The Write Way to Sustainable Productivity
I used to handwrite my thank-you notes when I got gifts for my birthday or Christmas. However, my handwriting is pretty brutal (it’s been compared to both doctors and Arabic) and my audience couldn’t read them. Instead, I began typing out a thank-you letter to share a little about what I was doing in addition to what I planned to do with the lovely gift.
This was all before researchers discovered that there is a tactile relationship between your brain and your hand when you’re writing by hand. You remember things better when handwriting compared to typing, which provides no benefit other than speed.
Having said that, do I always write by hand? Absolutely not.
But do I handwrite certain things? Absolutely.
January 23 is National Handwriting Day. If you’re a business owner who doesn’t have enough hours in the day, there are times when you need to go slow (handwrite) in order to speed up (sustainably increase the amount of important work you accomplish each day).
Tech and speed aren’t always bad for improving productivity…
You might or might not remember the Rolodex. That was the customer relationship management (CRM) system available in the late last century (hee hee).
If you’ve seen the movie When Harry Met Sally by the late Rob Reiner, you might remember the scene where the late Carrie Fisher was trying to find men to set Meg Ryan up with. Fisher’s character was thumbing through a Rolodex. When told that one of the men she came up with was married, she looked disappointed and folded down one corner of the card before replacing it in her Rolodex, clearly a system she had for identifying married men.
Most people, however, used it for business. It was set up alphabetically, and you had a little sheet of paper for each contact. If you had someone’s business card, you could just tape it to a Rolodex card. Or you could write down all the info you wanted on the card directly.
Although this system was helpful when you needed to telephone someone, there were no reports that came with it. The Rolodex just sat on your desk until you needed to look someone up. There was no quick way to identify which of your clients had a birthday in any given month, for example.
Your CRM app (if you’re an entrepreneur and don’t have one yet, go get one) sorts your contacts for you and you can run reports, such as who you haven’t spoken to in the last few months and who has January birthdays.
You can put contacts in different categories, attach your meeting notes, send emails that will be recorded in your CRM, generate birthday or special day notifications, and a whole host of other things that are impossible with a Rolodex.
While there are old-school, 20th century (snicker) processes and methods that still give you an advantage over 21st century tech, the Rolodex is not one of them. I can’t think of a single way in which the Rolodex is better than a free CRM.
Which is all to say that yes, sometimes tech really is better than the 20th century equivalent. I definitely put CRM and bookkeeping software in that category. I would also put “social” media scheduling apps in this category, except of course we didn’t have “social” media back then. But it’s speed and convenience that helps you out without a lot of downside.
…but sometimes going slow improves productivity
We’re working with human brains that have evolved over several hundred thousand years, most of those being spent in small tribes where we knew everyone very well. The Industrial Revolution was only about three hundred years ago. Businesses have been operating mostly on computers for less than fifty years, and we’ve had widespread Internet businesses for about twenty-five, plus or minus.
In the grand scheme of things, the way we now do business is almost a blink of an eye compared to how long humans have been around. And that, my droogie, is why sometimes slowing down is better. Slowing down means you’re operating at the same speed as your brain, more or less.
Not for nothing, but just because we have been working at a breakneck pace to try to compute with the same speed as a computer – impossible task – that leads to high rates of burnout doesn’t mean we have to keep working like this. Just saying.
A few years ago, you might have taken notes by typing them on your computer. Now, of course, AI note-taking apps have sprouted like poison mushrooms. Maybe you also type out your to-dos for the next day, or send yourself an email to remind yourself to do something.
And you’re wondering why all your meetings seem to blend together, and why you wake up in the middle of the night remembering something you forgot to do, or something important that you want to work on the next day.
When you want to get down to business and focus, because someone who writes about productivity recommended it as the best way to get $hit done, you find all these other tasks that need doing. Or you can’t help but recall the excruciating conversation you had with a client, and find focus is all but impossible.
The tech you’re using is the problem. To be fair, your meetings might also be blending together because you’re not scheduling a 10-15 minute break after each one to collect yourself.
