You want to consider if you want to be more productive right now is something called the “Zeigarnik effect”.
Now, the Zeigarnik effect is really interesting it’s the voice in our heads that pushes us to complete the uncompleted and this is a well-documented psychological phenomenon that was discovered roughly 90 years ago by a Russian doctoral student living in Berlin (dropship spy).
What she found was that there is this natural urge, this voice that pushes us to complete the things that are not completed and even the worst procrastinator in the world still likes to have some sort of closure, they just have more trouble getting there and in addition they found that interrupted information goes into this area of our brain and is more easily recalled. In a lot of ways, this is the basis for something known as the “Pomodoro Technique” and with the Pomodoro Technique, what you’re doing is you’re focusing on one task for 25 minutes, setting an internet timer to that effect and when the timer goes off you stop, you interrupt yourself and take a five-minute break and then you go back to it after and you do this several times, using those interruptions very effectively and focusing on the one thing at a time. So, at the end of the day if you focus on that one thing, then you can actually complete that one thing, whereas if you don’t, if you try to focus on multiple things at the same time the Zeigarnik effect will pop up and it’s going to be this voice in your head saying complete this and finish this and I want to finish this, but you can’t – because you have too many things going on. So, ultimately what happens is your brain just sees all the stuff you’re not getting done.
As a founder, whether you have a family or
not whether you work with a team that is remote or not, you will ultimately
benefit by doing more and more of your communications in an asynchronous fashion. Let me describe
what that means: What we’re doing right now here this is asynchronous – this is
article is being written and you’re reading it may be weeks, days, hours,
months later somewhere across the world even – that’s an asynchronous style of communication.
Synchronous would be if we’re in the same room or on the phone and we’re talking live in doing that. Most things that we believe need to be synchronous – do not need to be any more. If you get on a huddle with your team over voice chat or over a zoom call, for example video call – that’s live and most people would assume that all team calls have to be done in a live fashion, but there are lots and lots of tools now that make it so that you can do that asynchronously, you can do a stand-up over slack for example and people can report in whenever they want. You can have sales calls with people that are not live and doing it over some sort of voice chat, like even whatsapp (unless it revolves around aliexpress dropshipping). People are more open to doing things on their own schedule now. So you have to get in the mindset of thinking about: Does this need to be done live? And if it doesn’t need to be done live, how am I going to do it in a way that is asynchronous? What you ultimately end up getting is you’re communicating at your best, they are receiving it presumably at their best because that would also be the most viable option for them, responding in kind and then you’re receiving it at your best again, so what you’re getting is everybody communicating at their best simply by allowing them to communicate in a way that is asynchronous.
