The Associates Handbook

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Productivity

Get effective and then efficient at work

Learn two shortcuts a day

The lowest-effort compounding habit available to you. Forty a month, permanently. Every mouse movement you make is a small tax on your attention, because moving a hand to a mouse and back interrupts whatever your brain was doing. Individually trivial. Across a fourteen-hour day, considerable. So learn two

Two windows, and a colour-coded calendar

Ownership means it gets done, not that you do it alone

Owning a workstream means you are responsible for making sure the work gets done. Doing all of it yourself is a different obligation entirely, and high performers reliably confuse the two. An Engagement Manager at McKinsey put it better than I can: “What I didn’t understand in the beginning

Effectiveness before efficiency, and the four traps that eat your week

Every productivity technique assumes you already know what you should be working on. That assumption is usually wrong. All productivity is useless unless it aims at the right goal. Speed without direction gets you lost faster, and consulting is very good at generating direction-free urgency. So the first job

The five-folder Outlook structure

Never delete an email