Productivity tips for busy finance professionals

Garreth Hanley:
This is INTHEBLACK, a leadership, strategy and business podcast brought to you by CPA Australia.

Christine Gounder:
Hi, and welcome to CPA Australia's INTHEBLACK podcast. I'm your host, Christine Gounder. In this episode, you'll meet Donna McGeorge, an author and expert on productivity, meetings and time management. She'll share strategies on how you can manage your time effectively to help enhance your productivity and achieve your goals. Donna, it's great to have you on our podcast. Welcome.

Donna McGeorge:
Thank you so much, Christine. Happy to be here.

Christine Gounder:
Donna, time management is something a lot of us struggle with. Too often when we're asked, "How are you?" a typical answer is, "I'm so busy." As a time management expert, what is the secret to effective time management?

Donna McGeorge:
Well, to be a little bit controversial, it's actually to not worry about managing time so much as we should be managing our energy, because most people will probably agree that the reason that they're busy is that they're jumping around trying to do lots of things.

Maybe they're multitasking, maybe their calendars are back to back full, and very few of us stop and think, "Where do I build into my day an energy break or an opportunity to take a break?" In fact, I would nearly guarantee that most of your listeners, if I said, "How many of you take a lunch break?" They probably wouldn't.

So, the first thing I would say is we really need to be thinking about how we manage our energy, and how we understand how our brain works so that we can use brain power peaks at certain times in the day so that we actually use that energy that's available to us in a more impactful way.

Look, the other thing I'd say is also it's around systems. And I don't mean systems as in technology. I mean systems as in do you have a system for managing email, for thinking about meetings, for running meetings, for how you structure your day? And some of these can be physical, like I happen to be a “write things down” kind of gal, and sometimes they could be technological, using apps or something like that. So I would say managing energy and having systems for things would be the keys to managing time as best you can.

Christine Gounder:
Donna, it's interesting that you mentioned time peaks. Do different people have different times for when they peak in the day? Are most people morning people or afternoon, or it varies?

Donna McGeorge:
The majority of people are what we would call early birds, and so they tend to peak, from a brainpower perspective, their peak would be anywhere between 8:00 AM and, say, 12:00 or 1:00 PM. And so, I always encourage people to begin to pay attention to when do you feel at your most energetic and mentally capable, and pay attention to that so that you protect that time, 'cause too often we give that time away.

About 20% of us are what we would call night owls, and they tend to peak later in the day, but this is always around... I wrote a book called The First 2 Hours, and it was around the first two hours arriving at work, not necessarily when you wake up. And so yes, so recognising whether you're an early bird or a night owl is step one. And then looking at what's your optimal couple of hours in the day, and making sure you protect that for your most impactful or intensive work.

Christine Gounder:
Managing our time well is key to achieving our goals. What are we getting wrong about goal setting?

Donna McGeorge:
We make them too big and too vague. So we say things like, if it's a personal goal, "I want to get fitter." If it's a professional goal, we might say, "I want to get a promotion," or something like that. And so, what we need to do is make them much more specific and smaller. So if getting fitter is the goal, it isn't really the goal, what we should be saying is, "I want to go for a walk for 20 minutes every morning." That's the goal. And if we're looking for a promotion, it wouldn't be, "I want to get a promotion," it would be, "I want to learn these specific things and have these specific experiences in the next 6 to 12 months."

And so we typically go too big and then it's hard to measure our success. And secondly, we know from studies that progress and making progress visible is a very strong motivator. And so when we break our goals down into micro wins like, "Did I get for a 20-minute walk? Did I learn this particular skill or task?" and we somehow track that and make it visible, we tend to then work harder at those goals, because progress is such a strong, or making progress visible, is such a strong motivator.

Christine Gounder:
You mentioned, Donna, that the key is to making our goals more achievable. What changes do you think professionals can make to set more achievable goals?

Donna McGeorge:
Look, at the risk of repeating this oldie but goodie, you've got to start with your “why”. And so why would you want to walk 20 minutes every day? Why would you want a promotion? And it's got to be beyond things like money, right? So for me, I've had a very strong fitness and health regime for the last 12 months 'cause my daughter was getting married. And so a very strong goal there around looking and feeling my best for her wedding was very front of mind for me.

If it's about getting promotions, it's not just about the power of the next promotion or the money that might come with the next promotion is, "What would the promotion get me beyond that? Does it mean that I have a great quality of life? Does it mean that my kids are well taken care of with their schooling? Does it mean that I get to have great quality vacations?" It's really understanding our why.

