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NEWS
| Your Productivity |
8 August 2007 |
Personal productivity is a key differentiator between people who succeed in their chosen fields and those who do not. Individuals at the top of their game have learned how to achieve more, and better, results in less time than most people.
Increasing your productivity is a critical step in achieving your personal and professional objectives and creating the success you envision for yourself. This letter arms you with eleven steps you can use to increase your productivity and improve the way you use your time.
Apply the following eleven steps and watch what happens:
1. Develop clear personal objectives and write them down. Higher productivity begins with having clear objectives. As you know, objectives must be specific and measurable to be effective in guiding your behaviour. They must reflect your beliefs and be within your power to achieve. They must align with your values and you must have a time limit in which to accomplish them. To make your objectives real and concrete, write them down. The clearer and more concrete you make your objectives, the more likely you are to accomplish them in a shorter period of time.
2. Write a clear action plan. If you want to turbo charge your productivity, make sure you have a clear, written plan of action. Every minute you spend in careful planning will save you as many as ten minutes in execution. Create a list of every step or task necessary to achieve your objective. Every morning, write down the tasks you need to complete before the day is over. This will keep you on track and give you a visual record of accomplishment. You will see extraordinary results as soon as you follow this simple step. The very act of writing out a list and referring to it constantly will increase your productivity by 25 percent or more.
3. Set your priorities. The third step is to prioritise your list. Analyse your list before you take action. Identify and start with the high-value tasks on your list. “High value” is identified by the potential consequences attached to doing, or failing to do, a task. High-value tasks have significant consequences; low-value tasks have few or no consequences at all.
4. Concentrate and eliminate distractions. In this step, choose a high-value activity or task, start on it immediately, and stay with it until it is done. Focusing single-minded attention on one task allows you to complete it far more quickly than starting and stopping. When you apply this concentrated attention on a major task, you can reduce the amount of time spent on it by as much as 80 percent.
5. Lengthen your workday but increase your time off. By starting your workday a little earlier, working through lunchtime, and staying a little later, you can become one of the most productive people in your field. The early start and late finish to your workday will allow you to beat the traffic both coming into and going home from work. This can add two or three hours to your productive working day without really affecting your lifestyle. You will derive enormous benefits from these extra hours, which make a relatively small change to your overall schedule.
Simultaneously, be vigilant about scheduling regular time off, perhaps starting with weekends. Once you have integrated this practice into your routine, start planning short holiday breaks of two or three days. Work up to longer holidays. When you are away from work, clear your mind completely of job concerns and engage fully with the other parts of your life. This will clear your mind and restore your energy.
You will be amazed at the dramatic increase in productivity you will experience when you are back at work.
6. Work harder at what you do. When you’re at work, concentrate on work all the time you are there. Don't squander your time or fall into the habit of treating the workplace as a community or educational environment, where socialising is an accepted element of the mix. Rather, when you’re at the office put your head down and work full blast as long as you are there. Many people who have followed this simple rule have doubled their productivity and reached their objectives faster than they thought possible.
7. Pick up the pace. At work, develop a sense of urgency and maintain a quicker tempo in all your activities. Get on with the job. Dedicate yourself to moving quickly from task to task. You'll get substantially more done just by deciding to pick up the pace in everything you do.
8. Work smarter. Focus on the value of the tasks you complete. While the number of hours you put in is important, what matters most is the quality and quantity of results you achieve. Again, the more time you spend on those higher-value tasks with greater potential consequences, the greater the results you will obtain from every hour you put in.
9. Align your work with your skills. Skill and experience count. You achieve more in less time when you work on tasks at which you are especially skilled and experienced. Always strive to become more effective at the most important things you do. Achieving consistent excellence at the most critical things you do is the fastest, most efficient route to achieving the objectives you have set for yourself.
10. Bunch your tasks. Group similar activities and do them all at the same time. Making all your calls, completing all your quotes, or preparing all your presentation slides at the same time allows you to develop speed and skill at each activity. You simply get better at making each call, writing the next quote, or designing the next slide. Cut your performance time by as much as 80 percent by doing several similar tasks in sequence.
11. Cut out steps. Pull several parts of the job together into a single task and eliminate several steps. Where you can, cut out lower-value activities completely. Consider the example of one of the large insurance companies. Several years ago, their system for approving new policies consisted of twenty-four steps conducted by twenty-four different people and, on average, lasted a couple of weeks. Their position in the marketplace was being seriously threatened by companies with a faster approval time. The company consolidated twenty-three of the twenty-four steps into a single job for a single person, who checked every detail of the policy before sending it to a supervisor. In the second step, the supervisor simply checked the analysis of the first person and gave an approval or disapproval. Reducing twenty-four steps to two enabled the company to get the answer back to the field within twenty-four hours, almost always error-free. As a result of the speed of this new processing system, the company was able to write substantially more additional business every year.
The race is on! Make a game of it:
- Challenge your record daily to see how many high-value tasks you can complete each day.
- Set a schedule and a deadline for yourself and try to beat your deadline.
- See just how much more you can get done in less time.
Practice visualisation to guide your performance. Envision yourself as an exceptionally productive person. For a moment, visualise those times in your life when you were at your peak of effectiveness and productivity. You were doing all the right things in the right way and accomplishing a lot in a short period of time. You felt strong and confident about your performance. You felt stimulated, exhilarated, and in that magical state of “flow” that most people experience all too infrequently.
Imagine yourself five years from now as one of the most productive and successful people in your field.
- What's in this picture?
- Visualise your appearance, the way you will be working, the projects you will be engaged in, and the principles that will guide your personal performance.
- How will your colleagues describe you and your way of working to others?
Look for ways to increase your productivity every day. The payoff will be phenomenal.
Coaching Tip:
What are the habits and behaviours that will be most helpful for you to acquire in order to increase your productivity, results orientation, focus, concentration, discipline, and persistence? Will other traits become increasingly important? What additional knowledge and skills do you need to acquire to dramatically increase your productivity and perform at your best?
Remember that internal misjudgements are six times more likely to cause failure than external factors. Success in business, as in life, is all about getting the fundamentals right … and the actions you take!
Makes you think, doesn’t it!
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