Mikael Berner is CEO of EasilyDo, which makes the "smart assistant" app for iPhone of the same name. Below is an excerpt of my interview with him; you can read the extended interview here.
JD: What do you make of the difference between organization and productivity and efficiency? In my mind, you can't be productive and efficient without being organized, but it is possible to be organized and still be highly inefficient. How important is organization to your ability to be productive and efficient?
Mikael Berner: It's really important. Another dimension that I see that I think supports your proposition, is that being organized doesn't mean that you're disciplined or can take action. I think the discipline underlying organization is important.
I also think that focus can be misconstrued as needing to be long [periods of uninterrupted work].
We've read and found studies that say the average person context-switches every three minutes but doesn't come back to a task for 27 minutes. Productivity is a lot about context switching and how you read and process information. You need to be able to respond to important things coming in. Are you organized in that you have phone numbers in the right places and the right time? Or do you have to bounce around to find them?
JD: In developing EasilyDo program, what research or data did you uncover about what people need to be more efficient, more organized, more productive?
MB: We've found in our studies that none of us are aware of how much time and energy we're putting into small task that we don't even know are tasks. We stopwatch how long it takes to do these small tasks and compare them with how long it takes a smart agent to do them for you.
We're all being weighed down, and we don't even know we're being weighed down, by distributed apps and data.
JD: Can you share with us two or three of your own tips and tricks for increasing productivity?
MB: I rely on tools that help me surface the most important information. EasilyDo, Unroll.Me,
SaneBox—a lot of things that declutter email—I recommend any of those tools.
The best rule, and I sometimes slide off of this, is "If you're going to open an email, either do something with it, like respond to it, or delete it, or file it away." Don't even open an email unless you can process it right then. That's part of the two-minute rule.
I'm sitting in our conference room right now that has these Ikea tables, but they're glass tables that you can draw on with dry erase markers. It brings the group work together on the table rather than sending one group member to a board. It reinforces team work.
Next: Omer Perchik, Founder and CEO of Any.Do
Source: pcmag.com
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