Make 16 Percent Go Further

I attended a fascinating short webinar a few weeks ago that was focused on “amplifying your personal productivity” with the lovely Catherine Daley at Evologi Sustainable Productivity. The little snippet (grossly oversimplified here) that really caught my imagination was that the brain is limited to using only 16% capacity at any given time. It is not possible to exceed that, there is simply not the energy in our bodies to do that.

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In reality what does that mean? Most of us can multitask to an extent - walk and talk, drive and navigate, read and eat - but what happens when the complexity increases? Well, the other ‘task’ has to take a back seat for a moment so as to not exceed the 16% capacity. For example:

 

• Whilst taking a walk with a friend, your conversation turns to a more complex, highly emotional subject. At one point you need to stop walking and ask for the last few words to be repeated as they require greater emotional and intellectual consideration.
• Whilst driving to a new location you are talking to a friend in the car. This is fine until the journey moves onto more unfamiliar roads and you frequently stop engaging in the conversation to concentrate on directions.
• You learn to play a new song on guitar and happily strum the chords and sing along, however, during a more complex section of the song you struggle to do both and so resort to concentrating on just the guitar playing.
• While writing blog articles for your company, you often listen to music (I like a good film / game score) but should a piece of music come on with lyrics, it becomes distracting / too complex to process and therefore disruptive.

Hopefully the above gives the general idea. We modern humans try to cheat this capacity issue either by multitasking or through rapid task switching but in reality these don’t solve the capacity issue and indeed lead to other issues. We all know there are many different tasks of all sizes and priorities in our days, all vying for our time and every one of those tasks needs some of that capacity. So what do we end up doing during our day?

• Often reach for the easy to do (ignore priority), small tasks ❌ 
• Procrastinate on starting larger tasks ❌ 
• Get distracted when we do start the larger task (leaving the other unfinished) ❌ 
• Work through breaks / extended hours because we keep flitting about inefficiently ❌ 

Because of this, we become tired, stressed and more prone to mistakes whilst our ‘success’ and output stutters.

In an ideal world, to be efficient, happy and productive we need to:

• Prioritise ✔ 
• Stick to one task (through to completion) ✔  
• Avoid distractions ✔ 
• Ensure we take breaks to recharge ✔

Easier said than done in the modern office - right? Catherine can help you (as an individual) discover how you can work in a sustainably productive way to the best of your ability, however, what if you could use technology to ease the burden as well?

What if technology could take care of distractions, prioritise your work and free your time to focus and rest?

One of the greatest benefits of a document management system with process management is removing the time sapping distractions from employees in an organisation:

• Automate the mundane, distracting tasks
• Create task priorities and apply calendar controls
• Simplify labour intensive processes
• Improve compliance and security yet still reduce maintenance burdens

So if you find yourself struggling to be personally productive because you are constantly jumping between tasks, are often prevented from focusing by distractions, simply don’t have enough time in the day to rest or never leave the office on time, may I suggest it is time to take a serious look at your processes and have a chat with PacSol?

This isn’t just about one employee. These issues of productivity are impacting every employee across all departments today. Imagine the collective gains applying the right technology solution would have over an organisation?

#PacSolUK #DocumentManagementSystem #BusinessProcessAutomation #Efficiency #Productivity

Toby Gilbertson, Director. August 2024