Personal Productivity 101
Productivity with Purpose
Productivity is a Valuable Tool in Every Area
Jun 4th
Productivity comes in many forms and manifests itself differently depending on your work, life or focus. It really is just a matter of getting results or accomplishing a goal or task that brings you closer to a desired, meaningful outcome. That may be a new or better job, higher revenue or income, enhanced relationships, improved health or simply a more organized or efficient home of life with less stress. The skill or strategy of being productive is highly transferrable to every aspect of your life and is unquestionably worth the investment of your time and resources to cultivate as often as possible.
Whatever your goal; true personal productivity involves:
- Having a clear outcome
- Defining your purpose
- Timeframe for either completion or progress
- Method of accountability
- Outlined steps or tasks required
- Reward yourself if possible
Let me share with you a simple example from my own personal life to illustrate the concept in very basic terms. My son and I recently began a practice of reading together before school. We both love to read and used to read together at bedtime, but that just doesn’t happen anymore – he prefers to read by himself quietly before bed and my evenings are just so busy much of the time. At any rate, I decided to take my own advice and look at this personal issue from a productivity standpoint – what would I advise someone else to do?
- Outcome – Read The Mysterious Benedict Society with my 11 year old son
- Purpose – Spend quality one-on-one time with my child doing something we enjoy
- Timeframe – One month
- Accountability – Son as partner – he waits for me in our reading place and reminds me
- Steps/tasks – Read for 15 minutes each school morning while waiting for bus
- Reward – Breakfast in the park & a new book for next month
In this case since I was working with a partner, so commitment on both our parts was necessary to make this work. There were obstacles of course – days I had to leave home early or when one of us was ill – but even then we would treat this as a firm commitment and work around those roadblocks by rescheduling for afterschool or a “make-up” session on the weekend.(Yes, I added these sessions to my calendar!)
Simple, easy and remarkably effective!
What project or goal can you apply this too?
Plan a Daily Pleasure
Jun 3rd
Quick tip:
Plan a daily pleasure. Make sure that every single day you have something to look forward to. It doesn’t have to be big or expensive. Meet with a friend, treat yourself to a delicious cup of tea(Chai is my favorite) or coffee, take a hot bath, read a book, take a hot bath or nap in the hammock – whatever is enjoyable to you.
If you work too hard all of the time you will burn out. Reward and revive yourself with something fun or relaxing. It makes getting the work done all that much more gratifying when you know you have something to look forward to.
7 Principles of Good Time Management
Jun 2nd
“Do we have a shortage of time? No, we don’t. Time is the medium in which we exist. To complain about a shortage of time is like a fish in the sea complaining that it has a shortage of water.” — Mark Forster
Seven Principles of Good Time Management from “Do It Tomorrow” by Mark Forster.
The book lays down the following seven principles of time management:
- Have a clear vision to bring clarity and focus to everything you do. Your vision allows you to decide what to do, as much as it helps you to decide what not to do. This is because once you choose a course of action you’re rejecting all other alternative courses of action.
- Do one thing at a time. Establishing limits is an important way to get things done, and one important limit is to do one thing at a time. Forster explains that most unsuccessful people don’t sit around doing nothing all day; instead, they try to do so many things at once that they never get anything done. It’s much more effective to focus on one task, and when you’re done, move on to the next.
- Little and often. It is more effective to exercise five times a week for forty minutes each day than it is to do nothing for two weeks and then exercise for four hours. At the same time, it’s more effective to work on a report for a couple of hours each day than it is to leave it all for the weekend before it’s due.
- Define your limits. We’ve already discussed setting the limit of doing one thing at a time. Another limit is to work on clearly defined goals with clearly defined boundaries. Still another is to give yourself a definite period of time in which to complete tasks instead of leaving it open-ended. There are many ways in which you can set limits to make sure that you get things done.
- Closed lists. A closed list is any list that has a line drawn on the bottom so that nothing more can be added to it. For example, deal with your email in batches once a day instead of checking your email each time a new message comes in. Another example is to create checklists for tasks that you carry out repeatedly so that you can clearly see which steps you’ve taken and how many more you have left to complete the task.
- Reduce random factors. Interruptions, or random factors, are the main reason people don’t complete their work during the day. Although you can’t get rid of all random factors, the goal is to eliminate as many of them as possible.
- Commitment v. Interest. Nothing much is likely to come out of an interest unless it turns into a commitment. There’s no limit to the amount of things you can be interested in, while there is a limited number of things you can be committed to.