And the other thing I'd say that a lot of people do that makes it difficult to achieve their goals is they aim for perfection rather than progress. So, I kind of touched on progress in my previous answer, but this is around saying, "Of the last 30 days in the month or 31 days in the month, if I wanted to go for a walk for 20 minutes every day, if I missed two days, it doesn't matter in the scheme of things, I'm trending in the right direction." And so too often we beat ourselves up, we say, "Oh, I didn't get for my walk yesterday. I may as well give up." And so I say we aim for progress, not perfection when it comes to achieving our goals.

Christine Gounder:
That's a really great insight, Donna. Red brick thinking is a concept you believe in. Tell us why you recommend it and what we're missing out on.

Donna McGeorge:
So, red brick thinking is something that came about as a result of a little activity that I did in doing workshops. And it was based on a research study out of the University of Virginia, I think, in the United States around our tendency to have what's called addition bias. When we're presented with a problem, our instinct is to add.

So if we've got problems at work, we might add meetings, add committees, add more headcount, add more policies or processes. And this study showed that even when we know that the addition is going to make things harder or more complex, we still add.

And so, I encourage people to think about something called strategic subtraction. And in this, what we do is we remove things. Now, the reason it's called red brick thinking is the little activity I get people to do is a little Lego brick that's a bit lopsided. And when I say to people, "Fix the little Lego bridge," they typically grab another brick to shore up one side, when actually, they could remove a red brick from one side and it would still then be level.

And so the real challenge that I throw down is when you're presented with a problem asking yourself, "Is there a red brick I could remove? Is there something I could take away? Is there something I could stop doing that would still get me an okay result?" And so it's not just subtraction for subtraction's sake, delete a meeting, whatever, it's strategic subtraction, "Why do we even have this meeting in the first place? Why do we produce this report every month? Who's actually reading this report?" And asking ourselves some really solid questions and seeing if there's things we can stop doing in order to have the time and the capacity and the energy to focus on more important or higher yield or higher return work?

Christine Gounder:
This brings us to the issue of productivity then. How do we measure or how should we measure our personal productivity?

Donna McGeorge:
I'm old enough to remember that people were thought of as productive if they put long hours in at work. So as long as you were in before the boss and you waited till the boss left, you were, “big tick”, you got productive. But there's so many changes that have happened over the last decade, the pandemic included, that really showed us that we cannot measure or use hours as a measure. It's got to be impact or outcomes. It's the value that you create.

And so if I'm thinking about my productivity, and I get to the end of the week and I'm asked, how was my week? I'm wanting to answer the question with, "Did I get the things done that I wanted to get done? Did I have the impact that I wanted to have? And so did I add value?" So it's not about busyness, it's, "Did I add value? What did I move forward? What progress, there's that word again, "Did I make on any of my projects or my goals or whatever it is?"

And so, the first part is making sure that we recognise, "What is the goal? Why the goal? The stuff from our previous discussions, and then, "How am I moving the dial on that?" It's certainly not about even effort, right? So sometimes we feel like we worked really hard, but we didn't necessarily have any impact or create any value or move any things forward. So those three things impact, value and progress, or moving things forward, is what I would use to measure productivity.

Christine Gounder:
Donna, you've written a book called The ChatGPT Revolution. What can you share with us today from the book about AI to help us transform our work?

Donna McGeorge:
That's such a great question, and I do get asked this a lot. And the first thing I say is, "Well, how often are you using it? Have you tried it? Are you giving it a go?" I think a lot of people are, I don't know what they're waiting for. They're waiting for something to happen before they dive in, and they're already behind the time.

So ChatGPT, for example, was available in November 2022, so that's a long time ago now in the scheme of things. And if you're still not trying it and using it, then you're quite a while behind. And it's evolved massively since then.

And so I would say don't fear it, start using it for drafts or structures, or things where you get a bit, I don't know, you're a bit stuck. Maybe you've got to write a tricky email. So get it to help you at least do the draught of the tricky email.

It can actually save you somewhere between 35% to 50% of your time on routine tasks, so things like composing emails or putting a paper together, or analysing data. Now again, I'm going to give the whole security caveat around this, you don't put anything in the ChatGPT that is particularly personal or professionally at risk in some way, but gee, there's so many things aren't that it can help us with.

And the other thing I'd say is get really curious about it, because you don't need to be a techie, all you need is to start learning how to ask good questions. It's like having a personal assistant available to you 24/7 for free. So I say, get on it, have a go and start using it. It's not going anywhere. If you're waiting for it to go away, it is not going away.

