Productivity Hacks

You hear a lot about being productive these days. Social media is awash with genuine overachievers and an increasing deluge of charlatans humble-bragging about their morning routines. Sod off.

I’m going to go out on a limb here. Most in-house risk, compliance, and legal professionals I’ve met are biased toward detail and consensus. That’s a terrible mix for work-life balance. You take the time to review everything correctly and then seek to build agreement across disparate viewpoints and incentives. This may explain why I spend more time than I ever imagined having impromptu (or formalised mentoring) chats about career escapes.

But that next job probably won’t help unless we change.

Running this business forced me to change. I physically cannot be across every risk area or evolution. Nor can I consent to every opinion, call on my time, or request. I tried. Ethics Insight turns six in March 2025. It’s taken me this long to learn the real productivity hacks:

💡 Good questions beat knowledge.

💡 How to say no.

Until this week, I’d never assessed risk and developed an action plan for a Guatemalan construction project. If I’d fixated on (lack of) knowledge (my bias), I would not have been able to deliver that project. Instead, I asked better questions using proven methodologies, sector experience, and reading behavioural cues and inconsistencies). The lesson: put the onus on your stakeholders to answer questions they are better placed to address than you rather than trying to solve everything for them.

I received an enquiry from a non-banking financial institution (NBFI) late last week. Their risk framework was in bits. The headline risk document exceeded 100 pages. The enquirer requested I review the document and set out a strategy to update, benchmark, align, and gain buy-in from leaders. This “proposal” would be taken to the Board for sign-off. I’d mistakenly been down this path many times – spending days on an unpaid proposal “scope” that either answers enough of the questions or is used as a stalking horse for favoured providers. To overcome this challenge, we developed a low-risk approach, summarised in this document, to properly scope (rightsize) and develop an action plan; the cost is typically about two days of the mean rate for an experienced risk advisor (a steal).

When I explained this approach to the NBFI, crickets. Years ago, I might have panicked. Now I realise we must say no to people who don’t respect or value our time. I appreciate that it’s not always easy. But if you’re in-house, you can create defensible strategies and tools (often ones that require the other party to put some ‘skin in the game’, as I did). Building tested templates that add value but require their input can be an effective way to say “no”.

What repeated time-sucks could you address with templated responses, frameworks, or redirection? And where are you doing the heavy knowledge-lifting for other people? If you want to discuss this, let me know. Helping overburdened people is part of the paying it forward that others did for me when they helped me develop productivity hacks that saved the business.