're all getting wrong about productivity. What are some of those myths, you know, what seems intuitively the right approach, but actually isn't.
00:03:08
Speaker
Well, I think the idea that there's wasted time. So this idea that if we're not doing something all the time, we're wasting our time. If we're resting, relaxing, daydreaming, whatever it might be, that somehow that's wasted and our brains keep ticking over to
00:03:27
Speaker
what I should be doing, generating some kind of list that then you feel compelled to write down. This is the one I rail against the most that says, in order to be our best selves, our brain needs a rest and it needs to have an opportunity. I don't want to get too scientific with you, but when we think about our brainwaves, when we're constantly on and constantly doing stuff, our beta brainwaves are what's active. And then when we give ourselves a chance just to stop and breathe,
00:03:54
Speaker
and daydream for a minute. That's when our alpha brainwaves become active. And this is the part of the brain that gives us the, our creativity, our problem solving. Without access to that, we feel like we're on this treadmill all the time. And so I'm going to, look, to tell you the truth, we're so conditioned
00:04:11
Speaker
I feel it too. I'll be sitting, I put my favourite kind of egg chair that I sit on on my veranda and I say, right, I'm just going to chill for an hour or so. And my brain starts going. And sometimes it even says, are you sure you're not just wasting a bit of time here? Like, is this a bit of a luxury? And I just say to my brain, shut up, because this is probably the most important work I'll do today is giving my brain a rest so that I can get cracking with the other stuff later.
00:04:36
Speaker
That's really interesting. I do think that it is hard for us to give ourselves that permission to truly rest in terms of not just resting our body, but resting our mind from constantly being on that treadmill, the thoughts running through your head.
00:04:52
Speaker
Well, we're not taught to rest. We're taught to do. And we've taught that from a really early age. And even when you think about when we were at school, the breaks were so short, like we would go from class to class to class and the breaks are short. Then you get home and you're expected to do polar homework. So there is this conditioning about any time that we're not doing something is wasted is pretty deep. And it's been around a while.
00:05:19
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So I guess digging into the sort of productivity and efficiency of life admin, for me and myself, before we started this whole life admin hacks, you know, caper, we found ourselves quite organized at work, but, you know, really disorganize in our home lives. And I guess one of the sort of things we sort of we knew, I guess, intuitively, you know it, but we hadn't made the effort to implement them is that if you get the right tools and systems for the job. So in the case of life admin, we talk about
00:05:49
Speaker
having your life admin foundations there, that it's so much easier to get it done more efficiently. So be really keen to hear how important you think these sort of tools and systems and workflows are to productivity.
Building Systems for Efficiency
00:06:02
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Oh, completely. Like I'm all about systems. Now, what I think when people think systems, they think I'm going to tell them about some technology or some device or something, but it's actually not. It's more of a process in my mind about how I organize my world. And so one of the things I talk about in one of my books is around how we create the right living space so that we're reducing friction in our world.
00:06:28
Speaker
And a system that I talk about is that everything has a home. Now, I'm not going to go all Marie Kondo on everyone who has since had a revelation now that she's had children that maybe you can't keep your house tidy 100% of the time. But the system of everything has a home. My keys have a home. The scissors have a home. Pens have a home.
00:06:47
Speaker
my sunglasses have a home, is the idea that we remove friction. So that, just that idea of it has a home is a system. And so I think when we get really good at saying to ourselves, I have a process in place to manage things. So, you know, look, I don't like talking about bills, no one does. But if I have a system for when I receive them and how I diarise them and how I manage payment, just as an example, it's the same thing. So even my bills have a home of how I operate my world, even if they're online.