Use your calendar well and block off a 10-15 minute regroup break after each meeting. That will cut down on the number of meetings you can have each day, but how many of them are necessary in the first place?
The bigger fix is to handwrite certain things. When you’re in a meeting, you might want to continue with an AI note-taking app which can capture the to-dos and assignments for everyone to see. But you can also write notes by hand for ideas you want to remember, especially those that come up for you during a discussion that you don’t talk about in the meeting.
One of the many, many, many, many, MANY differences between human brains and computers is that computers don’t think or have memories. The human brain likes closure. So if there’s something that you need to do but didn’t get done, your brain is always ready to remind you that you need to get it done.
The problem is that your Very Helpful Brain might remind you at three am when you have an important client meeting at eight am. Or at other random and inconvenient times during the day. Remember, the human brain doesn’t automatically have a good feel for what “workday” means, because we spent hundreds of thousands of years not having any.
The good news is that it’s actually really easy to convince your brain that it has closure on tasks and activities. And that is… you guessed it… writing it down. By hand.
Typing a list of activities somewhere doesn’t achieve that, because there’s no connection the way there is when you write. Same with speaking to a voice recorder, like the one on your phone. Neither of these will give your brain the closure that it wants.
Handwriting is also extremely helpful when you want to focus on one important task. Cognitive offloading helps free up your brain for focus. Again, typing/recording these items is a waste of time.
When you write down all the stuff that’s floating around your mind – activities to do, ideas that have come to you, your annoyance because your coffee came with hazelnut creamer instead of the vanilla you specifically asked for – your brain recognizes all these as being handled.
Then you can shine the bright light of your attention on the important task.
Slowing down some processes improves effectiveness and recovery
The human brain didn’t evolve for the technology we have in the 21st century. The vast majority of our time as Homo sapiens was spent hanging out with the tribe, or scavenging, hunting, and gathering food. We did a lot of physical exercise, and we spent quite a bit of time outside.
Back then human brains didn’t need to focus for hours and hours at a time. You probably wanted to be focused while you and your pals were out hunting for food, but that was in short bursts and not a long duration of sustained concentration.
And mostly you did one thing at a time, because that was all that was necessary. After you got enough food, you could relax with your tribe. There was no reason to try to combine hunting with, say, making cave art. There was enough time to accomplish the important things like making shelter and getting food and still enjoy family and friends.
If you’ve ever trained for a triathlon or marathon, or you’re a serious weightlifter, then you’re probably familiar with the term active recovery. Those are days when you don’t go hard or long. You might crosstrain, or walk instead of run. But you don’t just sit in a chair and binge on streaming shows. Your body needs some downtime, but not to be “turned off” completely.
Your brain never shuts off, because when it does, you’re dead. But consciousness is shut down every night while you sleep to allow your body and mind to do some repair work, encode learning, flush out waste, and a bunch of other tasks that can’t be done when you’re awake and take 7 to 8 hours to complete.
When you think about what you do during the day, your brain is doing a lot. Making decisions, strategizing, dealing with numbers, and other difficult concepts that other animals don’t. Your brain needs some rest, but like your body when you’re training, it needs active recovery – not passively watching streaming shows all the time.
What’s active recovery for your brain? Things like hobbies, making art, playing an instrument. Talking to friends and family. Maybe participating in a sport or taking dance lessons. No screens, no “social” media. The more active recovery you get, the better your sleep. Which is key for making smart decisions about your business.
Computers don’t sleep, but we do. Having a good nighttime routine can help you prime yourself for a good night’s sleep. Do some cognitive offloading and write down everything that’s on your mind. That’ll help prevent you from getting up at night (unless, like me, you need a bathroom run – but that’s a different story!
Recap (tl;dr):
Tech can both help and hurt when it comes to sustainable productivity. Our brains evolved in a non-tech environment, and paying attention to your brain’s needs will help you improve productivity.
For the new year, I’m offering a 12-week program to entrepreneurial women to help them work more effectively and thrive without burnout. For more information, see what’s cooking here.
Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash.