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Is it just me… or is everyone way too busy???August 11, 2011It seems these days that EVERYONE I talk with lately is way too busy! It seems with the current economic environment, layoffs have occurred in the last few years and most folks who are working are “over employed” and are performing the tasks of their primary job as well as part (or all) of another’s job. How can one stay on top of, or even increase, one’s productivity while maintaining some sense of sanity? Your first instinct may be work harder (or longer hours). This strategy might work for some time but eventually you will crack and need a mental health day – or worse an extended mental health vacation! So the real question is, “How can I maximize my time?” Following are a couple of strategies that you can use to help increase your productivity while at work. The first strategy that may help boost your productivity is the Zen method, borrowed from Mahayana Buddhism. With this strategy you will take your top three activities (or action items) each day and do them, do them first and do not let anything get in your way of completing them until they are finished. Then you are free to work on other less important tasks. This strategy is effective because of the Pareto Principal, you know the old 80/20 rule (also known as The Law of the Vital Few or The Principal of Factor Sparsity). This proven rule holds true in almost every business (or personal) environment and simply states that you will get 80% of your results from 20% of your actions. Therefore, if you concentrate your activities on the “vital few” you crowd out less important activities and must, by extension, produce more. In my personal business the rule is actually closer to the “90/10” rule. In the book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey introduced us to the next strategy a four quadrant method described in his third habit-Putting First Things First. He asserts that everything you do, relative to achieving your daily goals, is either important/not important and urgent/not urgent. The key to using his method is to divide a square with an X/Y axis. label the X axis with urgent at one end and not urgent at the other. The label the Y axis similarly with important and not important. Now there should be four distinct quadrants. One will be urgent/important. One will be not urgent/important. One will be urgent/not important and the last will be not important/not urgent. Now place your action items into one of these related four quadrants. Once completed, you should spend your time taking care of the tasks in the important/urgent quadrant first. Follow this by doing the important/not urgent. If you have time left complete (or delegate) the unimportant/urgent tasks. Finally try hard to delete or delegate the items in unimportant/not urgent action items. At first this may seem difficult, especially ignoring the urgent/ but not important things. However, you will be surprised that, when crowded out, these things usually are truly not that urgent and they will oftentimes take care of themselves. Finally, if you work best from visual queues, then you could use a list written on paper. Keep this list with you and cross your tasks off once they are complete. There are several preprinted systems that are very good and commercially available. Day Planner, Day-Runner, or Franklin Planner are just some of the options that come to mind. This is also a good way to keep “score” on how you are doing throughout the day. While all of the paper list options mentioned above have merit I like the Franklin Planner methodology. Using this method you make a list of every task you have to do in your agenda book. After the list is exhausted you will need to go back and rank them by order of priority A, B, C, or D. The A’s are your day’s most important tasks. These are things critical to your career and professional success and may include things like collaborating on a project, scheduled meetings, software updates, prospecting…you get the idea. Follow that with the less critical (important but not urgent) things to do and label them with a B. The things which are needed to be finished in your personal life should be labeled with a C. Finally anything that is left over can be deleted or delegated. Label these items with a D. Now go back to the “A’s” and rank them most urgent with a 1, next urgent with a 2 and so on until you are through your “A’s”. Next go back and rank your B’s do this until you are through with your ABC&Ds. Now you know where you need to begin (with your A list) and finish (the D list) your day. Do not worry about not completing your “C’s” somehow they always get completed-almost, as if, by magic. Have you ever woken up after during a restless sleep at 3:00 in the morning with your mind racing with a problem or with all of the things you need to get done later that day (or week)? This is your subconscious telling you that you are out of balance. Make a list of everything that is running through your mind. You will relax and soon go back to sleep. Oftentimes you will even have the answer to your problem manifest itself when you wake up. All of the strategies above do come with a commitment of time. A small amount of time spent planning will help save you much time throughout the day. Other than 3:00 AM, when is your best time to plan? Everyone is different so you need to discern when your “sweet spot” is. So, when is the best time of the day for you? Some people are morning people and some are definitely not! Other people will plan better in the early afternoon – or at night. The sweet spot is the best time for you to do your planning. These are some of my thoughts on the strategies of becoming more productive or “Doing More With Less”. Try one, all or a combination of them and use the one that works best for you. I hope you’ll find them useful and feel, if used, you will definitely become more productive. Tom McIntosh is a Sales Consultant and Senior Account Manager with Genesis Technologies. He earned a BS of Economics from the College of Social and Behavioral Science at the University of Utah. Posted in Uncategorized Tagged blog, blogging Leave a comment Leave a Reply |
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