00:07:17
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For me, there's also kind of the idea that if you know what to do with it, it's kind of like having the knowledge because sometimes I feel like for life admin, it kind of hits you and you're not a hundred percent sure exactly what to do with it. And so then it languishes and then it does get into this kind of this head space that you think about it, but you don't do anything about it, which I think to me was, I guess, one of the challenges I faced as we were trying to get our life admin in order is, you know, lay awake at night thinking about the fact that I didn't have a will in place or,
00:07:46
Speaker
that I hadn't shopped around for my mobile phone bill or that I hadn't planned my child's birthday party because I didn't know exactly what the next step was.
Q&A: Using AI for Task Management
00:07:56
Speaker
Do you know, you just reminded me on the planning your child's birthday, I don't know whether you've talked to any of your people yet about chat GPT and AI and my publishers just asked me to write a book on this and one of the examples I use in there is how to get it to create a kid's birthday party for you.
00:08:14
Speaker
And it is genius, just quietly genius. And so for busy working parents to be able to say, hey, you know, my my five year old son loves the Avengers. Can you please design me a three hour birthday party that includes a couple of activities and bang, it puts it out, including an agenda. Very cool. But, you know, the idea that we don't know what to do with something is really important. So one of the other I'm sometimes considered a global authority on productivity. I'm still getting used to that title.
00:08:42
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But one of the other global authorities on productivity, David Allen, he talks about how the human mind is for having ideas, not storing them. And so this keeping of stuff in our heads is also preventing us from, you know, I talk about being creative about problem solving and that's not, you know, I'm not talking about that from a big perspective. I just simply mean
00:09:06
Speaker
a curveball gets thrown at me, how do I react and respond to that? And if my head is full of remembering all that stuff you've just talked about before, then I'm just not going to be as good at responding in the moment when something needs my attention. And so the systems, the processes that I'm a huge list fan. And so I do like doing lists. I think they're really useful as long as they're done in the right way. Do you know what I mean? Like, so it's not just this endless thing of things I need to do. There's a bit of, you know, a system about lists.
00:09:36
Speaker
Yes, preaching to the converted we are huge list lovers too. Your advice often centres around deciding what not to do. So how do you apply that principle to life admin
The Art of Outsourcing
00:09:49
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in particular?
00:09:50
Speaker
Well, this could be coming from a position of privilege. So I just want to be really clear about that upfront. But I value my time very highly. I know what my hourly rate is worth out in the world. And so I often look at what am I spending my time doing that I
00:10:07
Speaker
could get someone who's more of an expert better at it and I could outsource it. So I have a solid outsourcing model for a lot of my stuff. And you mentioned a will earlier. I haven't done it yet, but apparently you can get chat GPT to write your will. Haven't tried that yet. But that's something I've just recently discovered a company that will do the whole lot for you. Interview you, just do the whole lot for you, send it to you when it's all done and dusted.
00:10:30
Speaker
That probably appeals to me rather than thinking I'm going to go down the, you know, try and do it on the cheap, if you will. So I'm never one for doing stuff on the cheap unless I enjoy it, right? That's a whole other story. I'm also very fortunate that my partner and I are really good at collaborating around who's good at what.
00:10:49
Speaker
and so we share the load pretty well. So yeah, I think probably the thing that I'm more conscious of is, am I really the right person to be doing this? I ask myself that a lot. Is there someone else, some other way this could be done that isn't me? So one of the things that we talk a lot about is also deciding what's important to you and then maybe
00:11:08
Speaker
realizing that you're just gonna let it go so you know good example is maybe it's not worth saving twenty dollars a month on your mobile phone bill but it's been one of those things you've been thinking about you know I really know that if I got off Telstra I know I could save money and so you think about it but you don't do anything about it.
00:11:24
Speaker
But actually accepting that that's not important to you right now in your time of life and like actually letting it go from your brain. We actually encourage people to think about like maybe put that on your not to do list. I am not going to have look at my mobile phone because I've accepted that $20 is not important to me right now.
00:11:42
Speaker
I completely agree. In fact, first of all, I love the idea of a not to do list. Secondly, you know, often what I'll do is when I look at my to do list, if I've had to move something over a few days, like I didn't get it done yesterday or last week or whatever, so I've moved it into today or whatever.
