My 3 best and worst productivity habits

THE BEST HABITS

1. Getting everything out of my head and onto a trusted list.

I've changed my productivity apps several times over the years because I must absolutely trust that space. Regardless of the app, I've used this space to collect the items that are bouncing around in my head, causing anxiety, and making me feel like I have a lot more work than I probably actually do.

What I've tried over the years:

First, I tried two alternatives to OneNote that have been discontinued on the internet, and I forgot what they were called already. Syncing was slow and would screw up frequently, tagging tasks was impossible in one of them.

Evernote : I hate this thing. Complicated, and I don't see how it's supposed to work for tasks. So many shortcuts and typing and bells and whistles. AAACK.

Asana : Can't work offline, even using the iPhone app. Dealbreaker. Also you have to assign every task to yourself in order for it to show up in your actual task list on the left panel. Annoying.

Producteev : Great. Syncs offline. Fast, easy, reliable. Loved it, no complaints. But I did leave Producteev for something new...

TeamViz : Integrates Pomodoro and GTD(ish) principles. So far, so good. Will get into that later in the post.



2. When I get the nagging task out of my head and onto paper, I define it as a clear next action.

I've been practicing GTD (Getting Things Done) since I picked up David Allen's book, Getting Things Done about 3 years ago. Over the past three years, I have followed some parts of GTD consistently, and other parts I am less consistent with. What I have practiced consistently is defining my tasks as action items. An example would be instead of writing "write entrepreneurial finance paper"which is somewhat of a vaguely-defined, overwhelming to-do I would never start until the last minute, it would be broken down into manageable tasks I could take action immediately, such as "conduct research on the mobile gaming startups and identify comparables".


3. Pomodoro Technique

This is a new habit, but it is great for several reasons. Firstly, I tend to get deep into the zone and sometimes when I'm like this, I don't come "out" for hours. Sometimes I don't even know everything I had been doing. Interruptions during this time period make me very frustrated, and the people who want to interrupt me get impatient. Time flies during this time window, and I'm pretty sure it's productive, but I never stop to reflect on whether it is.

As prescribed in the Pomodoro Technique, I divide my work up in to 25 minute chunks of time with a 5 minute break in between. I have been trying this for 1 week, but I already love it. This system allows me to focus in short bursts, reflect on what I've been doing, address interruptions/calls/texts during breaks, and I tend to have a more sharpened focus during the 25 minute chunks.

TeamViz lets you keep track of tasks (off and online), and assign each task a # of pomodoros it will take to get done. When you click on the task, you start a timer for 25 minutes and off you go. it's not super GTD-friendly, but there's a lot of value in having a simple list without tags and labels for each tasks (for context).



My 3 Productivity Challenges:

1. I struggle to switch between work and play. 

I'm either full-heartedly in one or the other, but don't like switching back and forth between the two. I'll put off work if I'm having fun, and I'll skip out on fun things if I'm in the groove.

2. My daily goals are often not realistic.

When I was a kid, I used to organize my tasks well. I was able to accurately estimate how long it would take to get something done, make a schedule, and do it. In fact, nerdy Meg used to post said homework schedule on my door so my brothers knew when it was OK and not OK to bother me. This is in 4th grade.

Now, I do the same thing but somehow seem to think I can conquer the world in one night while also watching 2 episodes of a favorite TV show on the internet. The pomodoro is helping with that, though.

3. Email owns my attention.

I use a productivity tracker which I love called RescueTime, but one of its metrics makes me very depressed: how much time I spend on email. In a recent week, I logged 12 hours, or 21% of the time that I used my computer for work that week. I refuse to give that much of my day away to email.

I need advice here, and I need to make a change.

I use Unroll.Me to get me off of all those pesky newsletters, and to streamline the ones I care about into one daily email. That's a great start. Unroll.Me has helped me unsubscribe from over 430 newsletters. That is not a typo.

