Do you manage to accomplish the most important tasks at the end of the day?
If not, wish to manage your time better?
Don’t waste your precious time. Reclaim your life.
THE PARADOX OF PRODUCTIVITY
Nowadays technology allows us to accomplish great things; but at the same time, we can feel easily overwhelmed by their demands and endless possibilities.
As the authors of 5 Choices say, “It is both easier and harder than ever before to achieve extraordinary productivity and feel accomplished in our lives.”
What paralizes our productivity? We are facing three big challenges:
1. We are making more decisions than ever.
2. We are facing the second-by-second battle for our attention.
3. We are suffering from a personal energy crisis.
A PRODUCTIVE LIFE IS A CONSCIOUS LIFE
Are you aware of how you’re spending your valuable time?
Being conscious will allow you to design a more productive life, and at the end of the day you will feel that you’ve accomplished extraordinary work, without neglecting any important areas of your life.
Let’s take a look at a six-year FranklinCovey Study. It’s a research based on 351,613 respondents from all continents.
60% of their time was being spent on important things;
40% of their time was being spent on things that were not important to them or to their companies.
So, the results are quite telling. The respondents were wasting almost half of the time.
ARE YOU DOING AN EXTRAORDINARY WORK?
Everyone has the capability to do great, even extraordinary work. The difference between those who do and those who don’t is how they manage three pivotal areas, which are:
- Decision
- Attention
- Energy
Therefore, we should make five choices for avoiding distractions and paying focused attention to our most important goals and tasks in our daily lives.
DECISION MANAGEMENT
1. Act on the important [Don’t react on the urgent]
Sometimes it’s not easy to keep working on the important things when something urgent comes up.
In order to create two awesome hours of effective mental performance, Josh Davis, author of Two Awesome Hours, invites us to implement the strategy of establishing decision points.
“The moment when you have finished a task and are free to start the next one is a precious opportunity.
Once you engage in a task, your brain tends to switch to autopilot, and as a result, you can easily continue doing the same task until it ends or something interrupts you. When your brain goes into automatic mode, you become less aware of your surroundings and the time passing.
That’s why the decision points in your day are so useful: they are the moments when you snap out of automatic and become aware that you can decide how to spend your time.”
2. Go for extraordinary [Don’t settle]
If you settle for just anything, you’ll never know what you’re truly worthy of.
Don’t settle for mediocrity.
ATTENTION MANAGEMENT
3. Schedule the big rocks [Don’t sort gravel]
Brian Tracy, author of Eat That Frog, recommends a linear process to i
1. Make a list of everything you’re responsible for in your work.
2. Then, ask yourself: If you could just do one item on that list all day, every day, what item would you do that would allow you to accomplish the most with the same amount of time? Put another way, what item on the list is the most valuable to your boss or yourself?
3. If you could do only two more items on that list all day, what second and third tasks let you accomplish the most in the same amount of time?
These three tasks are the 20 percent of your tasks through which you contribute at least 80 percent of your value.
4. Rule your technology [Don’t let it rule you]
How many minutes or hours you spend on facebook?
I’m sure most of you wouldn’t like to confess it.
Okay, don’t fight that battle.
Here’s the deal. Why don’t you create a habit allowing yourself to check it out for an amount of time.
15 minutes a day is good for you? You decide. But stick to it.
ENERGY MANAGEMENT
5. Fuel your fire [Don’t burn out]
Managing time is not only scheduling. Managing time implies that we manage our mental energy. Our brain fatigues and needs to rest.
It’s not the same to write an important research paper than to answer e-mails. All tasks should be done. However, the key is to tackle your work when you have the right mental energy for it.
Really helpful post.
Thanks Andres! 🙂