Maximize Your Productivity in Uncertain Times  🔗 **Source:** [Maximize Your Productivity in Uncertain Times](https://share.snipd.com/episode/2a8ba871-b4c8-43d2-ac72-fb51288c908a) ## Highlights - **Aim Beats Speed In Uncertain Times** - Uncertainty rewards aim more than speed. - Rachel Cooke argues when the road is murky, conserving energy and moving in the right direction beats doing more faster. Transcript: Rachel Cooke So when things get uncertain and resources get tight, our instinct is to speed up. But the real risk in uncertainty isn't moving too slow. It's moving too fast in the wrong direction and burning through energy we can't spare. Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, where we help leaders to work better by design. I'm speaking to a lot of organizations these days about how to move more effectively and productively through seasons of uncertainty, how to stay connected and build the playbooks And sustain the momentum. If your organization could use some clarity on this front, head over to leadabovenoise.com and learn more. So confession. Back in my 20s, I was that girl in the step aerobics class. And if you're somebody now in your 20s, just Google what step aerobics was. I was always upfront. I was jumping higher, kicking stronger, insert cringe. But yes, I wanted the world to know how hard I was working. The truth is I was exerting for sure, but I was also burning myself out like literally, but Hey, no pain, no gain. Right. And then over time, and thank goodness, I started learning more about exercising and exercising well. And what I discovered, at least for me, was that there were better, smarter, more efficient ways to get the same burn, if not better. For me, shorter bursts of intensity, building muscle through lifting, these were better ways. So I made swaps and my body responded in all the right ways. Work these days is feeling a little like the old school step aerobics. We are waiting in so much uncertainty. What's AI going to do to our jobs? Will the economy further constrain our resources? All the big questions. And we're pushing so hard to try to stay ahead of it. But all that pushing, is it wise? We need to be asking ourselves, like that girl in the step aerobics class, are we maximizing the burn or are we burning out? When the ground feels unsteady, when budgets are tighter and the path forward is murky, we tend to reach for the only definition of productivity that most of us were ever taught. Do more, go faster. Front row, biggest moves. But uncertainty doesn't reward effort. It rewards aim. When you can't see far down the road and you don't have energy to waste, the question stops being how fast can I move? And it becomes whether I'm moving in a direction that is actually worth it. ([Time 0:01:37](https://share.snipd.com/snip/d091c724-033d-4a09-9c00-572dabb1a31d)) - **Step Aerobics To Smarter Workouts** - Rachel shares her step aerobics past to illustrate overexertion. - She changed to shorter, smarter workouts like lifting, showing small strategic swaps can beat brute force effort. Transcript: Rachel Cooke So confession. Back in my 20s, I was that girl in the step aerobics class. And if you're somebody now in your 20s, just Google what step aerobics was. I was always upfront. I was jumping higher, kicking stronger, insert cringe. But yes, I wanted the world to know how hard I was working. The truth is I was exerting for sure, but I was also burning myself out like literally, but Hey, no pain, no gain. Right. And then over time, and thank goodness, I started learning more about exercising and exercising well. And what I discovered, at least for me, was that there were better, smarter, more efficient ways to get the same burn, if not better. For me, shorter bursts of intensity, building muscle through lifting, these were better ways. So I made swaps and my body responded in all the right ways. ([Time 0:02:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c276876c-8e21-4153-bdaf-4aa74c280837)) - **Define The Problem Before You Build** - Get crystal clear on the problem before building solutions. - Spend minutes defining what success looks like and failure signals to avoid weeks solving the wrong thing. Transcript: Rachel Cooke First, get clear on the problem before you chase the solution. There's a line I love often attributed to Albert Einstein, and whether he said it or not, here it is. If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. Look, I don't always love advice that fits on a bumper sticker, but I think the wisdom here really holds up. Even more so in a season of so much uncertainty, when everything is moving, the temptation is to act fast so you feel like you're making progress. But sprinting toward a problem that you haven't fully or clearly defined is how teams end up three weeks deep into solving the wrong thing. I mean, right now, for example, I'm working with multiple organizations that are striving to, quote, build AI into products or workflows. The teams get the direction and run. They've all got hands in the tools and they're tinkering and experimenting for hours at a time. But to what end? In most of these cases, the directives are coming from executive leaders who are responding to market pressures, demands from the board. But if pressed, what do they mean by building AI into workflows and products? Like for creating efficiency? For driving new value? For solving a problem? These are the questions we need to sit with and answer well in times of uncertainty. And if we spend 55 minutes getting clear and aligned, we can all use that final five minutes to do great work, such that our results are all pointing in a singular direction. So before you mobilize, get specific. What exactly are we solving? How will we know if we're right? What would tell us if we're on the wrong path? 10 minutes of that upfront can save you a month of beautifully executed effort aimed at the wrong target. ([Time 0:04:25](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4ca2fa5a-f45f-487d-bfec-f83d526bbe6e)) - **Make More Two Way Door Decisions** - Distinguish one-way doors from two-way doors and move faster on reversible choices. - For reversible decisions, act quickly, observe results, and reverse if needed to save deliberation energy. Transcript: Rachel Cooke Next, make more two-way door decisions. A lot of energy quietly disappears in a different place when we treat every decision like it's permanent. Jeff Bezos has a distinction between decisions that are truly permanent and those that aren't. Some decisions, as he describes it, are one-way doors, like you walk through and you can't come back. Like a reorg, for example. Companies these days are letting teams go, opting to automate their jobs with AI. But when those same companies realize that AI can't actually replicate the humans, it's too late. Those folks are long gone, in many cases employed elsewhere, and that decision is not reversible. But many decisions are two-way doors, totally reversible and therefore less catastrophic if we choose wrong. Like