Extreme Productivity

Why do some people seem to have more bandwidth than others, and how do they achieve extreme levels of productivity? This episode talks about the principles and practices followed by successful leaders when it comes to time management, prioritization and clarity of thought.

Extreme Productivity

Salonie: Hi, and welcome to the next episode of Matrix Moments. This is Salonie and I have with me Avnish Bajaj, founder and managing director, Matrix Partners India. Today’s episode is about Extreme Productivity and the strategies used to attain this.

Avnish you often talk about having met people who have unlimited bandwidth and yet we know that there are only x no. of hours in a day. So, how do you really achieve unlimited bandwidth and what does it really mean?

Avnish: Thank you Salonie, good to be back. Let me ask you something first, what can’t money buy?

Salonie: Ah, health, love…

Avnish: Money can, of course money can buy health, we have so many preventive, love okay I can’t argue with you on that, although on that I have a different point of view, people say happiness but let me say a different framework and obviously there is no right answer here.

I don’t think money can buy time, yet, I think time can buy money. You know there are friends of mine who are very successful and they always seem to have time, and I keep telling them and this is also a saying that “True wealth is time.” I actually think it is the other way round. Which is, the people who manage their time extremely well become super successful and I think that underpins a lot of other things. I think it underpins, clarity of thought and some of the stuff we can talk about. So, I think there are, what do I mean by people with unlimited bandwidth? And I have been really privileged to work with a lot of them and honestly, I picked up a lot of stuff from them. Some of the practices we can discuss today are not from any one particular person but a lot of these guys have similar things. One common trait - always available for important things and it boggles my mind how they are always able to do it and I remember this thing from Meg Whitman which she had said that, “As you rise up your career graph, often we are asked to prioritize things” right?, so we will say “Hey, Meg should I be doing x or should I be doing y” and she used to say, that’s a cop out, the challenge in the senior positions is, the challenge of the “and” and not the “or”. You have to do both and that’s obviously in a finite number of hours in a day, it puts more pressure. So, I do think that there is this set of people whether you call it extreme productivity which is the way I want to practice it, who just have unlimited bandwidth.

Salonie: Sure. But what in your observation would you say that these people do differently? The practices that you were just referring to? So, are there any like daily practices on a tactical level that are followed to help achieve this level of productivity?

Avnish: Yeah, so we will go through some of these. My only submission is that nobody has all of them but these are some thought starters for people to think about. The first thing it starts with, which is a topic of separate podcast, not with me but somebody else which is clarity of thought. These guys have unbelievable clarity of thought. Why is clarity of thought important? Because you have to separate the important and the unimportant, the classic prioritization 2x2 is you put urgent and important, on 2 axis and you say whether it is urgent or whether it is not urgent, whether it is important or not very important and often you will find that most of us are always doing urgent and important, okay? Well, that is good. If you are doing urgent and not important that is horrible, but being able to know what is important and not important is very critical and these people have that, there are one or two practices that people follow like, meditation or even very tactical, which I sometimes discuss with people that “ask yourself in a situation, if I could do only one thing, what would It be?” “If I could do only those two things, what would those be?” So, that really forces you to think but coming back to these people, I think they spend a lot of time in the quadrant of the important, not just urgent and important, okay? Now, how do you get there? assuming you are able to separate these two And one of our colleagues actually mentioned this to me and it came into this framework is that most of these people spend 80-90% of their day on planned activities yet they leave 10-15-20%, I mean the numbers are not important for unplanned activities. Now, guess what you’re doing? You are planning an unplanned activity, and then the important stuff that shows up is either part of the planned activities but the urgent and important can immediately be slotted into the, planned-unplanned. So, I think that’s the second practice. Go back and think how much of your day is planned, how many things are calendared? Now it can sound a little bit regimented but I actually have free slots calendared on my calendar, and I know, that is the planned-unplanned and if somebody really needs to reach me, they are able to.

Other practices, the ones that I personally learnt from a very well-known VC very early is this concept of 8-10 hits a day, what is a hit? A hit is a needle moving action on something that is important. So, let us take an example of that, if I have to hire, if I have to help hire somebody for a company, so, that is a non-incremental thing that I have to do, if I do one interview that is one hit, if I do three interviews for the same position that’s still one hit, now if I am doing two interviews for one position and two interviews for another position those are two different hits. Now, what that forces you to start thinking is, am I truly being productive at multiple levels? So, if I do eight interviews for the same position, my day only has one hit, and so, what I will then say is how do I minimise the number of interviews I have to do for this position? Which means, that I will probably do reference checking I will do some other practice. I think often you known we run into these set of people who are very busy, always busy, but they are not productive. Things take far longer than they should, and that’s because they are always busy doing 10 interviews for the same position as opposed to 5 interviews for four different positions and that’s how the productivity goes up. So, this framework has helped me a lot to say, everyday, on my calendar are there 8-10 different needle moving activities that I am doing.

