Overview

Effective @Amazon was a training focused on improving productivity at work. It was one of the best actionable training sessions I ever took and has been very useful in organizing my chaotic workspace. Being effective means choosing the right goals and getting those goals done in the most efficient way. Effectiveness comes not just by working efficiently but by working efficiently on the right goals. 

Being effective involves performing certain important steps repeatedly. I added some additional flavor to it by injecting the LNO framework to pursue the right priority work. To be effective involves following steps: a) Capturing, b) Classification, c) Prioritization, d) Scheduling, e) Planning & Review

Capturing

This is the foundational step to get organized and be able to plan your week. The most important principle here is to allow your head to stay clear of any lingering to-dos or ideas. This allows you to stay in the moment and be focused. To be able to focus, you need to bring all of your to-dos at one place and this is what capturing does. 

In this stage, capture everything that you need to do (emails, tasks, ideas, goals, post-it notes, conversation summaries, follow-ups, etc.) in a single place. Do not leave anything inside your head. Using email is a good way to capture all the things that you need to accomplish. 

Send yourself an email with the title as the to-do task and if needed a small summary of the task. Create a “Waiting” folder and move all these tasks into it. You can create a rule to send all the task emails created by you to the “Waiting” folder. You will use the “Waiting” folder to review and prioritize the tasks for the weekly planning. As the name suggests, it is the folder that is waiting for the review during your weekly review planning session. 

Classification

Within the “Waiting” folder, you can add labels to all tasks (aka emails) and categorize them depending on specific projects/goals, task type, urgency, manager/skip-manager emails, etc. The goal of classification is to organize all of your relevant tasks together. For example, a milestone may involve multiple activities to be executed and all tasks associated can be combined under the same milestone. This will give a comprehensive overview of all the things that need to be done (as well as prioritize) to achieve the milestone.

You also receive tons of emails during the day that need to be actioned. Some are important and others are not. Having an Inbox Zero enables you to focus on the task at hand and hence reviewing your inbox periodically enables you to do exactly that. Whenever you receive a new email or are reviewing all of your emails at specific time of the day, follow the below flowchart to decide on what to do next: 

This allows you to read through every email and that too only once. You can decide if you want to do it, defer it, delegate it or ignore it at the same moment and forget it – leaving your mind free. Reviewing your “Waiting” folders periodically enables you to revisit the emails and take appropriate action during the scheduling stage.   

Prioritization

All tasks are not created equal and not all tasks are impactful. Following Shreyas Doshi’s LNO framework (Leverage-Neutral-Overhead) allows you to be effective and impactful. 

As per the LNO framework, there are leverage tasks that create profound impact on the business or team. These leverage tasks are the ones that move the needle the most and hence most important for you. You should invest as much time as possible to leverage tasks and give your best work to these tasks in order to make yourself shine through them. Neutral tasks are those that are important but are not so impactful. Nevertheless they need to be done. You should invest some time and do a good enough job for these tasks. Lastly, overhead tasks are least impactful and you should get done quickly. There is no need to do a good job at these tasks as the effort put in is not worth it. You can implement a specific time slot where you execute all of your “overhead” tasks to get them done and move ahead with L&N tasks. 

Use the LNO framework for the tasks that are created and categorized in the “Waiting” folder. This will help you in scheduling all the work needed for the week.

Scheduling

You schedule all of your prioritized tasks for the week during the weekly planning process. The only way to get anything done is when it is scheduled on your calendar and you have blocked the time. So all those prioritized and categorized tasks in the “Waiting” folder should be added to the calendar. The amount of time to be blocked would depend on the task. Generally, it takes a minimum of 45 mins for me to get into the zone and the next 45-75 mins to get some quality work done. So, as a rule of thumb, it is good to block 2 hours per task that is of medium to high complexity level. 

Oftentimes, it is difficult to predict how long a given task would take. To manage such tasks, always schedule the follow-up tasks immediately on the calendar so that it continues to be worked upon if you cannot complete within the blocked time. Else, you can always have buffer time during the day or week to revisit the uncompleted task. All tasks that are scheduled in the calendar should be moved to a new folder called “Scheduled”. During weekly review, you can check if the scheduled tasks have been completed or need to be scheduled again (and thus moved again to “Waiting” folder for prioritization)

The good thing about having the task scheduled in your calendar is that it gives a good overview of the work that needs to be accomplished. It also enables you to fend off “urgent” tasks that come your way mid-week. For example, if your manager wants certain things to be done urgently, you now have an organized system to refer to and ask your manager to deprioritize any of the work that you planned for the work. This way you are working on the top priority work without getting overworked. 

Planning & Review

As mentioned above, all of your tasks are scheduled in the planning & review sessions. The weekly planning session is your dedicated weekly time when you go through all of your tasks. In this session, you should re-prioritize the tasks based on the latest information, go through your “Waiting” folder to categorize the tasks created throughout the week, schedule the tasks into the calendar, etc.  

Bringing it all together

To make all of the above stages actionable, following are the steps to be taken:

Weekly review: Schedule ~2 hours at the start of Monday morning every week to review and plan your entire upcoming week.

Inbox review: Schedule two-to-three ~15 min blocks to go through your Inbox daily. This will allow you to either immediately reply to emails or move the emails to be actioned at a later point in time. 

Mid-week review: Schedule ~1 hour to review your rest of the week. This enables you to re-plan the week in case of change of priorities. This is an optional step required only when there are competing priorities and need a change in your schedule.  

Know your energy levels: Deep work requires time free from distractions and when your energy levels are high. Schedule the deep work tasks at times when your energy levels are high to be able to maximize the impact and available time. 

Use folders and email rules: You can automate the organization of emails and tasks using the rules within the email. All tasks that are created as email and sent to you can be automatically routed to the “Waiting” folder. All important emails coming from your manager or your leadership team that generally requires you to act quickly can go into a separate “Leadership” folder. The emails that need to be followed up at a certain point in time can be moved to the “Follow-up” folder. This can be automated by adding yourself to bcc or cc to those emails and setting up the rule for “Follow-up” folder to move emails that are sent by you and you are in either cc or bcc.