I see a few problems that I have with my email management.

i) I cannot stand having more than 10 emails in my inbox, no matter what I'm doing or working on. It causes me anxiety. This serves as a distraction, and I am letting my inbox tell me what to pay attention to.

ii) I'm highly responsive and I don't say no enough to requests, which I suspect actually causes more emails to keep coming in. Relative to those on the other end of the email, I tend to respond a little bit more quickly. Thankfully, Gmail Meter can tell me about my email behavior, such as my response time:

iii) I treat my inbox like a task list. Emails that take more than 2 minutes to respond to (a la GTD) stay in the inbox until addressed. I don't like the GTD principle of converting the email into a task and archiving it. Then I have to go find the email again to reply, and I might just forget to reply, ever. So, I've started to Boomerang emails that I can deal with on the weekend (Boomerang- have the email come back to my inbox in a few days), and I've started to Boomerang my replies to be delayed by 1/2-1 day in some cases.

iv) I check my email every time one comes in and I hear that "ding". FAIL.

v) I reply to everything. I see plenty of people never reply to emails, and I can guess that they get fewer emails and even less work/requests for favors/questions to be answered as a result. Perhaps it's time to start drawing some boundaries (and still be polite)!


I'm ready to make a change and I'm inspired by this HBS article to do it!

For the next 8 days, I am going to commit to the following changes and will report on how they go:

1) Determine my email budget - decrease my email daily usage from 21% to 15% on my RescueTime tracker. I am going to set a RescueTime alarm to go off after I've spent 1 hour on email each day.

2) Set boundaries around when to check my email - I will do my 1 hour of email from 5-6ish each day, and otherwise check it for urgent things once in the morning and once at lunch. If really necessary, I'll increase it.

3) I will use discipline to put longer tasks in the task list rather than tackling it to get my emails down to 10.

4) I'm going to try Sanebox and let you know how it goes.

5) and finally, I'm going to take advice from Simon Sinek and try to send fewer emails and talk to people more. Goal: 15 messages or fewer a day. We'll see how that goes.


Other advice welcome!!!!

Week 1 Oxford

Safari photos are coming soon. I haven't had time to sort through them!!!!



Week 1 of Trinity Term

• Classes:
• Political Economics - we learned about how GDP is calculated and relevant pitfalls; we learned about informal proxies for economic development and well-being such as how "lit up" a country is from the sky and garbage as a measurement of consumption
• Entrepreneurial Finance- we dove right into creating a capitalization table based on a case we read on a carbon trading company
• 8 Key Challenges for Social Entrepreneurs- Guest speaker Tim Smets from the Eden Project blew our minds with a radical way of approaching management and fearlessly pursuing BIG ideas
• Social Finance- coming up later this week
• Infrastructure- coming up later this week. This course is going to be amazing, I think.

• Extracurriculars:
• Lean LaunchPad : On a team that will be building a business my friend is starting (in real life!) that will tackle challenges with the vocational education system in Nicaragua over the course of the month of May, alongside workshops and training sessions
• World Economic Forum consulting project: Met with members from the WEF, the business school dean, our advisor, and the team to present our progress to-date. Meeting was insightful and interesting; the hard work begins now to finish our 3rd deliverable of 4. Some of us will present the deliverables in Geneva; others will attend a convening event in fall in Dubai.

• What else I'm doing with my "spare" time
• Finding an internship/consultancy position for the summer. Looking at options in east Africa, mainly. More to come very soon!
• Attended the Clarendon Lecture Series to hear Mauro Guillén, Director of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management & International Studies, speak on complexity and coupling as a model for understanding global systems
• Was invited to an intimate dinner with the Dean, Mauro Guillén, SBS professors, and staff from the Oxford University Press. Though the youngest in the room and the only student, I had some pretty Oxford-esque conversations with people that left the wheels turning in my head for awhile afterwards! Amazing. It is moments like this that remind me what a unique, special place Oxford truly is.

