Productivity Habits of Successful Business Leaders

Productivity has become one of the highly discussed and yet least clear terms in business. For a lot of people, busyness only means having tight schedules, replying emails at speed, and other hectic activities which demonstrate a person is really dedicated. Though, the business leaders who bring the most excellent results to the table almost never run around. These are the people who take things very slowly. The leaders, through the method of learning by doing and honest reflection, have constructed a unique set of habits and work systems that safeguard their most cherished asset, their attention, from the distractions that could fragment it, and they also concentrate the attention on the right jobs that really get things done. These habits were not passed down and are the hard work and refinement of these people themselves, in fact, the same way that they have led their companies.

They Guard Their Most Productive Hours

There comes a time of day when most people are at their best cognitively, when they are thinking the clearest, their concentration deepest and their work of the highest quality. For most people this time is in the morning, while for the others it may be the evening hours. Business leaders who are successful know precisely when their window of productivity opens and they will protect it with all life. They won’t give away their best hours to meetings, emails and administrative duties which could be dealt with equally well at other times.

Rather, they are left for work that needs most thinking processes from the brain: long-term planning, creative problem-solving, major writing projects and the decision-making processes with a major impact which will guide the company’s path. As an example, Jeff Bezos wrote about having his most stressful meetings and decision making sessions right after the awakening hour and keeping that part of his time for the spontaneous requests which are a day-to-day thing on a manager’s job. Allocating the work which is most important to the times when one is the most productive is probably one of the best habits a leader could take up.

They Start Each Day with Purpose

The most consistently successful leaders don’t begin their workday by opening their email inbox and letting other people’s priorities set the agenda for the next eight hours. They start with intention—with a clear, preset idea of what the one, two, or three most important things they actually need to get done that day are. This practice, sometimes called the MIT—Most Important Task—approach, ensures that no matter what the day throws at them, the things that matter most get done first—rather than continually being displaced by the urgent but less important demands that fill every executive’s day. The daily practice of starting with importance instead of urgency is what makes it practical and not theoretical . It is one of the most important distinctions a leader can make .

They are experts at saying no

Time is limited, and each commitment a leader makes is a commitment to something else. The leaders who deliver the most meaningful output are the ones who have cultivated the judgment to differentiate requests that deserve their time from those that don’t, and the discipline to say no to the latter without guilt or over-justification. “The difference between the successful and the very successful,” said Warren Buffett, “is that the very successful learn to say no to almost everything.” This is not a counsel of selfishness or indifference to others — it is a recognition that the most valuable thing a leader can offer the world is his or her best and most focused work, and that scattered, over-committed attention produces a diminished version of that work across too many fronts at once.

Deep Work – Batch and Guard

The most fatal enemy of productive leadership is fragmented attention. Each interruption – each notification, each dropped-in question, each meeting that could have been an email – takes time to deal with and also a cognitive recovery cost that research shows can take twenty minutes or longer to regain full concentration. Successful leaders combat this fragmentation by batching—grouping like tasks into dedicated blocks of time—and by guarding long periods of uninterrupted focus for their most demanding work. Cal Newport’s concept of deep work – the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks – is not just a theoretical ideal among the most successful leaders. This is an everyday operational practice safeguarded by clear scheduling, closed doors, silenced phones and straightforward communication to teams that certain hours are not available for interruption.

They Delegate Without Mercy and Methodically

The most productive leaders aren’t the most productive. They are the ones who get the most done, and that requires a disciplined transfer of responsibility to the people around you. It is not passing on tasks with vague directions and little help. It’s the deliberate matching up of the work that doesn’t need the special skills of the leader, finding the right person to do it and giving that person the context, the authority and the accountability structure that person needs to succeed. Leaders who find it difficult to delegate – who hang on to work as a matter of habit, perfectionism or unwillingness to expose others to the risk of failure – create bottlenecks that limit the organisation’s capacity to the constraints of one individual. Systematic delegation multiplies the capability of the whole team by the effective output of leaders.

They Work as Much as They Invest in Recovery

Maximum hours do not equal high sustained performance. It comes from disciplined management of energy — through sufficient sleep, regular physical exercise, real time away from work, and the kind of restorative leisure that restores the cognitive and emotional reserves intensive work depletes. Most productive leaders see sleep as an un-bendable input to performance, not something to be compressed under pressure.

Arianna Huffington’s very public burnout and subsequent advocacy for sleep, Satya Nadella’s daily mindfulness practice, and Barack Obama’s commitment to daily exercise regardless of schedule pressure are all expressions of the same understanding: the quality of a leader’s thinking and decision-making is a direct function of the quality of their recovery. The leader who chronically under-recovers, is not working harder. They work in an increasingly degraded state that makes whatever they do less effective.

They review, reflect and adjust on a continuous basis.

The most effective of business leaders are not those that ‘get it right the first time’. They are the ones who honestly look at their performance, see what is and isn’t working, and adjust their habits and systems accordingly. All of the world’s most effective leaders and executives have one thing in common: the weekly review. It’s a special time to get out of the weeds and evaluate progress toward goals, clear your plate of outstanding commitments, and set priorities for the week ahead. It offers the view of continual execution preventing and the early warning of drift allowing correction before small deviations become serious problems.

At its most advanced, productivity is not cramming more into the same hours. It’s about channeling the right energy to the right things at the right times, protecting that channel with disciplined habits, and recovering well enough to keep doing it day after day. That’s a behavior, not a personality trait—and it’s there for the taking for anyone willing to build it.