Thriving in the 1099 Nation

Let's get down to business ... As a part of the 1099 nation, nobody is paying you a salary to attend meetings and listen to the group Executive drone on about how smart they are.

The 1099 nation is about results - Strong results produced rapidly and repeatedly. To do this, we will need to build and execute a rigorous discipline of productive habits.

Please note that being productive and being busy are not the same thing ... not remotely.

Productive habits start and end with the ability to manage distractions and invest focused time in the precise activities that produce and grow profits for your business.

According to a study published by The Washington Post, the average office worker is interrupted once every three minutes and it takes 23 minutes to re-focus after the interruption. The net result of all this is an extremely low effective rate of productive effort. Despite all this, people are more distracted than ever and perpetually self-deluded about their ability to 'deal with it' in an effective manner.

As we climb up the career ladder, the rate of distractions increases and so does the self-delusion. The more people you manage, the more they will come to distract you. In turn, it is most likely you will consistently and repeatedly distract them. This results in both of your attention being diverted from the productive output that generates profits. (Feel free to substitute the word 'value' in a corporate environment where most employees are distanced from profits by multiple degrees of separation)

The problem is that every time you answer an email, forward a message, tell somebody else to take action or attend an update meeting it feels like progress has been made.

Progress toward what?

This seems to be the key problem ... nobody seems to know what 'really' generates profits and what is just managerial posturing for the personality politics of most corporate performance review processes.

OK - Now we're getting somewhere...

The dirty secret of major corporations is that productive effort rarely gets rewarded. The people who consistently advance are predominately the ones most skilled in organizational politics, which does not always coincide with producing profits.

As a part of the 1099 nation, you live outside of this nonsense spiral. Your livelihood is financed by your customers, not by your managers. At first, this is frightening but ultimately it becomes liberating.

Productivity Discipline

Getting back to the idea of our productivity discipline - There are four key steps:

1. Clearly define what 'productive' means

What this ultimately means is that we need to learn how to draw a line between what we are doing and generating profits. If you are in a major corporation, this can be extremely difficult. Most employees have tightly segmented job functions that have a tangential relationship to generating profits. If you are running your own business, this should be much more straightforward to articulate.

Once 'productivity' is clarified, it becomes the benchmark for your continued effectiveness.

2. Develop the discipline of ignoring distractions

Generating consistent productive output will require that you cultivate the ability to push distractions out of your consciousness. This means ignoring email, texts, instant messages, online articles, social media and all other 'things' that can absorb your attention.

This is a lot harder to achieve than most people think.

A distraction detox will take quite a bit of effort and probably require a significant amount of time. Many people suffer from the 'Fear of Missing Out' or FOMO and this fear prompts them to consistently check messages, social media, news feeds, etc. It will feel very uncomfortable but achieving elite levels of productivity will REQUIRE that these distractions be pushed to the side until narrow, scheduled windows of time to address them.

3. Structure your schedule to minimize and batch distracting activities

Combining these two concepts, we arrive at a rigorous schedule for achieving exceptional productive output. It requires implementing extreme discipline in scheduling time to execute and complete high-value activities while eliminating distractions during your scheduled work periods.

Please note - I did not say to 'minimize' distractions, I said to ELIMINATE them.

There will clearly be exceptions, but they should be exceedingly rare. (Fire alarms, physical disturbances, emergency calls from your spouse, etc)

None of this means that you will 'never' answer email or check messages - It means that you will perform these activities during a small number of scheduled times each day. This will simultaneously ensure that responses are delivered in a timely manner and condition the people you interact with to understand that you are batching message processing and not to expect immediate responses.

I have found that the Pomodoro Technique is an effective method for executing this discipline. Many people have found that the amount of output in one 30-minute Pomodoro cycle is equivalent to 1-2 hours (or more) of traditional distracted effort.

4. Measure everything you do and hold yourself ruthlessly accountable

The fourth step is to measure yourself ruthlessly. This will feel uncomfortable and tedious, but it is CRITICAL to your continued success. Anybody can be motivated for a day or a week, but staying disciplined month after month requires a system to ensure that you do not succumb to self-delusion.

The exact structure of this system is less important than having one that you consistently follow. The core element needs to be tracking your level of productive activity and tracking that activity back to generating actual profits. This will generate a feedback loop where you develop a hypothesis of productivity, test that hypothesis, and adjust it if necessary. If this discipline is maintained over time, it will result in a consistently increasing tide of output that will eventually transform you into a 'superhero' of profitable output.

Ultimately, thriving in the 1099 nation requires that each of us ruthlessly maximize the profits generated by our time. Mastering this discipline is a major part of guaranteeing your ultimate success.

#1099Nation Article Series -

• Introducing the 1099 Nation