The 3 Most Important Mental Models for Improving Your Work and Productivity
If you’re subscribed to Farnham Street or have read any of Charlie Mungers’ work, you’ll know what I mean when I say Mental Model. If you’re not familiar with the term ‘mental models’ then the easiest way to describe them is that they are frameworks or principles that help us better understand the word we live in and therefore we make better decisions.
A quick example of a mental model is ‘Inversion’. Let’s say your trying to build a website for your business and you don’t know where to start. Inversion suggests that instead of listing all the things you need for a good website, simply list all the things that make a bad website and avoid them. The result, you have a good website.
Mental Models are a great way to approach decision making and problem solving. They give you a solid foundation from which you can approach almost any task. The only problem is there are 100’s of mental models available to us and it’s hard to know which mental model to use and when to use them. To narrow that decision down I’ve come up with what I think are the 3 most important mental models for improving your work and productivity.
1. The Eisenhower Matrix
The Eisenhower matrix is a simple of way of prioritising tasks. The vertical axis measures importance and the horizontal access measures urgency. I use ‘measure’ loosely as it is a subjective measure but we’ll talk about this later.
Top left is Important-Urgent. These are the things we need to do now. They go to the top of your list and become your immediate priority.
Example: Finishing the presentation you have to give tomorrow at work.
Top right is Important-Not Urgent. For these tasks we schedule them in as soon as possible. We know they need to be done but we have time at a later date to do them.
Example: Going to the gym.
Bottom left is Not important-Urgent. These are things that we will delegate. Example: Sending out a meeting invite
Bottom right is Not important-Not Urgent. Simply get rid of these tasks. Example: Watching the 5th episode in a row of your favourite Netflix series.
The issue we all have with this matrix is deciding how urgent a task is. A good rule of thumb is for this is to use deadlines and consequences. When assigning urgency to a task, first look at the deadline and then ask ‘what are the consequences of not hitting the deadline?’. Don’t over exaggerate them. Your co-worker might have asked for something by 5pm but the consequences of not meeting that deadline might be minimal.
2. Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” — Cyril Northcote Parkinson
Simply put Parkinson’s Law says that if you give yourself 1 hour to complete a task, it’ll take an hour, give yourself 3 hours for the same task it’ll take 3 hours to complete.
We’ve all been there, you’ve been given a deadline 6 weeks from now and you spend the whole 6 weeks tweaking and perfecting the project and give yourself a tap on the back for all your hard work once it’s done. We’ve also experienced someone throwing a project at you with a deadline 48 hours from now. Notice how we still manage to get it done and with little to no impact on result. Thats because reducing the time we spend on a task helps us focus on only the things that are really important, it stops us focusing and tweaking the minute details that have no real impact on our quality of work.
I do have a couple of suggestions when using this mental model. Firstly, be realistic, you’re unlikely to be able to produce a 12,000 word report in 10 minutes. The second suggestion is slightly at odds with Parkinson’s law, assign slightly more time than you think is needed. Assigning 1 hour to complete a presentation is in line with Parkinson’s Law but the first 15 minutes of that are going to be filled with setting up, getting comfortable and focusing. I like to give myself an extra 15 minute buffer (and no more) for tasks. So if I am sitting down to write an article and I think it’ll take me 1 hour, I’ll block out 1 hour 15 minutes.
3. Pareto’s 80/20 Principle
Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist, is accredited with founding what we now call the 80/20 principle. It started as an observation of income distribution, where 80% of the wealth in Italy was held by 20% of its citizens and has since been applied to almost every area of life.
The benefit of the 80/20 principle for improving your work and productivity is that it will help you to focus on what’s most important.
The 80/20 principle in the context of work suggests that 20% of the work you do produces 80% of the results you achieve. It’s worth noting that it isn’t always 80/20 it may be 90/10, 70/30, but the overarching message is that a small % of your inputs will produce a disproportionate % of the outputs. All you have to do is find out what those 20% of inputs are for you and focus on working on them.
If you apply these 3 mental models to your working life consistently, you’ll likely reduce the amount of time it takes to get things done and improve the quality of your work.