00:11:58
Speaker
Once it's been moved three times, it does one of two things. Either I do it immediately, right? If it is important to me to save 20 bucks on my mobile phone, fine, I'm doing it right now. If it isn't, then I just delete it all together. So that's exactly the same thinking. So there is that point where you go, if this has been hanging around for more than, say, three, whatever your cycles are around how you organize your world, it's been hanging around for more than three. It's either never going to happen or you've got to do it right now.
00:12:23
Speaker
Oh, I love that idea of the three, like thinking about if you reschedule things three times. I do think often people also put things on their to-do list that sit there and languish. You could maybe come up with a rule like if it's there for three weeks and you haven't done it, then maybe you cross it off the list and say, goodbye, farewell. You're not actually important enough for me to do. So like, let us knock you off the list. Sometimes we put stuff down on our to-do list because something happens on a particular day, right? We think, oh, I might do that or I'll get to that, or I have aspirations of doing that.
00:12:53
Speaker
And then three weeks later, whatever the urgency we felt on that day just simply doesn't exist anymore. And so for me, it's like it's OK to let it go until it comes into your orbit again. And then you can make the decision then whether it's, you know, something that you really need to do. Interesting. I actually have also got a list in my
00:13:12
Speaker
list of like someday. So I put things in there that I know that I'm not going to do at the moment, but then occasionally I can look at it and it's got a mixture of like aspirational career things and holiday places I would like to go and all sorts of things. But I know that they're not in my near term future, but I feel like I can put them there and take them out of my brain and put them in the someday list. Love it. Love it.
Email Management Strategies
00:13:35
Speaker
So email, it's actually one of the huge pain points of many of our listeners. So we know that you've got this great system or some steps for taking control of unruly inboxes. So like here's with you your best hacks.
00:13:49
Speaker
Okay, so this is mostly for people who are out of control. So if you're in control, you've probably got less than 10 emails sitting in your inbox at any one time, you don't have piles of folders, and you feel like you've got it under control. So if that's you, put the kettle on right now. If however, you're one of those people that has 7,425 emails sitting in your inbox, 5,890 of them are unread, and you've got 250 folders sitting there, then pay close attention.
00:14:18
Speaker
So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to drag everything that's more than, you pick a number, but no more than a month. Let's say anything more than two weeks old, we're going to create a folder that says just stuff. You call it whatever you like, stuff.
00:14:33
Speaker
is best or done or, you know, archive, whatever. You can put a date against it. Some people put a date and you drag everything in your inbox and you dump it in there. Now, that's kind of like sweeping things under the rug. I get that. But the idea is that what we're doing is every time we open our email, we're reminding ourselves of how disorganized we are and how guilty we feel.
00:14:52
Speaker
And so let's just clear out a chunk of it already. What's remaining, you're going to immediately sort and you're going to be able to delete whole chunks of it from people that doesn't matter or newsletters you don't like signing up to and all that sort of stuff. Just delete a whole bunch of those. And then you're going to be left with potentially, I don't know, 10 or 12, maybe 20. It depends on how much email you get. But actually, you're now going to quickly scan and go, yep, I've done that. So you're going to just quickly go, yep, and you're going to drag that into this folder you've created.
00:15:20
Speaker
I like calling the folder done because once I get an email and I process it, bang, it just goes straight into done. So I don't have any other folders other than done and deleted and maybe an old archive one that I had from a while back. Because a lot of us might be old enough to remember when we had to have a folder system because the search engine capability wasn't good enough in the email applications of say 20 and 30 years ago, that's how long.