Christine Gounder:
Absolutely. Donna, do you use ChatGPT a lot in your work?

Donna McGeorge:
Every day. I'm not as clever as a lot of people are, but I've set it up with what's called a custom GPT. So, PDFs of my books are sitting in my custom GPT, which means that when someone asks me to write an article, I immediately say, "Here's the article they're wanting me to write," and it's pulling the content directly from my book. So it's using my IP, in my voice, in my way.

Now it's never good enough to publish straight out of ChatGPT, I always have to edit it, but it's no different to me handing the question to an assistant and saying, "Can you do me a draft with this using the content from my books?" And so that's how I see it. I see it as an eager intern with a hangover. So, the eager intern always wants to be helpful and tries really hard, and the hangover part is because they don't really always get it right, and I always have to check stuff. Because even with my content, it sometimes still makes stuff up.

Christine Gounder:
That's a really good example and analogy, Donna. And yeah, it's a great time saver, but as you say, you still need to curate and edit whatever comes out of ChatGPT.

Donna McGeorge:
Absolutely.

Christine Gounder:
Donna, taking us back to the first question about being busy. Next time a colleague asks, "How are you?" Should our answer be something along the lines of, "Actually, not too bad, given the number of things I want to get to this week"?

Donna McGeorge:
Yes, that's a really good one. So, I get asked this a lot from my parents and family, who still value busyness as a badge of honour. So they'll say to me, "Have you been busy?" Or, "Are you busy?" And I always answer with, "I have enough," 'cause they're very worried that I haven't got enough work, all that sort of stuff.

So I think it's recognising that, and it's very similar to what you've got here is, "I had enough time to do the things I needed to do this week." So I'm going to make it a little simpler for them. What I say is, and I say this to myself as well, "How's work? Are you busy?" I'll say, "I was super productive." So I've had a productive week, not a busy week.

And I don't even ask the question anymore, "Are you busy?" I always say, "How's work going?" and let people tell you that. But certainly, I actually like your answer, "Actually, not too bad, given the number of things I wanted to get to." And I would add to that and say, "Actually, I had the right amount of time to get done everything I needed to get done."

Christine Gounder:
Great. That's a really good one. Thanks, Donna. I'll be using that in my conversations going forward.

Donna McGeorge:
Excellent.

Christine Gounder:
The word busy know, just overall, before we end, the word busy, is that an old-fashioned word now? Should we not be using "busy" in today's age, do you think?

Donna McGeorge:
Look, I don't know if it's old-fashioned so much as it's just overused. And certainly, I would say it's probably a throwback to the late '80s, early '90s work culture where the clock determined... And your importance was measured on how busy you were and how frantic you seemed.

And I can even remember stories about when I was working, and I've always been fairly productive, as you would imagine, and the amount of work I could get done between a 9:00 to 5:00 period of time as a working mum was pretty good.

And I even had bosses come to me, and this is early '90s, saying, "You don't appear to be busy enough. We notice that you leave around between 5:00 and 5:30 each day. That would tell us you don't have enough to do."

And I was always the person that I would say, "Okay, well, give me more. I'm happy to help the team. I don't want to be seeing other people drowning." And still, no matter how much they gave me, I was still able to get it done. I'm just particularly focused and very productive, and I just get stuff done.

And so this idea that I was being measured by the hours I was putting in, and someone even said to me once, "You seem too cheerful. Are you not busy?" And I'm like, "It's possible to have a high-powered job and still be cheerful."

So this idea that you had to be miserable, you had to be busy, you had to be working ridiculous hours, that idea, I think is really old-fashioned. And some of it still lingers today. And so, I'd be saying to your listeners, "Were you busy?" If you want to continue using busy, I'd start saying, "Was I good busy or bad busy?" So good busy, as you say, "Wasn't too bad, given the number of things I had to get done this week. I had enough time to do the most important stuff."

Bad busy, "I didn't even touch my most important stuff. I was distracted. I had crises happen all over the place." That's bad busy, right? So I think that's a great measure at the end of the week, was it good busy or bad? Busy.

Christine Gounder:
Great. Thank you so much, Donna, for joining us today, and for sharing some valuable insights for our listeners.

Donna McGeorge:
Absolutely. My pleasure, Christine. Thanks for having me.

Christine Gounder:
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Garreth Hanley:
To find out more about our other podcasts, check out the show notes for this episode, and we hope you can join us again next time for another episode of INTHEBLACK.