Productivity advice from the CEOs
Everyone has the same 24 hours a day. So be us, Elon Musk CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, Jeff Bezos CEO of Amazon, Bill Gates CEO of Microsoft, and Jack Dorsey CEO of Twitter and Square. But why the level of productivity seems so different between them and the rest of the population including me? Let's learn some tips from them.
Sharpen our focus
Several successful people have a common way to sharpen their focus. People such Dorsey, billionaire like Ray Dalio, to Bill gates, doing it through meditation. They make meditation to be their daily routine. Bill Gates stated in his Gates Notes blog that meditation is his favorite productivity habit. "it's a great tool for improving my focus, " he said. He and his wife do it 2 or 3 times a week, for about 10 minutes each time.
Meditation help sharpens his focus by teaching him how to pay attention to his thought. “Meditation simply exercises for the mind, similar to the way we exercise our muscles when we play sports,” he said.
For anyone who'd like to get started with meditation, Gates suggests the book “The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness” by former Buddhist monk Andy Puddicombe.
Eliminate noise
Steve Jobs excessively eliminates options that are not the best option.
He believes that the key to productivity is knowing when to say 'No'. “Focus means saying ‘no’ to the hundred other good ideas, so you have decided what it makes sense to spend time and energy on, and what doesn’t," Jobs said during the company’s 1997 Worldwide Developers Conference.
Billionaire Warren Buffett also has the same mindset. Once he said that “the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.”
In their day-to-day work, Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey have another tip.
Have you ever been in marathon meetings with your college? If you are a professional I bet you have experienced that especially during this pandemic where jumping from one online meeting to another is the new normal.
65% of senior managers say that meetings keep them from completing their work, according to a survey from Harvard Business School and Boston University. 71% of 182 managers surveyed believed that meetings are unproductive and inefficient.
Elon and Dorsey eliminate excessive meetings and make it a more focus-friendly way.
For Elon, “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time,” he shared in a letter to his employees in 2018. “Get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter.” he advised.
For Dorsey, he tried to make meetings more focus friendly by doing what our brain is good at: reading and being focused.
“Most of my meetings are now Google doc-based, starting with 10-minutes of reading and commenting directly in the doc,” Dorsey tweeted in 2018. “This practice makes time for everyone to get on the same page, allows us to work from many locations, and gets to truth/critical thinking faster.”
High -velocity decision
According to Jeff Bezos in his speech back in 2016, it is important to make high-quality high-velocity decisions.
Making the right decision is sometimes less important than making a high-velocity decision. You only need to be good at correcting the incorrect course, quickly. When you are capable of doing that, being wrong may be less costly than you think. While going slowly is expensive for sure.
He also stated that high-velocity decision-making environment is more fun.
Conclusion
For now, let's try to apply those three tips from the CEOs.
There are plenty of tips out there as well. Let's add!