Productivity Hacks: Apply the Rules of Consulting to Your Personal Life

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share their secrets to being more productive. See all their #productivityhacks here.

My best productivity hack involves adapting a strategy model to personal time management. The model is called the Core/Context Model, and like most good things in consulting, it lends itself to a 2X2 matrix:

The goal of this model in a strategy session is to prioritize the allocation of scarce resources, with the following priorities:

1. Invest to drive substantial growth through significant differentiation across a material amount of business.
2. Allocate resources to meet mission-critical commitments, particularly financial ones material to investors.
3. Invest in next-generation opportunities that could become high growth and material.
4. Allocate resources to productivity initiatives to free up scarce resources to spend in the other three quadrants.

My experience as a management consultant is that context too often trumps core, leading ultimately to a slowly deteriorating competitive position in the marketplace propped up by a never-ending series of spending cuts. My point here is that the same thing may well be happening in your personal business life as well.

To check if this is true, do a core/context analysis on the last thirty days in your personal calendar. Look at every meeting or activity you were involved in and ask yourself, was this something that allowed me to deliver differentiated value and/or grow my experience and capabilities, or was it something I had to get done to just do my job? Then ask, was it mission-critical to my company that I get this done and done properly, or was it just something I felt—or someone else felt—should just do? Sum up the amount of time in each quadrant to create your own resource allocation profile.

OK, now here come three key productivity hacks:

1. Outsource your context to free time up for core. In my case I have an executive assistant who is my Chief Context Officer. She has enormous discretion to address a wide variety of business issues, many of them mission-critical, including all contracts, calendaring, and travel logistics. This not only saves me an enormous amount of time, it takes a kind of expertise to do well that I neither have nor plan to develop. Making this work means investing in the relationship to build trust and install productive processes, but the payback is huge.
2. Put core before context. When you build your plan for the week, month, or year, do not start with listing out your backlog of mission-critical commitments, virtually all of which are context not core. You will run out of time and energy before you ever get to anything else—there is always more work to do in this quadrant than you have resources to complete. Instead, plan your investment in core first. What are you going to do to either create new differentiating capability for yourself or demonstrate your existing differentiated capabilities to your key customers, be they inside or outside your company? Calendar and commit to this work 100% before you commit to anything else.
3. Get creative about productivity. Non-core, non-mission-critical sounds not worthy of your attention—but this is a mistake! Taking risks with context tasks is the best way to free up chunks of your time for core. Maybe you outsource some more of this work. Maybe you reengineer it. Maybe you can automate it. Maybe you can just stop doing it. As the song says, “You don’t need to be coy, Roy, just get yourself free!” The amount of stupid stuff we all waste time on is not just annoying, it’s embarrassing. We—and you, specifically—can do better.

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Geoffrey Moore | Escape Velocity | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube

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