Recruiter Productivity – too busy? You can take back control.

Unleashing your recruiter productivity will give you better results and reduce your stress. Why would you not pursue self-improvement?

We live in strange times. We worry about a future of automation and no jobs, We love technology that apparently ‘frees us up’. And yet we’re busier and more stressed than ever.

I am obsessed with productivity. It’s a fundamental skillset for anyone who has founded and built up a business. How much is enough? What’s the right task to do? What will create the best results? I’m going to start sharing my tips plus useful resources on how you can make yourself less busy and more productive.

But first let’s look at how we got into this sorry state in the first place…

The new ‘busy’ paradigm seems to have begun with the onset of our addiction to consumerism in the 1950’s, eloquently summed up by author Bill Bryson – the decade started with a time-rich culture, yet ended with “millions of people caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labour-saving devices that they wouldn’t have needed if they hadn’t been working so hard in the first place.”

Some people wear the ‘I’m busier than you’ as a macho badge of cultural honour. I’m confused why working a 12 hours day should be seen as ‘good’. I don’t understand how finding a way to compress exercise into a minute is fulfilling. To me it’s just a manifestation of what Derek Sivers says:

“BUSY” = OUT OF CONTROL.

If you’re too busy, it means you are failing to manage your time correctly – you’re not prioritising your life correctly. You’re not focussing on the right tasks to achieve the most important outcomes. You’re not creating (forcing even) the space you need to step-back and decide how you can unwrap the busy net.

Applying Productivity to Recruitment

I’ve been obsessed with improving my productivity for the last 10-15 years, and even though software products like idibu are all about increasing recruiter productivity – these software tools are massively diminished if you can’t improve your own personal productivity methods. I’m going to focus on recruiter productivity in 2017 and help you take back control… but a few ideas to get you started right here and now:

• Take the time to educate yourself a in time management method. Read David Allen’s Getting Things Done
• Plan your day before you check your email. Work out what’s important to achieve before the wall of noise hits you
• Use products like Omnifocus (my personal favourite but Mac only), RememberTheMilk (see other options here) to arrange your tasks using the ‘Getting Things Done’ methodology
• Set your main focus for the day before you start – what’s the ONE thing you commit to achieving TODAY that will create the maximum outcome? The Momentum Chrome Extension is a great help here.

Are you too busy? You think it’s impossible for you to claw back your freedom? Tell me why?

(Note: I really loved this paragraph that Bill Bryson wrote in “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” and while I referenced it in part above, you might like to read the rest of it below:

“People were wealthier than ever before, but life somehow didn’t seem as much fun. The economy had become an unstoppable machine: gross national product rose by 40 per cent in the decade, from about $350 billion in 1950 to nearly $500 billion ten years later, then rose by another third to $658 billion in the next six years. But what had once been utterly delightful was now becoming very slightly, rather strangely unfulfilling. People were beginning to discover that joyous consumerism is a world of diminishing returns. By the closing years of the 1950s most people – certainly most middle-class people – had pretty much everything they had ever dreamed of, so increasingly there was nothing much to do with their wealth but buy more and bigger versions of things they didn’t truly require: second cars, lawn tractors, double-width fridges, hi-fis with bigger speakers and more knobs to twiddle, extra phones and televisions, room intercoms, gas grills, kitchen gadgets, snowblowers, you name it. Having more things of course also meant having more complexity in one’s life, more running costs, more things to look after, more things to clean, more things to break down. Women increasingly went out to work to help keep the whole enterprise afloat. Soon millions of people were caught in a spiral in which they worked harder and harder to buy labour-saving devices that they wouldn’t have needed if they hadn’t been working so hard in the first place.”)