Wrapping up our Entrepreneurship Project

Much to review since returning from Nairobi!

• Entrepreneurship Project - Summary

In this project, we spent 2 weeks iterating a business idea using the Business Model Canvas, analyzing micro/macro market, industry and team strength and potential using frameworks found in John Mullins' The New Business Road Test. We then tested the assumptions behind our business model from various creative angles in order to develop a Minimum Viable Product. We then took our  MVP and built it into a pitch for a panel of venture capitalists.

Our business model started with a social issue that each person in my group was personally affected by- lack of employment opportunities for Tibetan refugees living in refugee communities in India.

I think our first pitfall was to fall into the trap of "needing to scale"- we automatically assumed that we had to design our model from the outset to be able to scale impact beyond the Tibetan refugee community. While thinking about scalability/replicability isn't necessarily wrong, I think by focusing too much on that idea we missed out on some great localized business models for employment generation/vocational training.

Our second pitfall was assuming we had to be a for-profit, which I think also caused us to miss out on some interesting potential non-profit or hybrid models. 

We moved away slightly from the unemployment issue, and decided instead to focus on Tibetan artisans (and, later, artisans from other low-income communities), who are often considered even by locals as a forgotten community. Artisans are being undercut by mass produced fakes being sold in China; and worse they are forced to go through middlemen to get their products on the streets. As a result, they lose out on significant margins.

We wanted to connect artisans to a global online e-commerce platform, and we knew this had been done before by non-profits for other communities/geographies. The models we had seen (with a few major exceptions), however, failed to reach a very large audience- their consumer base appeared to be very niche, referred by word-of-mouth and the limited marketing of their brick-and-mortar locations. 10,000 Villages, for example, e-commerce is the cheapest way to sell their items but yet they only sell a small portion of their items online. Other platforms, such as GlobeIn didn't vet and train artisans as carefully as we wanted to. We had developed a training package for artisans that would, over time, empower them to start and run an e-commerce business on their own- with the specific education about how to cater to market preferences (since they had been cut off from direct access to the market by middlemen). 

The specific market we wanted to target was the Etsy market, a market that has a knack for high-quality handmade goods. We wanted to basically create the platform and supply chain that could be potentially sold to Etsy to be included on their platform as the "social impact" side of their business.

In other words, we wanted to be what this is for Overstock.com. 

However, when I modeled our financial projections and ran scenarios (as an entity independent of Etsy), I realized the sheer scale required in order to be profitable (and attractive to equity investors). To produce enough to be profitable by year 3, we would have to make a risky assumption that our quality control, training, and supplier vetting/management processes would be replicable rapidly and that we could work with well over 100 artisans at a time. From talking to smaller-scale competing companies and non-profits, we knew that this would pose a major quality control challenge. To move forward, on-the-ground research and a pilot would be necessary in order to inform possible innovations to overcome this hurdle.

Overall, I thought it was a very educational experience and we had certainly selected a relatively challenging but fun idea to play around with. From a strategic point of view, we realized the importance of strategic product and service differentiation and also the unique challenge of competing with other e-commerce businesses for attention. 

Day 4: Acumen, Kilimo Salama, Chamber of Commerce

On Thursday, we met with Acumen and had the pleasure of deepening our understanding of their model and positioning through a case study of an actual investment in an East African country.

In East Africa (and in general) Acumen positions itself as an investment firm that has the ability to leverage capital for high-risk early-stage investments, as its capital is generated from charitable donations and investment returns, focusing on the agriculture, health and energy sectors.

In this way, it is similar to Kiva- tapping into a charitable giving market that wants to see their charity dollar recycled, and is, in addition to offering cash to invest, is donating philanthropic risk tolerance in the interest of seeing local market development as a result. 

