Tooling and Fun
As a Manager I get pulled from many different directions and staying focused or doing any deep work is often a pipedream. As I mentioned in Creativity and Time To Think, I'm trying to be more aware of where my time goes and stay as disciplined as possible. I started moving meetings around to have bigger blocks of focus time. I avoid "snacking", in the sense that I stay away from quick distractions like checking my email. In the past week, I regained some sanity but I can't call it a victory until this process is second nature.
As part of this effort, I look at things that frustrate me or often are a waste of time. I was partially inspired by this post: Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool. Other than incorporating some of these tips first thing on Monday I am on the lookout for other small things that kill my productivity. One of them is this Google Calendar browser extension. It's been around for a while and it does serve its purpose fairly well. The problem is that my meetings tend to move around and it often falls out of sync. The only way to pick up the latest changes is to revoke permissions and grant them again. I would very rarely open Google Calendar if I could just move meetings easily, have the extension up to date, and add focus time on my calendar. This doesn't seem like an outstanding amount of work and I created small extensions before so, I plan on creating one for this exact purpose. At least if something goes wrong I can fix it, or add a feature myself.
If you followed some of my previous thoughts this is exactly what I'm doing with my budgeting app. All my data is private, I can fix bugs quickly, I can add features quickly, and it just works! I plan to continue iterating on these ideas of productivity boosters whenever possible. I find this quite fun, and I think I'm not using some of the tools I work with daily to their full capacity. Little by little I'll compile a list of things where I waste most of my time. Another example that I waited too long to do was putting together a simple JIRA board to keep track of everything that matters to me and my team in one place. I used to save the search filters as a favorite but now I can collapse most of them on one page (thank you Hai Kinh for the template!).
Thoughts
Be on the lookout for things you waste time on. Sometimes you get so used to the way you do things that you're blind to potential improvements. If you look at the time you waste doing a specific action that could be automated, then estimate the time to build that automation. If the time spent developing is less than how much you spend on that task over a quarter, then it's likely worth the effort to let a computer do it. I might push it a little further for the fun of it and start investigating existing tools hot tips, small scripting, and browser extensions that could make my life easier. As I write this I just thought about improvements over my current Gmail filters!