streamlining a process, you decide it takes too long to hire new talent. So you choose an open role you need to fill quickly, and you get permission to reduce the total number of interviews from eight down to four. You make the higher. If it pans out, great, new policy. And if it fails, you just bump back up to eight. Two-way door choices can and should be made faster, not without care or consideration, but in recognition that the consequences are not permanent or dire. It's the over-consideration that slows us down. And in times of uncertainty, so much just isn't knowable. So we need to make more imperfect calls. Make them faster, learn faster, choose to stay or reverse faster. So sort your decisions. If a call is reversible, make it quickly and watch what happens and adjust. Save your deliberation and your energy for the doors that don't swing both ways. ([Time 0:06:14](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e4e1f834-5683-4981-ac0f-9989b5e22ffb)) - **Glom On Work Already In Motion** - Look for existing momentum before starting from scratch. - Rachel Cooke warns teams often duplicate work and recommends borrowing or extending internal projects to save hours. Transcript: Rachel Cooke Next, glom on what's already in motion. When resources are tight, the fastest way to burn productivity is to start from a blank page. And sometimes we have no choice. But always, we should check before we assume. Somewhere in your organization, someone has probably already built a version of the thing you need. Or has a project in flight. Or is in a conversation with a relevant customer or vendor. Or is even in the exploring stages of a new tech or tool that could suit you. Point is, always take a minute to scour the landscape before you open a blank dock. In uncertainty, your job isn't to invent more. It's to find the momentum that already exists and add to it. This may take a little ego management. Borrowing someone else's framework doesn't feel as exciting as building your own, but you're not optimizing to impress right now. You're optimizing for impact, unlimited fuel. One of my clients had two teams discover months in that they'd each built nearly identical customer dashboards, same data, two sets of hands, double the hours. The fix going forward was almost embarrassingly simple. Before you build, ask around, who's touched this already? What can I borrow or extend instead of starting clean? Build on what's already moving and you cover a lot more ground for a lot less push. ([Time 0:09:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4d5d4f48-31bc-4865-8ae3-4ab8ac1aa7cb)) - **Two Teams Built The Same Dashboard** - A client had two teams build identical customer dashboards independently. - The duplication cost months; the simple fix was to ask who had touched it before building anew. Transcript: Rachel Cooke In uncertainty, your job isn't to invent more. It's to find the momentum that already exists and add to it. This may take a little ego management. Borrowing someone else's framework doesn't feel as exciting as building your own, but you're not optimizing to impress right now. You're optimizing for impact, unlimited fuel. One of my clients had two teams discover months in that they'd each built nearly identical customer dashboards, same data, two sets of hands, double the hours. The fix going forward was almost embarrassingly simple. Before you build, ask around, who's touched this already? What can I borrow or extend instead of starting clean? Build on what's already moving and you cover a lot more ground for a lot less push. ([Time 0:10:20](https://share.snipd.com/snip/0e18ca1a-ba3d-4b64-80a4-8b7c2f6c3876)) - **Turn Individual Learning Into Shared Memory** - Curate and share learnings as a team with small rituals. - Use a 15-minute weekly sync or shared doc so individual AI experiments and lessons become collective intelligence. Transcript: Rachel Cooke Next, curate what you're learning together. In uncertain times, everyone is learning fast, sometimes on purpose, like TED Talks and podcasts, sometimes by accident, like, whoops, I should do that differently next time. Problem is that almost all of that learning stays stuck in the head of whoever learned it. One person figures out a thing and the person three desks over learns it again the hard way next month. Multiply that across a team and you're paying for the same lesson over and over. A client said this to me recently, we're all learning so much individually about AI, but we have no way to pull it, to track what's working and what isn't. So we keep making decisions from scratch instead of from everything we already know. You don't need a fancy system. You need a habit, a weekly standing 15 minute meeting or a shared doc where people drop what they tried and what happened. The goal is to turn scattered individual insights into shared intelligence you can actually draw on. When the environment is uncertain, your collective memory is one of the few real advantages you've got. So curated on purpose. ([Time 0:11:06](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4c8da273-a817-4c41-963b-e339134743d2)) - **Evaluate Decision Quality Not Just Outcomes** - Judge decisions by process, not outcome to avoid 'resulting'. - Annie Duke's resulting trap makes teams reward luck and punish sound reasoning; evaluate whether the call was sensible given available info. Transcript: Rachel Cooke And finally, judge your decisions by how you made them, not by how they turned out. This one might be the most important, but also the hardest when things are uncertain. Annie Duke, the famous poker player turned decision expert, has a name for a trap we all fall into. She calls it resulting, and it's judging the quality of a decision purely by how it turned out. Good outcome, good decision. Bad outcome, bad decision. Problem is that logic only works in a predictable world, and uncertainty is the opposite of predictable. When there's a lot of luck and a lot of unknowns in the mix, a smart, well-reasoned decision can still turn out badly, and a sloppy one can get you lucky. If you only grade yourself on outcomes, you'll learn exactly the wrong lessons. You'll punish good thinking that got unlucky and reward bad thinking that just happened to work. Like, you choose not to wear a seatbelt 99 times and you arrive safely, luckily, at your destination each time. The one time you wear the seatbelt, someone else runs a light and you get hit. Annie's point here is wearing the seatbelt is still the right decision, even if the outcome was a bummer. So shift what you evaluate. After a decision plays out, ask a better question than whether it worked. Ask, given what we knew at the time, that a good call? Did we define the problem and weigh the trade-offs and decide at the right speed? When you judge the process, you build a team that makes better and better decisions over time, no matter how any single roll of the dice lands. ([Time 0:12:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/a6c20377-ab3a-4bf2-b97d-2f6f931b6167))