The Serum Inside Productivity Injection
What’s the story, morning glory? I haven’t had a linear career by any means, and when I explain that I’m a productivity consultant, people always want to know how I got here. It’s been a long and winding road…
Working my way through corporate America
You might be surprised to know that my undergraduate degree is in physics. (Let me just say people who claim to know how quantum mechanics works by definition have absolutely no idea. Deepak Chopra and other so-called gurus may talk about it, but they don’t have a clue.)
I knew I wouldn’t use the degree once I graduated - the two options are pretty much teaching and working in a lab, neither of which I wanted to do. A few years later I decided to go to business school and get my MBA, which got me started in finance.
Random careers I have had before launching my own business:
Analyst in a private bank
Client management for a mutual fund software and consulting company
Financial consultant for a safety consulting firm (I earned my Six Sigma green belt here)
Implementation consultant for fixed income software company
Financial advisor at an insurance firm, then a regional advisory firm
Financial planner at a wealth management firm
Not all of the companies I worked for were corporate or had corporation-style culture, but some of them did. I’ve worked with some great people and some not-so-great people, was a good fit for some (typically the less corporate types) and really, really bad for others. When my last gig at the wealth management firm ended, I decided to go out on my own.
Business #1 and mistake #1
At my last firm I became a certified divorce financial planner (CDFA) and so I decided I would open my own business as a fee-only divorce planner. Many CDFAs are also money managers, but I knew I didn’t want to run money. I figured I could make some money, and I was competent at it, AND I could genuinely help people. Great idea!
It took me a while to get there, but I finally started working with some family law attorneys and was earning decent money. But then I ran into a big problem.
My heart wasn’t in it.
Most people who do the work have personal experience with financial devastation after divorce: either it happened to them or a family member (often their mom). My parents never divorced and I’ve never been married, so even though I enjoyed helping people, I didn’t enjoy the work. I wrote a book about it so people could at least have access to the information and wound the business down.
Business #2: ghostwriting
At that point, even though I still had my CFP and CDFA credentials, I was done with financial planning. What now? I went back to one of my original loves: writing.
Yes, you can be a highly analytical person and still enjoy writing and other creative arts. I wrote all the time as a kid, but when I was in high school and college (and later) I didn’t think I could make a living at it.
But I always enjoyed it. So even when I was hip-deep in corporate America and wearing my little suits and my Brooks Brothers non-iron shirts (I was in NYC in the 90s and we all wore suits back then) I kept writing on the side. I took the occasional class or workshop or joined a group here and there.
But in this century (!), there were more writing gigs to be had: freelancing, working on financial websites, ghostwriting articles and blog posts and eventually books. I have three books under my own name on Amazon, but I’ve ghostwritten many more. Mostly on finance and money-related topics, but also on project management, business leadership, psychology, etc.
I still do ghostwriting for the right clients, even though I’ve also launched Productivity Injection. I am a very productive writer, and I can get a massive amount of word count done in a short period of time. I don’t even know how to type.
That’s partly because I have always worked with my brain, which means I don’t work like a lot of other people. And it wasn’t until I discovered more about neuroscience that I understood why I’m so productive.
Business #3: Productivity Injection!
It may seem like I took a hard turn from writing to productivity, but the secret is in my extremely non-linear finance career. I did (relatively) unusual jobs but gained some weird skills along the way.
Also I am a nerd, and apparently on the autistic spectrum. If you met me in person you might not know, at least not in the first half hour. I’m pretty good at masking it, at least at first.
Right now I have two major offerings in my business, though I’m in the process of rolling out a couple more over the next year: a ½ day workshop and a 6-week consulting engagement. They’re based on neuroscience, because productivity begins in the brain.
However, in the consulting arm, there are often a lot of systems and processes that need to be worked out for the whole staff to be productive.
And yes, this actually does tie back to both finance and my writing work. I have always looked for the system or the framework to explain what’s going on. I always want to know: how does this work? And not at a superficial level, but how the entire thing works. Whatever the “thing” is.
She blinded me with science!
Even though my degree is in physics, I’ve always been fascinated by brains. I ended up doing a lot of research for some of the books I was ghostwriting and discovered a lot about how the human brain evolved.
The simple answer to why people are so distracted and have a hard time getting their work done is that our brain hardware developed in an extremely different set of circumstances about 100,000 years ago and we’re running 21st-century software on it.
Some lack of productivity is uniquely 1980s-era American. It’s this idea of burning yourself out to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, while a rapidly narrowing slice of the people (less than 1%) accrues wealth. There are plenty of organizations and companies and people who benefit from the constant distraction they foist on the rest of us.
