POWER-S
LIFE program
The Effective Productivity Quotient
There is a productivity constant shared by all human beings: we all have 24 hours to revolutionize a day. In these it is necessary to include the sleep time, which depends on each one, which leaves a certain number of residual hours in order to carry out our daily actions.
The effective productivity quotient, or QPE, corresponds to the useful part of the use of your daily, weekly, monthly time... The useful part is the time that you will invest in activities and actions that are linked to well-defined long-term goals, or to nurture values that are fundamental to you.
I have chosen to talk to you now about QPE because the whole point of a cognitive optimization method is to improve your performance, whether professional or personal. For example, if you go to an amusement park with your children, play regularly with them in the attractions while dedicating your total attention to your family (known as being totally present), your PEQ can be very high, because you create a bond with your family, which corresponds to a long-term objective, and to nurture a fundamental value. The same situation, but by spending your day checking your emails or on the phone, without being present for your family, and your QPE can be very low, even close to zero.
Each action, each activity can be evaluated, as we have already seen, according to its degree of importance and urgency, according to a simple grid called the Eisenhower matrix:
All your activities can thus be classified according to their degree of urgency and importance:
→ Urgent and important actions require immediate action and often cannot be delegated. Cardiac arrest is a good example of an urgent and important action in an emergency department, but the phone call from school telling you to pick up your son who has just been injured is also an example of urgent and important action. These perceptions are purely personal, and the degrees of urgency and importance you set may not match the other people who work with you (or live under your roof!).
→ Non-urgent and important actions are the foundation of your profitability and productivity. An important part of this training will allow you to define and above all to assume to orient yourself towards this type of action which will allow you to improve your professional and personal productivity, to increase your resilience, to put in place a cognitive optimization and personal development… At work, organizing your time between your different patients and integrating and planning complementary examinations are part of important and non-urgent activities. These actions are often interfered with by the important emergency actions (if a patient stops in shock, it is necessary to stop the examination of lumbar pain evolving for three months to ensure urgent care) but also and above all not important (the meeting, the administrative emergency … which we see below)
→ Actions that are not important but urgent are indeed often external requests, even emergencies felt by other people: “you can come and see my patient for five minutes”, “you can come and help me at the 5th, he did pee everywhere”, “can you look at the scan from ten days ago of this patient, we may have missed something”. This does not mean that these actions should not be performed, but not necessarily at the time of the request. We will see later that the attentional defocus causes a strong loss of efficiency, since it will take an effort of reconcentration to refocus on the task that we were performing at the time of the distraction. Learning to say “no” or “of course, come back to see me in X minutes” is essential for developing your assertiveness and, by rebound effect, your cognitive efficiency.
→ Actions that are neither important nor urgent are either counterproductive or oriented only towards your short-term pleasure and must therefore be carried out after having carried out your other actions planned for the day. They are very likely to distract you and lead you to procrastination. The use of social networks without the aim of improving its visibility is a good example. Training on social networks is not bad in itself, but when this activity occupies 20 to 50% of your waking time, your PEQ is greatly reduced. Learn to dedicate yourself to NUNI (Non-Urgent, Non-Important) activities only when you have finished your other important tasks (especially non-urgent ones). Your personal development habits sheet, which you will learn to fill in further, will allow you to fight against the procrastination effect linked to NUNI over-activity.
Your PEQ strongly depends on how you will use your energy during the day/week… Indeed, if we consider the following diagram:
Your actions can be divided into three groups:
→ Those that build value, i.e. that create added value for you or for others (or both at the same time)
→ Those that destroy value, generating harmful consequences and no added value. These are often actions that enrich either the reward system (smoking, drinking alcohol alone at night, etc.), or the ego (seeking revenge at all costs on a colleague by abandoning your own work, etc.)
→ Those which bring nothing, which have no consequences, which are called sterile actions (which does not necessarily mean that they are not useful in themselves, but not in the sense of a consequence to longer term).
You will discover in this training several techniques for developing your QPE, whether within an action, during your day, or applied over longer periods of time (weeks, months, etc.). It is interesting to do your work of evaluating your QPE within a working day: we often realize that many of our minutes are monopolized by parasitic actions, and that our attention constantly passes from one element to another, without really settling on the task at hand. As a consequence of our hyper-information society, attentional defocusing, partly linked to our telephone and the pop-ups linked to the arrival of emails on your screen, must at all costs be controlled in order to improve your efficiency and optimize your cognition.
