246. Do Less, Achieve More: Unpacking Productivity Secrets with Mick Spiers

Are you drowning in tasks yet still feel unproductive? This episode unveils vital productivity hacks that can help you reclaim your time and harness your potential. Join us as we explore powerful insights from Pia Silva, who successfully transformed her business by cutting down inefficiencies while emphasizing value over mere hours worked. 

We discuss practical strategies that aim to enhance both personal and team effectiveness. You’ll learn how removing clutter from your daily routine can lead to a clearer path toward real accomplishments. Mick Spiers shares his personal productivity rituals, highlighting time blocking, increased self-awareness, and creating purposeful meetings that drive results. 

Delve into the significance of reframing your mindset as we discuss integrating gratitude into your daily tasks. Instead of viewing responsibilities as burdens, shift your perspective to see them as opportunities that contribute to team success. Listen to how these principles can cultivate a more supportive and productive workplace where everyone thrives. 

Are you ready to take your productivity to the next level? Don't miss this opportunity to learn transformative strategies that will help you get more done with less noise. We would love to hear the productivity tips that work for you! Subscribe, share, and leave your review to help us spread these important ideas.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Productivity Hacks
• 34:55 Pia Silva's Transformational Strategies
• 1:26:55 Mick's Personal Productivity Tips

Transcript

Mick Spiers: 0:01

Do you ever feel like no matter how hard you work, there just aren't enough hours in the day? What if the key to getting more done isn't about doing more, but about doing less better? Imagine this. You sit down at your desk, ready to tackle the day, but within minutes, emails flooding, Slack, messages ping, and suddenly you're juggling five different tasks at once. By the end of the day, you've worked hard. But what have you actually done? Have you actually moved the needle? Today we're going to talk about productivity hacks that will change the way you work, not just for yourself, but for your team. We'll build on my recent conversation with Pia Silva, who transformed her business by cutting six month projects down to just two days, all by removing things that cost time and money but don't add value. Then I'll share my own personal productivity strategies, the ones that have helped me stay focused, avoid burnout and maximize my impact as a leader. Hey, it's Mick here cutting in before we start with an important announcement to celebrate four years and five seasons of The Leadership Project podcast. We're hosting the podcast guest Awards, where you get to vote for who has been the guest that has had the most impact on you. Head to mixpeers.com to cast your vote. Now there's only a couple of weeks left to get your vote in and make sure it counts. Welcome back to the leadership project. I'm your host, Mick spears, and today will be a solo cast where I unpack my learnings from the amazing interview with Pia silver. I'm going to unpack her productivity hacks, and then I'm going to add some of my own, some of the things that have worked for me during my career. So without any further ado, let's get into it. So let's go into some of these productivity hacks from Pia silver. The big one was eliminating what doesn't add value piers. Entire business transformation was based on cutting the clutter, removing unnecessary steps, wasted meetings and anything that didn't directly drive results. This aligns perfectly with Timothy galway's concept that we've spoken about on the show before, that performance is equal to potential minus interference. The less interference you have, distractions, unnecessary work, inefficient processes, the more you can reach your full potential. So check in. Have a look at where your time is going. Is it going on a necessary task? Is it going on interference? And the more that you can remove those interference, the higher performance you will be, and your team will be. The second big takeaway from peer was to stop pricing your work by the hour, price by the value you create. Think about it. Would you rather pay a plumber who takes six hours to fix a problem or one who fixes it in six minutes? You don't pay for the time spent. You pay for the solution delivered. The same applies to your own work. Stop measuring effort, start measuring impact. The third big takeaway was to say no more often. Every time you say yes to something that doesn't align with your priorities, you're saying no to something that does strong boundaries aren't a luxury. They're essential for high performance. Now let's take these principles even further with my own personal productivity hacks, the ones that I use every day to stay sharp and effective. Number one, stop multi tasking. It doesn't work. Multi tasking isn't a super power. It's a productivity killer. Studies show that constantly switching tasks can reduce productivity by up to 40% instead, use time blocking, set dedicated periods to focus on deep work without distractions. Look at your calendar and see how you can create time blocks in your calendar where you only focus on that one thing at a time. Number two, be fully present. This is a superpower. You do a much better job of anything when you are truly present, whether you're in a meeting, writing an email or spending time with family, focus on that one thing number three, know yourself and your body. For me, I'm a morning person. I do my best creative work in. The morning and push admin tasks to the afternoon. My best time blocks are 90 minutes long. I know that for me, but what is it for you? Anything beyond that and my focus starts to dip. So think about yourself. When do you do your best work? What time of day, and what is your effective time period for the time blocks, and then align your schedule with your energy levels. Number four, prepare for the day ahead. Before each meeting, ask yourself, How do I need to show up? What role do I need to play in this meeting? Do I need to be inspirational, curious, Coach mode. Do I need to be strategic? Do I need to be decisive? What do I need to achieve from this meeting, and how will I know when we've gotten there, this level of focus will make your meetings shorter and more impactful. Number five, making those meetings purposeful. Every meeting should have a clear purpose. If it doesn't cancel it, do a check in at the end of each meeting. Are we aligned? Do we know our next steps? Who is responsible for that? This could be as simple as asking the other person, hey, what have we just agreed to? And get them to play it back to you. The reason why this is a powerful tip is it avoids wasted time by people going off on different tangents. If they come back one week later for the next check in and you discover that there was a major misunderstanding of what was agreed, then you've you've lost a week, and people get frustrated. So do those check ins at the end of each meeting to make sure that there's a common understanding of what was said and what was just agreed. Number six, play to what people love, for every person out there who hates. Let's say something like a pivot table. There's someone out there who loves them. When people love a task, they do it faster and they do it better. So delegate strategically play to strengths, not to job descriptions. If there is someone there that just loves doing a pivot table and you hate doing it, let them do it. They're going to be in their element. They're going to be going, I love this. I get to do this amazing work, and it's the work that you've been dreading. Now, be careful with this one. Don't create choke points in your business. Don't create single points of failure. But have a look around you and look at what people love doing. That's also a good segue to number seven, which is to reframe tasks from I have to to I get to mindset is everything. Instead of saying I have to work on this report, say I get to present insights that will help the team make better decisions. Your gratitude then shifts the energy. It turns work from a chore into an opportunity. Try this today. Have a think about if you catch yourself saying, I have to do this today. Think about why it's important and what it means, and shift the sentence to I get to and turn it into a positive statement. Number eight, overcome procrastination with why, and what's called swallowing the frog. Remember the purpose of each task. Your Why is the best motivator, and it's also a great source of resilience. If you know why you're doing this task, it could be that it unlocks productivity for someone else. It could be that it connects to a greater purpose. The more you understand why you're doing this task, the more energy you're going to put in it. Conversely, if your team don't know why they're doing something, the exact opposite happens. People will do almost anything if they understand why it's important and swallow the frog first. Do the hardest thing, the most important task, first thing in the morning, before distractions creep in. This is amazing for productivity, of getting that thing done, that thing that you've been avoiding, but it also creates this cycle and momentum where you feel good about the fact that you've finally got that thing that you've been putting off. When you finally get it done, it feels really good, and you build momentum, and then the rest of And number nine, the biggest one for leaders out there be a your day seems to flow. multiplier, not a micromanager. Your job as a leader isn't to do everything, it's to make everyone. Around you better, empower your team, teach them how to think, not just what to do. If you're the only one solving problems, you're the bottleneck to everyone's success. Ask better questions, engage people, bring them into the discussion, so that they take great ownership of the tasks at hand. I really lean on the work here of Liz Wiseman, the author of the book multipliers. And if you haven't read that book, please get a copy of it. It is amazing for any leader out there. My favorite part is what she calls the extreme question experiment. So if you're the type of leader that comes into a meeting and says, Okay, team, here are our priorities for the week. Bang, bang, bang, bang. Jim, I need you to do this. And Sally, I need you to do that. The idea of the extreme question experiment is to flip that on its head and ask nothing but questions. Say things like, hey, team, what do you think our biggest priority is this week? Hmm, interesting. And what makes that important? Hmm, good. And what will this enable? Okay, interesting. What challenges do you think we might encounter when we try to do this thing? And how might we overcome those challenges, you'll be surprised how in sync your team up, they know what needs to happen. And if you're asking questions, they take ownership. They take ownership, and then they'll drive those tasks home. A few bonus productivity hacks batch similar tasks together. So when I was talking about time blocking before, a really key one is to respond to all of your emails at set times instead of constantly checking so instead of checking your email every five minutes, put it in your calendar and go right, I'm going to respond to emails between

