It’s not easy to be always hard-working, setting challenges and achieving them. At some point you lose all your energy and start pushing yourself to struggle through deadlines, trying to survive to the end of working day. No one is saying that being super-productive and always staying in the flow is easy, but if you know what to do and how to do – it doesn’t seem that impossible anymore.
So here we’ll share some bullet points about enhancing personal efficiency. Firstly we’ll explain main principles that will be the base of your productivity and then we’ll switch to the “bricks” – concrete advices and technics. The most important is to understand: who cares if you forget one or two daily rituals, but if you build the basement poorly – the whole structure will fall apart.
Principle 1. The basis of every productivity scheme is: time, energy, attention and skills.
Your personal efficiency depends on how you will manage these four components. They are closely inter-connected therefore you should work on all of them simultaneously. For example: you have enough energy and time and have clear understanding of tasks to be done, but at the same time you are not attentive and constantly distract yourself – the result won’t be positive. Or if you lack skills for conducting specific task, you will use lots of other resources – time, energy and attention, not even getting closer to your goal.
Principle 2. You have to realize that there is no «magic stick» or some simple secret to be Superhero of Productivity. But there are some meaningful rules, implementing which in your daily life, will help you to become more organized and successful.
Principle 3. If you work too much or against your will: it seriously ruins your productivity.
Chris Bailey experimented on his personal efficiency. He diversified his working time: one week working 90 hours, another week – only 20 hours. And afterwards while comparing the results: he completed same amount of job, nevertheless how many hours he was spending.
Conclusion: person spends more effort, when s/he knows that time is limited. According to the well-known Parkinson’s law: “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. So, if you have 4 hour to reply to a client, you will procrastinate and use all this time, even if you could accomplish this task in 1 hour. But if you continue working in accelerated manner – very soon you will be exhausted. You can do a lot in a day or two of working hard, but you cannot be in this state constantly (if you are not a robot, of course).
Principle 4. Here comes next philosophy: 3 super-useful ways to boost your efficiency – are simple and open for everyone. They are: sport, food and sleep.
This advice may seem simple, nevertheless it works. Try to experiment with different methods of improving efficiency, but you’ll see that at the end these three – win!
Principle 5. Productivity – is not how much you worked, but how much you accomplished.
There is no sense in measuring productivity by hours spent for doing the work, numbers of books that you’ve red/ words you’re written. You still won’t be able to see the result which you reached.
In every part of your life (finances, health, job, relations etc.) there are only few key tasks that create maximum value and need the most resources in form of your time, energy and attention. So, pay attention to those tasks.
So, these are the basics of productivity. Think over these five rules and try to understand for yourself if you are following all of them and where you should focus more. And next time we’ll tell you more about which specific technics should be implemented.
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Tags: efficiency, improvements, work