00:15:47
Speaker
it's been going on for. Whereas now, they're better than Google, some of the search, the ability to search your inbox. So as long as you vaguely know the day, the person, the topic, you should be able to find it. So that's one thing. The other thing I'd say is that's really only if you feel like you need to keep stuff. If you're happy to delete anything more than three weeks old, that's really liberating or power to you. But most people are a bit nervous. That's why they have all their emails sitting in their inbox. That's the first thing. What we want to try and do is have
00:16:14
Speaker
very little sitting in our inbox. So as it comes in, I respond to it and I drag it to dump. Don't worry about filing it. If you've got some kind of, if anyone that's listening has their own, I don't know, business where they might have a CRM system, you can link it to all of that, but just drag it out. And what we're trying to do is maintain zero inbox. The second thing I'd say is it's timing. So one of the things we do with our email is we dip in and out of it all the time. We let email just run our day.
00:16:40
Speaker
just in and out all day. And so I'm going to say you only want to open your email two or three times a day, turn off all your notifications, turn off the little red dots so you don't know how many are there. Do that on your phone as well so that you're only going in at certain times of day and you then be the boss of your email. So that'll be my two biggest tips. Clean them up and get to zero inbox and then only get dipping out, you know, batch how you go in there two or three times a day.
00:17:04
Speaker
Oh, I love that. And actually, you know, we've talked similarly about like declaring inbox bankruptcy and just going, yep, I'm bankrupt. I'm not even going to try and deal with it. Like, let's start with, you know, that idea, the strategy of the clean slate is like, you know, from today, I'm going to be different.
00:17:21
Speaker
Well, and I think there's a bunch of, you know, what do you consider your quote unquote junk email? Because I think sometimes we go, we buy a product or we buy something online and suddenly we're now on someone's mailing list and the spam filters don't pick it up. I unsubscribe immediately from those. So delete them all now. Don't worry about doing it now. Just delete them all now as they now come into your inbox, unsubscribe. And that starts to clear a bit of space. So you'd be surprised how many of those you've got coming into your system as well.
00:17:50
Speaker
Yeah, I used to have enormous amounts. I actually created at one stage, I created an email for just for internet shopping. So then they would all like just go somewhere else. And then I could when I felt like unsubscribing, I could unsubscribe from there, but not have it clutter up my dedicated life admin email, which I have, which, you know, I don't dare give anyone that address that I don't want to spam me. So I fully support that idea.
00:18:19
Speaker
Okay, what are some of the other things that you teach? You focus your work in the corporate world, but a lot of these things do also apply to life admin. So I'd love to hear some of the other things that you teach that might help our listeners.
Clearing Mental Space: Focus and Prioritization
00:18:32
Speaker
get their life admin sorted. Sure. So in the corporate world, a lot of people talk to me about thinking space and they literally kind of hold onto their head and say, I don't have any space to think. And so giving them room in their heads is one of the big things that I do. And it's relevant, as you say, for those of us from a life admin perspective,
00:18:51
Speaker
There's three things, which is stop, take stock and decide. The first thing is to stop. Just give yourself a point in each day. You get to pick when it is. You just stop. And in that time, you take stock. What have I got on? What's on my plate? What's on my list? What have I got to get done today? Now, one of the activities I encourage people to do is something called wipe the mind. Depends on where you're at, whether you do it in the morning or the evening, they're the best times of day to do it. Beginning of the day, end of the day.
00:19:18
Speaker
where i literally do a stream of consciousness and i just empty everything that's out of my it's in my head and empty it out so it's not a to-do list if they can be can be converted into one but mostly it's just everything that's on my mind because for example my parents are moving to queen's land and i'm helping them there's so much life admin with that just quietly
00:19:36
Speaker
helping them move house, get settled, sell the place, get a new place up here, all the stuff around that. There are things to do around that, but it's just on my mind. Writing down, science would tell us the writing is the important part. Typing is not so good.
00:19:52
Speaker
And so I write down just everything that's in my mum and dad's house. It's mum's new doctor that she's going to, you know, dad getting into the new band. And I just write all this stuff down and I clear my head out and that gives me space. Now at the beginning of the day, it clears up my thinking space for the day. At the end of the day, it improves my sleep.