11:00 and 11:30 and 2: 12:00

00 and 2:30 like it doesn't have to be just one time block, but put in different time blocks and respond to those emails. Next one. Use the two minute rule. If a task takes less than two minutes, do it immediately. If it takes more than two minutes, schedule it. So if you see a task yet, and this might be when you're going through your emails, if you see something that's going to take you less than two minutes to do straight away, do it straight away so you don't have this time soaking up of the task shifting that we were talking about before. And finally, automate repetitive tasks. If you find yourself doing the same thing over and over again, find a way to automate that thing or to delegate it to someone else that can do it for you. So I'm curious to know which of these productivity hacks will you start using today. The key takeaway here is not about doing more, it's about doing better. Cut the interference, protect your time, and focus on high impact work. I'd love to hear from you, what works for you, what's your biggest challenge when it comes to productivity? Do you have any productivity hacks that you would like to share with us and with our audience? In our next episode, we're going to continue to celebrate International Women's month, and I'm delighted to be joined by Jill Schulman. Jill is the founder and CEO of breakthrough leadership, and she's going to talk to us about the bravery path, choosing growth over comfort. You don't want to miss this one. Don't forget to go and vote for your favorite guest for The Leadership Project podcast guest Awards, which we'll be announcing the winner of in the middle of March. Thank you for listening to The Leadership Project mickspiers.com a huge call out to Faris Sedek for his video editing of all of our video content and to all of the team at TLP. Joan Gozon, Gerald Calibo and my amazing wife Sei Spiers, I could not do this show without you. Don't forget to subscribe to The Leadership Project YouTube channel where we bring you interesting videos each and every week, and you can follow us on social, particularly on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Now, in the meantime, please do take care, look out for each other and join us on this journey as we learn together and lead together.