Make momentum your friend

Catch the wave of productivity

Momentum is an incredibly important, yet undervalued, quality in any work environment. It’s like catching a wave: you work hard to get there and then you hit this sweet spot where the ideas are flowing and you’re working with incredible efficiency and effectiveness. You’re riding that wave and doing great work. You don’t want to lose focus and crash down the other side, or not keep pace, and then have to scramble uphill to get back to where you were.

As Brendan Baker said on Life Hack:

Seriously, momentum is a beautiful thing. Momentum enables you the ability to start thinking clearly, see that your goals are reachable and it gives you a sense of purpose, power and direction. By building momentum, you are creating a world in which you are more productive, more effective and more efficient.

It’s one of the reasons we schedule our work in blocks here at Mettro. And if we get support requests through that don’t require much time, we’ll plan those for the morning so we can take care of them early and then focus on the large chunks of work we have to do for the rest of the day.

During those blocks of work, we don’t check our emails and we turn off our notifications. Email is the enemy of momentum. Chopping and changing regularly to read messages and deal with small requests means you don’t build that flow you need to ride that wave to its conclusion.

You can improve your ability to harness momentum by:

• preparing beforehand and having a clear direction and intended outcome, along with a succinct list of tasks
• making tasks achievable by breaking them up into realistic and measurable chunks
• minimise interruptions by wearing headphones, turning email notifications off, closing your office door, and letting your colleagues know you’re ‘on a roll’, and not to be disturbed.