Paula Rizzo breaks down four dimensions of productivity style: your peak hours, whether you work best alone or in noise, how music resets your focus, and your ideal work interval length. She uses 15-minute music breaks and short bursts to stay sharp, and notes that surgeons use music to enter flow state.
Hey, it's Paula Rizzo from ListProducer.com. Thanks for joining me. Today we're going to talk about your productivity style. Who knew that you even had a productivity style, right? Well, you have one, and when you tap into it, you're able to get so much more done. So we're going to go through all the things that you need to think about to really optimize the perfect time, place, all of those things for you. So number 1 is time of day. Some people are just morning people naturally. I myself am a morning person, but not everyone works that way. Some people get their flashes of brilliance in the middle of the night. And if that's you, you need to tap into that time to be your most productive self. So just knowing that about yourself can help you set up your day for success. So like, for me, I know that in the morning I'm able to write a lot more. I have a lot of ideas and I want to get them down on paper. Later in the day, maybe I'm a little bit sluggish, so I'll do a little bit of, you know, pre-interview work where I'm talking on the phone with people asking questions you know, really making them do the work. And I am able to sort of figure out how my day will go because I know what my productivity style is. At Netflix, they actually know this about their, their workers, and they let you work whenever you want. That's the thing, you get to pick when you're most productive because they know that when people get to choose when they work and how best they work, they'll actually get more done. The other thing is environment. That's number 2. So you need to know where do you work best. Maybe you like to be in a quiet room by yourself. Maybe you like to be in a big, you know, busy room with people talking or in a café or something like that. So for me, I am a television producer, so I work in a busy newsroom during the day, and there's constantly people talking and yelling and things going on. When I wrote my book at home by myself, it was very quiet. And so I found that I couldn't get any work done. I just couldn't do anything. So what I had to do was I had to go to cafes, I had to meet up with friends and say, "Hey, can we just chitchat for a little while? Can you just sit there and you do your work and I'll do my work? And if I have a question or I need a synonym, I can just yell it out and you'll yell it back to me?" Because I needed that collaborative environment because I was so used to working in that way for my regular job. So that's my productivity style. I kind of need to be around people, but you may not. So Being able to know that about yourself is super, super important. The other thing is, what are you listening to? Is it— even if you have to have complete silence or music. Music has been known to actually boost people's productivity when you listen to it for 15 minutes. So 15 minutes using the music of your choice will actually reset your mind and your brain to be able to work a little bit more efficiently and be more productive. Actually, doctors, surgeons use music, you know, when they're doing their surgeries, and it does help them kind of get into the zone. There's been all these studies done about it. So just try it. Even if you can't work through while the music is on, maybe it's different kind of music. Maybe it's something that doesn't have lyrics in it and it's just, you know, instrumental. Maybe that will help. Maybe having music on at all doesn't, doesn't help you at all. But just try that 15-minute reset to see if that really, you know, will be able to help you. The other thing about productivity style is how long can you work and be actually productive? So for me, being a television producer, I'm used to working in very short increments of time. You know, stories that we put together are 2 minutes, 1 minute 30, 90, you know, whatever it is, 30 seconds, very short time. So for me, I work best in short spurts when I have a short deadline, 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Sometimes I trick myself and give myself some of those, those false false deadlines just to get going and get to it. But there's something called the Pomodoro Technique, which is 25 minutes of targeted time. And what you're supposed to do is pick one task, and you're supposed to work on it focused. You set a timer and focused work on it for 25 minutes. For me, that's a little long, so like I said, I pick 10, 15 minutes, and those are the spurts that I work in. But maybe you have your burst of brilliance in an hour. You know, you need one full hour to go through. Chances are it's probably a lot shorter than that, but just play around with the amount of time that you're actually working on a task and you feel that you're your most productive. Tapping into your productivity style is just amazing. So try some of these things that I've given you. Shoot me an email, paula@listproducer.com. Let me know what works, uh, and I hope you find your productivity style. See you later.