Acumen invests where other investors don't, offering debt. equity or blended structures in an effort to make businesses attractive for future and larger investment. Debt exits have been generally successful, equity investments have seen troubled waters in terms of exits and Acumen is sometimes staying I these investments longer. With equity investments, the hope is that one of two things will happen: strategic sale or a commercial capital buy-out. They are considering alternatives to equity particularly for firms that are not able to take out debt, including structures with revenue or EBITDA share.

They are currently piloting a commercial fund of their own as well.

Their investment criteria include:

- ability to reach 1m people

- game changing idea in poverty alleviation

-  intention to be financial sustainability

- world-class team

We reviewed their investment Western Seed, discussing the due diligence we would want to do on the company before investing. Western Seed is a major seed producer for specific elevations in Kenya, producing a hybrid seed that can increase yield threefold. To learn more, go to Acumen's website www.Acumen.org .

Kilimo Salama

Kilimo Salama sells micro-insurance for weather for farmers, sold through farmer aggregates, coops, and companies that hire farmers. Using weather stations, they are able to track the weather and base premiums and payouts on current vs historical weather data. They are expanding their model across the continent.

An amazing company that uses the power of weather data, an expert actuarial team, and strategic partnerships to source and distribute livelihood-protecting insurance to clients.

Chamber of Commerce

A brief meeting with staff to share in a Q&A about exports/imports & trade, relations with neighboring countries, and Kenya's vision to become a developed nation by 2030.

We finished the day with dinner at Carnivore, a restaurant that serves as much exotic meat as you can eat. Fortunately the vegetarian meals were great, though you have to be careful as not all items on the veg menu are actually veg.

Fat cats roam around the restaurant making friends and looking for nibbles.

Day 3: One Acre Fund and IFC

On Wednesday, we visited One Acre Fund's new office, which was spacious, stylish and start-up-y complete with bean bag chairs. The are recruiting pretty aggressively and grownig fast in several counties, with a goal of supporting 6% of the 239m under-nourished farm families in Africa.

One Acre Fund targets the very BoP, farm families that are unable to produce enough to both sell and nourish themselves by providing training, access to critical inputs through micro loans, and access to market pipelines for increased production and profits.

Though structured as a non-profit, others in the local social enterprise space have high regard for OAF, who manages to self-sustain 70% of expenses and deliver effective, efficient services while operating on business principles.

Learn more here: http://vimeo.com/75982352

Next, we went to the International Finance Corporation to meet with representatives who shared with us what the IFC is doing in East Africa in terms of providing solutions in private sector development.

They aim to:

- promote open and competitive markets in developing countries

- generate jobs and deliver essential services

- support gaps tn the private sector value chains

- catalyze and mobilize other sources of finance for privet sector development

They are prioritizing:

- frontier markets

- long-term client relationships

- local finance markets

- climate change

- growth constraints attributable to limitations in areas such as infrastructure, health, education, and most importantly, agriculture/food value chain ($1.1b in investments in 2013 in the ag. sector)

IFC invests in a variety of companies, including MFIs (such as FINCA) and agriculture micro-insurance firms (such as Kilimo Salama) and also has a PE fund to provide expansion capital to SMEs.

A fascinating day, concluding with a happy hour with the local social enterprise community!

Day 2: Game-changers in education and mobile money management

This morning we started out our meetings by visiting Bridge Academies, a social enterprise that is re-inventing the way education is delivered in the classroom, providing a carefully-crafted standardized education to those who otherwise are unable to access it. 

On our walk to the building, we received friendly waves from some guys putting up a new billboard, piece by piece.

Today, we are dressed particularly formally given the nature of some our meetings (and cocktail event later tonight).

While sitting in this lovely classroom, we felt we were right back at SBS getting ready for class to begin.