Then other tactical things, personally somehow this is my pet peeve. So, I use a single inbox. So, we are in the days of Twitter, LinkedIn, at work we have some other software, there is Whatsapp and there is Facebook messenger. I believe, a lot of that is junk and I have a single inbox, which is my e-mail inbox. You have seen this, if you are trying to reach me on Whatsapp it is two times a day because I filter all the junk, because there is so much of spam that comes. So, work for me is a single inbox which is e-mail and then I make sure it is cleaned every day.

So, generally you would know, the response timings being- and the people know that, that they would reach out, other pet kind of a way of doing things, phone for me I think that tends to be used or abused a lot. So, if you see me in the office or even some of the people that I work with, I do not use my phone in the office. There is planned time for phone which is before work hours, the first thing in the morning or end of day or late night. So, my phone is on DND and people often say that “hey, that’s a luxury to have” I don’t believe so. I think, if you ask my founders they would say I am very, very responsive but it is scheduled. Unless it’s in that slot where its planned for the unplanned. So, I think office is for things that can only happen in the office. Phone calls can happen anywhere right? So, I tend to really really segregate those two things, other than where it is really urgent and important. Final tip is, also one of the things, just going back to phone calls is I believe when people message you quick chat, this-that? They are thinking about their own convenience. Now, if there is something I have to think about, I prefer and I ask them “can you please send context on email?” then, I’ll have a chat. Now, what happens is often, and this happens in meetings also, we use meetings and other people’s time, either to outsource our thinking, which is okay but there should be slots set up as brainstorming or whatever. Often, it is to give information. Why do you have to schedule a time with me to give me information? Send it over in writing, right?

So, one of the practices that I have heard from so many people globally. Some of the most successful people is, do things in writing because it forces you to clarify your own thinking, it gives the other person time to think, it lets the other person respond once they have thought and it is at their convenience as opposed to you revving people up, at your convenience. You know whenever you think, which is why the phone tends to be an instrument that is used very, very carefully by me, and the good news is people who know you well, or as they get to know you, you set these rules of engagement, but they know, everyone knows that I am reachable between 15-30 minutes if required.

Final thing, one important thing I’ve seen with all the highly productive people, is that they schedule their meetings within 15 minute intervals and that means they are really respecting time and I think that if you don’t respect your own time, you do not respect other people’s time. So, often meetings are set such as half an hour, 45 minutes, one hour, one hour-fifteen minutes and some of the big industrialists I have met they are very, you know, you are talking to them, you are 45 minutes into it the gentlemen will get up, very, very courteously and say “sorry but I have run out of time” and this is a common trait and you can feel bad or you can feel “wow, I should learn from this” and I have learnt from that, and I do the same “sorry, but I have run out of time” right? So, I think you need to really respect time.

Salonie: and lastly your thoughts on the work-life balance. How do you strike the right balance between the two?

Avnish: Do you think I am competent to answer this question? Okay so let me put it this way, I do not believe in work-life balance, I believe in work-life harmony. I am very passionate about my work, and I think that a lot of people are, and I think when you are so passionate about work, I think it would be, at least for a DNA like mine, it is delusional to expect that I can segregate the two. Yet, if you speak to my family they will say, you know they feel like I am there for them and that is because I have integrated work and life and what does that mean? Even when I go on a holiday I have a contract with my family, the contract is that, before the kids wake up and get going by let’s say 10-11am, I have put in three-four hours of work and post them unwinding around 8-9 pm, I have put in 2-3 hours of work. In between if I have to take a call, which is a planned call I will do it, right? So, honestly, throughout the holiday I am actually never back-logged, I feel like it is working, I am in a good mood and the whole day I am with the family and they feel that I am there.

That said, at Matrix you know we have this philosophy of you know 15-20-15 which is let’s say you have 50 productive weeks in a year, 15 weeks people should really have their weekend to their own because there is this thing that comes up sometimes you know? Saying “shouldn’t we be working all the time, working 24/7” I think everybody is built differently, for me, 24/7 is- if I don’t do that I will get stressed. But I think 15 weekends if you disappeared, nobody would find out, 20 is maybe this kind of, some level of work which I discussed with you and 15 weekends be prepared to kill yourself, and in our business which tends to be a bit spiky on deals you know that is probably one framework that can work. So, those are my thoughts, but I am noexpert on this.

Salonie: Thanks Avnish, Thank you for listening and you can find the transcribed version of this podcast on www.matrixpartners.in. You can also follow us on Twitter and Linked-in for more updates.