Office Productivity Hack #1: The Woodpecker

I know why you’re here.  You have spent the last month neck deep in tasks and can barely keep up.  Your boss can’t be trusted to manage your workflow any better than a moderately well trained raccoon.  There are at least seven different mediums you receive information through, and the last office productivity blog you read suggested a dozen different hacks to organize them.  What is a hard charging, always hustling, starter-upper, entrepreneur-savant to do?  I have one word for you: Woodpeckers.

No, I am not trying to sell you the latest Silicon Valley wünder-startup—all talk and no product.  This is the real deal: a 7-10 inch feather totin’ head bangin’ Picidae with a license to drill, baby, drill.  Why bother inventing something new or taking a hard look at why you use a chaotic flood of inputs to distract from your lack of direction when Mother Nature has the answer for you?  She has Failed Fast/Learned Fast for billions of years to deliver the perfect tool right to your doorstep.

Did I say doorstep?  I meant forehead.  That’s where your personalized Woodpecker will soon roost in its effort to keep your office productivity on track, synergized, and disruptive.  Here’s how it works: all of your current communication systems will funnel into a central Feed called the Trough.  Instead of a dozen different notifications spread across your phone, smart watch, computer, tablet, and—horror amongst horrors—human interaction, your new Trough funnels them all right into your bandwidth gullet via the Woodpecker.  Each time your system of systems needs your attention, a small Feed Bug drops from a convenient storage container resting over your head.  Your Woodpecker then strikes your forehead to eat the bug with the power of a college dropout with an idea, determination, and $90 million in venture capital funding.  Instant feedback for instant results!

I can see your concern—how can we be sure that your Woodpecker does not miss a notification?  No need to worry, friend, we’ve thought it all through so you don’t have to.  We have ethically and organically sourced our Feed Bugs from the best bioengineering firms in the business.  Each Feed Bug contains little to no nutritional value, so even though your Woodpecker will constantly hit the Feed, it will never find actual satisfaction.  Instead, it will exist in a state of perpetual anxiety as it awaits the next Feed Bug, allowing you to relax in the knowledge that nothing will slip by its manic state!

Where the Woodpecker truly shines, though, is in its user interface.  Let me take you on a journey.  Imagine you’re in a meeting, laptop open in front of you with your email in one window and your Teams chat in another.  You’ve got your phone under the desk to ping someone back on Slack and your smart watch open to a text message when you realize someone at the meeting has tried asking you a question for at least a minute with no response.  Disaster! 

Now imagine a world with a Woodpecker safely strapped to your face.  You are responding to the first three notifications simultaneously when your coworker attempts to ask a question.  Your Trough recognizes your coworker’s question through artificial intelligence, machine learning, an Ouija board, and paradigm shifting proprietary software, then releases a Feed Bug.  Driven to the brink of madness by overstimulation, your Woodpecker jabs its beak into your forehead with a force of up to 1,400 G’s.  You gaze up from your three devices through a growing stream of blood and piggyback off whatever your coworker said last.  Crisis averted!

Office productivity hacks are no joke.  Through the careful alignment of impactful systems, you can keep your productivity in lockstep with a structural pivot towards greater leverage in the work place.  When you can move the needle past the line in the sand and keep every task on your radar while thinking out of the box, you are ready to foot stomp the closest alligator to the boat and slap the table.  Now go forth and be productive!