Bridge teachers use a detailed curriculum script in schools that are simply built and located directly in slums. Bridge also does the construction themselves due to limitations so they are quite vertically integrated. Some stats on typical clients' households:

57% self-employed

95% mobile phone owners

50-50 male femal classroom breakdown

79% urban

Ages 3-12

Avg hh income: $1.23 per person per day

259 active academies in Kenya

Looking to expand to Nigeria and Uganda

The school building

We certainly had interesting discussions after the visit- and apparently Bridge is known to be polarizing. Education purists and others are concerned with a highly-structured nearly-scripted approach to teaching, others were concerned with the quality of the buildings and lack of lighting, particularly in contrast to the office itself which led to debates about for-profit education initiatives. Personally to be sold, I'd like to see more details on the financial model of the business and also the financial philosophy (would they subsidize tuition or not, are buildings cheaply-made to ensure affordability and access, who are the investors and what returns are they asking for, who is on the board, how is impact measured, etc). I just need a little more confidence in their social mission but I am impressed with what I saw of the curriculum and the degree of focus in the classrooms we observed. Anyways, more discussion on these questions warrant another blog entry but for now I will move on with the update.

Next we went to Safaricom, the largest telecoms company in Kenya (and is a Kenyan business) and they provide mobile money transfer services that are used by 80% of the entire Kenyan aut population - called M-PESA. M-PESA saves people tremendous amounts of time (and therefore money), and allows for financial inclusion on a massive scale allowing unbankable people access to insurance, MFI loans, cheap money transfer services, etc. M-PESA outpaces competition significantly and MPESA stations are as ubiquitous as CocaCola.

Some stats:

18.2m users

70k merchants using it for business to customer payment transfers, salary payment distribution, etc

Over 6m transactions daily

Without MPESA, only 23% if the population, rather than 80%, would be included in the formal economy 

Used by MFIs, social enterprises to facilitate ease of money transfer, reducing risk of transferring physical cash

Day 1- back to business school through Goldman Sachs, and back to cookstoves with Living Goods

We started the day having breakfast with the founder of AdPack, a plastics manufacturing company. He shared with us his journey of starting a manufacturing business in Kenya, celebrating his first year in operation. Fascinating to understand where reality and theory clash and support each other when studying business. It was also interesting to learn about the dynamics and benefits of operating a family business.

After breakfast, we made our way to the United States International University, a beautiful campus in Kenya. We visited the business school, where Goldman Sach's program 10,000 Women holds business courses for women who are running SME's. 

We were a few minutes early and had a moment to walk around the beautiful campus (and visit the bustling cafe)!

In class, we were warmly welcomed with introductions, tea, and enthusiastic conversation. There was no shyness in that classroom!!

After class, we were blessed by the class with a song and dance before we headed down to eat lunch with the women and continue to discuss what it has been like for them to grow their businesses. The women ran a variety of businesses, from hospitality, to food, to education, to advtertising.

We then rushed over to the office of Living Goods, situated in a particularly poor area of the city (so they can be accessible to their customers. This tall builiding was situated along a row of microfinance institutions, but amidst Kariobangi North, one of the poorest areas in the city. (I don't really like taking pictures of poverty unless there is a productive reason, but wanted to note that this building quality is an anomaly for the area).

Living Goods operates in Uganda and Kenya. In Uganda, Living Goods trains agents to market life-saving health products and medicines, and are carefully trained to use specific protocol to actually diognose and track (using mobile technology) the illnesses and conditions of their patients (and use SMS messages to remind them to take their medicine/treatment as prescribed). Due to regulatory restrictions in Kenya, the model is quite different and focuses on selling products beyond medical treatment included cookstoves, solar lanterns, sanitary napkins, etc. The Kenya office is new, and they are still experimenting with what the model should look like to maximize impact (though they are finding significant success already). 

I was thrilled to be re-united with cookstoves. They sell the Ecozoom cookstove among other types, and I was excited to hear that the Ecozoom stove is selling successfully and is highly popular despite the price (this was not our experience in Ghana). The stove on the left is the Jiko stove, upon which is what the Gyapa cookstove was modeled (where I used to work). Visit www.Gyapa.com if you are curious!