You have to ignore that programming to be productive. I’ve never allowed my cellphone to interrupt my life or my work. One company paid for a cellphone, so I got a separate work one from my personal one. Then I wouldn’t have to deal with it on weekends or after work.
Look, it was financial planning or writing, not rocket surgery (!) - no one needs me urgently when the markets are closed. I’ve always done my best to avoid interruptions - if I’m in the middle of something that’s complex, like a piece of writing or a financial plan, your question or problem can wait. Needless to say, that didn’t necessarily make me popular, but I sure got my work done.
I also discovered the best time of the day for me to work. This is based on sleep chronotype, and yep, I’m a bear. I can actually quantify this when I’m writing: when I’m in my focus time, I can write 2,000-2,500 words an hour, and a few times I’ve written 3,000. That’s a lot. Don’t try that at home, kids. But when I’m outside that time? About 1500 words.
I focus on doing one thing at a time. You can imagine my glee when I found out that “multitasking”, or doing two or more things at once, is a myth. (The brain just switches back and forth between tasks very fast, so people think they’re multitasking … but they’re not.) This also means I can go longer because my brain isn’t dead tired from switching back and forth.
Distractions are tiring and eat into your productivity. There are good times for people to do cognitively demanding (or what I like to call “thinky”) work, good times to sleep, good times to check emails and call people, etc. That’s how the brain works.
My half day interactive workshop is about the basics of brain management. Attendees find out why the brain is so important and how to work with theirs to find their ideal schedules, how to block their calendars, and how to prioritize.
Software
In my finance career, I worked with a couple of software firms. I am very comfortable with software whether it’s something I’ve used or not. I think a lot of people are somehow worried that they’ll “break” the software, or they don’t know where to look for what they need.
Modern software has a logic to it, and once you understand the logic you know where to look. Also, the underlying logic tends to be pretty similar, no matter what industry you’re in.
Sometimes businesses are less productive simply because they’re using spreadsheets instead of software. Look, I love spreadsheets and I still use them for certain tasks. (In fact, I even had a favorite spreadsheet program that was NOT Microsoft Excel. Quattro Pro was SO much better, you guys.)
But you have the problem of manual entry, which is easy to mess up; data that could be stale; and the difficulty of reporting. Most software for whatever you need has standard industry reporting, so you shouldn’t need many spreadsheets for your business.
I run into two main issues when I look at business systems: too much software or not enough. Sometimes there are so many platforms that team members spend more time updating their systems than solving problems. Or whoever bought them wanted to have really best-of-breed for each task, instead of buying one or two good-enough software applications where people could do most of their work.
Or they’re on spreadsheets.
Many problems are due, at least partly, to technology in some way. Which makes people believe that the answer is more technology, and most of the time it really isn’t. You don’t solve a problem like distraction by adding more apps to your phone.
Consulting
In the consulting engagement we look at the productivity gaps. It’s usually a mix of systems and people, including management that doesn’t take into account the brain because they don’t understand how it works when it comes to productivity either.
That’s where my Six Sigma green belt (and project management books) come in: assessing the gaps, mapping the current state, and then mapping the ideal state. Then figuring out how to get from here to there. Which sounds pretty simple, but it’s not always easy.
Mistake(s)
When I started my first business, I did think that if I built it they would come. I found out pretty quickly that was wrong! But in business #1, once I realized I really did need to start marketing, it was easy for me to identify the people who could bring me business: family law attorneys.
In the writing business, people are looking for writers. There are platforms where you can look for work, so I wasn’t doing as much marketing but I was still able to find projects.
The productivity gig has been more difficult as far as marketing for me. I didn’t originally know exactly who I was targeting, or where they hung out. Networking has also been tough for me.
I made a big mistake by paying thousands of dollars to someone who knows what she’s talking about but wasn’t the right consultant for my business. She gave me a tagline that didn’t really fit the business I was working on, and as a result I did not make back my investment with her… which was EXTREMELY disappointing.
Which isn’t to say I’ll never hire another marketing consultant again. But I will be more careful about what I need and whether they can deliver it.
It’s been a bit of a wild ride! I am not one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason or that I am “where I’m supposed to be” because I also don’t believe there’s a plan. But that’s okay because I have a mission to grind out hustle-and-grind culture and help people be happier with their lives. And for me that is a good place to be.
Recap:
It’s been a journey to get to where I am now. Although it may seem strange that I went from physics to finance to writing to productivity, there’s actually a throughline there. If you’re someone who’s had a pretty nonlinear career, don’t worry, it’s A-OK. Now go on out there and recharge yourself so you can be more productive!