Increase your Productivity

There are many ways you increase your productivity. The goal is to get more done in less time and less work, so you can focus on what you want.

With these 5 simple steps.

• Step 1: What Do You Want? What are your goals?
• Step 2: Make a list of your average Daily activities not by hour but by activity and average length of activity.
• Step 3: Eliminate unnecessary activities
• Step 4: Streamline
• Step 5: Automate

These 5 simple steps can be applied to almost anything whether it is work or home related.

Step 1: What Do You Want?

This is the biggest and hardest one to answer. List your goals and objectives you have for the next year. This is the focus and carrot to keep you going. This will also keep you from saying I’m bored and wasting time because all you have to do is pull out your list of goals and objectives and do one.

Step 2: Make a list of your average Daily activities

Making a list of your Daily activities allows you to examine where your time is going and help decide how to better focus your time. This list should be by activities and average length of time

Step 3: Eliminate unnecessary activities

There are many activities most of us do that are very unproductive and suck up time. Such as news, we often spend hours watching and reading news for things that little concern us in our great scheme of life. While I’m not saying ignore all news but filter it out to only news that concern your goals in life. The rest of the big stuff you will often hear from your friends and family.

Often a unnecessary activity that I personally commit is attempting to learn to do something that I should outsource because my goals don’t require me to know it but require me to have it done. This is a problem most commit such as learning to build a website capable of managing our content for our goal rather than getting a already built content management software to handle the content. The content management software may be relevant to our goal but it our goal isn’t to create the content management software but to make the content, so why not leave the content management software up to the people whose goal it is to make content management software.

It is often the small time consumers that can be eliminated and free up the most time.

When going through these activities you are looking for things of low priority, things that can be ignored and things that are irreverent to your goal. If they can’t be eliminated than or ignored than go through the next two steps.

Step 4: Streamline

Examine your task and figure out a way to do them faster. Often the biggest way to streamline task is to do it in batches rather than attempting to multitasking. Multitasking is like switching horses in middle of a race, sure there is a chance that the fresh horse can get you to the end faster but there is a cost of switching which is time. Every time you switch task, even amongst the simplest of task, it takes you a few seconds or longer to proceed with the other task. Multitasking also affects the quality of your work, because you are constantly thinking about the previous task and the future task.

Some things that often cost you time that you don’t realize can be phone calls, you often make/receive calls throughout the day constantly being interrupted in your work and then have to figure out where you were to start again. The idea is to do it in batches, rather than making/recieving calls throughout the day set a time or two to return calls. Any emergencies they can call your cell phone.

Email is another big time killer. Most managers and others have been gotten to the point of checking email every 10-20 minutes. Like phone calls do it in a batch at specific times rather than stopping what your doing to answer an email. Some other tips are to set custom filters base on subject lines to get your attention for important emails. If you have a secretary use them to filter your emails for you, and giving you a summary of any important emails that may need your attention. This way you can focus on your job rather than getting those low priority reports, office jokes or etc that don’t need your attention at the moment.

Utilize your most productive time period. If your a morning person than make sure to get most of your work done in the morning and focus on returning calls and other task that don’t require you to be at your top.

Step 5: Automate

One of the beauties of technology is the fact that it has given us the ability to automate things. Look to automate any activities you have.

Somethings you could automate to free your time

• Email – Create an auto-responder for specific emails. This is great for when you often receive emails asking common questions.
• Vacuuming – Get a roomba, these things will automatically clean your floor.
• Shopping – Amazon offers a Subscribe & Save program. The program basicly setups a schedule delivery of supplies you need. They offer a 15% discount and flexibility to change the schedule or cancel at any time with no risk.
• Automate your Checkbook – A lot of banks now offer free online payment, take advantage of it.
• Outsourcing – Got a task or project need to be done but don’t have the knowledge or time to do it than outsource it. Sites such as Domystuff and Elance can help you find freelancers willing to do your work.