Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and I'm Helen Tupper and you're listening to the Squiggly Careers

Podcast. Each week we talk about a different topic to do with work and discuss practical

ideas and actions to help you develop in your career and be successful in this increasingly

squiggly world of work. And this week we're talking about how to get practical with your productivity. And so

productivity is a topic we've covered before. We did an episode with Graham Alcott, who is the

author of a really good book called Productivity Ninja. So if you're like, you're passionate about

productivity, definitely go and look at that and listen to that. I guess our recognition is that

people might not feel as

productive right now or it might feel like they are struggling with their motivation, struggling to

feel like ways of getting things done. It feels like we've been working in this slightly weird way

for quite a long time now and it just felt like the right time to share a couple of practical

ideas, things that we do, things that have inspired

us that other people do, just to help you with your productivity. And I think it's also maybe

just useful to reflect on what we mean when we talk about productivity. I was looking at a few

definitions, Sarah, and I thought you would hate them because it was all about like being efficient

and your inputs and

increasing your outputs. I know and I was like, well, that doesn't sound good anyway. And that's the

last thing that people need now is like, think about how you can increase your output. And so we are

talking about productivity in the context of getting the things that you want to get done done in the time that you want to

spend doing them. So this is about you and thinking about what is it that I want to get done

in a day and it's about you defining how long that day is. So it's not about some external

metric for how much stuff we should be producing in 24 hours is a very personal thing.

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