5 Tips from Google’s In-House Productivity Guru

Laura Mae Martin shares 5 key insights from her new book, Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing

How would you like to be as productive as a Google executive? Well, that could be within reach because the person in charge of training those executives is now offering her tips and tricks to the rest of us. Laura Mae Martin is Google’s Executive Productivity Advisor and for more than a decade she’s been coaching employees on everything from conquering their inboxes and calendars to running top-notch meetings. In her new book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing, Laura brings those strategies to the wider world, and she joins us today to share 5 of her key insights.

1. Do your email like you do your laundry.

Let’s forget email for a second and talk about something most people understand more— laundry. What if doing your laundry looked like this: you open the dryer door and pick out one shirt. You fold that shirt and walk all the way upstairs and put it in your dresser, then walk back downstairs to the dryer. You find another shirt, fold it, walk upstairs to the dresser, and then walk back downstairs to the dryer. You find a pair of pants, and it still seems a little damp, so you throw it back in with the other dry clothes. You find one sock and don’t really feel like hunting for the other sock, so you walk it upstairs, put it in your sock drawer, and come back downstairs. You find a pair of pants, but it’s the same pair of damp pants you already touched, so you put them back in again.