The concept of being productive is meaningless without a good understanding of your values or what is important to you personally. Being productive isn’t just a matter of being busy. It isn’t a matter of doing a lot of things. Productivity is accomplishing important things.
Many people try to get organized so they can do more, but really they are just trying to fit a bunch more unimportant things into their day. Until they define what is really important to them, just scheduling a bunch of tasks won’t help them really accomplish more.
Sometimes being productive doesn’t mean doing more. In fact, sometimes it can mean doing fewer tasks each day. When these tasks are carefully chosen to align with your values, they can have a much bigger impact on your overall accomplishments.
For example, lets say one of my values is life long learning and one of the areas I want to learn about is economics. Here are a list of tasks that might help me accomplish this:
- Spend one hour per day browsing the web for information about economics.
- Read two books per month on economics written by established economics professors.
- Sign up for an internet based class on economics.
- Sign up for a night class at the local university.
All of these are good things toward my goal, but trying to do all of them would be less effective than picking one. The “right” one is the one that best meets my needs. The first task probably isn’t going to be the most effective way to learn. The third and fourth tasks are good ideas, but might not fit into the time I have available. The second task might not work if I don’t learn very well from reading.
The point is to choose the best option that maximizes my time investment and do that task well. By focusing, I’ll have more time to spend on the other areas of my life. Carefully deciding what to do can
mean doing less, but accomplishing more. But this is only possible if you first decide what is really important to you.
Originally posted on December 3, 2005.
Mark, I completely agree! My work with http://www.thedailysaint.com has been honing in on this often overlooked aspect of productivity. A career without a calling is just that.
Keep up the good work,
Mike
Hi,
I think it is not only about values but about your goals in life. On my Time Management Master blog I encourage people to first define their goals for life.
Only if you know what you will use the gained extra time for, you will be highly motivated to change habits.
Here is the link to the article on defining your private and professional goals.
http://memytime.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/set-your-goals-for-your-life/
Besides this article the Time Management Master blog is a collection of about 200 concrete time saving tips to gain an extra hour every day. Tips can be applied at home, at work or on the road.
Every person is different and so are the tips. Please let me know if your found something that works for you.
Thanks
Nicolas
I think setting a target for yourself is inspiring. Deadlines are as important, they will give your productivity a boost since you know that there is a particular period that your task or project needs to be finished.
And of course it would help to treat yourself to a relaxing reward as you meet each individual goal.
Nice post!
Been learning other productivity tips too from http://www.contsum.com/blog.