00:20:09
Speaker
because I've cleared out all the stuff that might normally wake me up at two in the morning. That's the taking stock. And the third thing is make a decision. Make a decision right now about what you need to do today, tomorrow, rest of the week, whatever it might be. I tend to operate in Fortnite. So what have I got to get done in the next two weeks tends to be how I like to think. And so I'll say, okay, on mum and dad's house sale, for example, I might say, what have I got to get done in the next two weeks to progress that.
00:20:36
Speaker
Or if I am doing a will or whatever it might be, what have I got to get done in the next two weeks to progress that? So they're my top three things around how we create a little bit more thinking space for ourselves. So interesting. We just had Laura VanderKam on the show. I'm not sure if you're familiar with her from the US, but she's also a big planner. And so she has a dedicated space in her week for planning on a Friday afternoon. So it was really interesting, sort of the pros and cons of when people plan and
00:21:03
Speaker
in my family for our family activities we plan on a Sunday evening, because that's like dealing with the logistics of what's going to happen in the next week. Do you have a fixed time for planning? And I guess what's your approach that kind of you talked about a little bit there, but what's the actual process you go through?
00:21:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I wrote a book at one point called The First Two Hours, and it's about how we carve our day up according to the clock in our body, not the clock on the wall.
Optimal Planning Times
00:21:28
Speaker
And, you know, there are times when we're better, you know, we need a lot of intensity. So we're more mentally alert, typically the morning for most people, and times when we're not as mentally alert but can do routine stuff.
00:21:39
Speaker
And so I talk about the fourth two hours of the day, so somewhere between, say, four and six in the day. You don't have to spend the whole two hours doing this. This is just a good time to do it. It's because I do my planning then because it doesn't typically require an awful lot of intensity or brain power for me to do that, to do a list or to review my meetings for the next day or to think about what I've got coming up over the next two weeks or whatever it might be.
00:22:03
Speaker
yet it has tremendous impact on my success. And so that last, I always do at least an hour of power at the end of the day where I churn through any last minute things that need to be done, review what I have to do the next day. I think about if I'm driving somewhere, what's the route I'm taking and is there parking nearby? What am I going to wear? If I'm a, you know, if I'm doing, I might do meal planning. What am I going to eat for the next day? If I'm going to be leaving the house and make sure I've got my granola that I pack for myself, all that sort of stuff.
00:22:31
Speaker
The language I use around that is, what can I do in this hour that my future self will thank me for? And so that's where I do most of my, you know, where I do most of my planning, like, you know, what are the three things I'm going to do tomorrow, all that sort of stuff. Oh, interesting. I really like the idea of thinking about that actually it doesn't take that much brain power to plan an egg. Actually, Laura Vanderkamp said the same thing like with her.
00:22:53
Speaker
rationale for thinking about a Friday afternoon is no one really wants to start anything new on a Friday afternoon. But you can use that time quite effectively to plan what's coming up next. So I think the temptation to plan
00:23:07
Speaker
you know, early in the day when it's perhaps a more precious thinking time is, you know, often wasted opportunity, isn't it? Absolutely. Love that idea. So I think that's probably a good time to like wrap up our conversation.
Conclusion and Resources
00:23:20
Speaker
So thank you so much for sharing your experience and ideas with us today. It was such a pleasure. Where can our listeners, if they want to find you, if they want to know more about your work?
00:23:28
Speaker
Well, first of all, Diana, thank you for having me. And Mia, thank you for having me on the show today. It's been an absolute pleasure for my part as well, chatting with you. Look, I'm a shameless self-promoter, so people will find me on all social media. I put things up there regularly. But if you're looking for my, specifically looking for my stuff, my books, et cetera, you'll get them in bookstores or on the online bookstores. Or you can go straight to the source, DonnaMcGeorge.com, where you can find out lots more about me, what I do, and the books that I have in my It's About Time series.
00:24:01
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend, or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.