Tag Archives: Productive

Professionals

8 Ways to Radically Increase Your Productivity

Productivity

1. Change your environment.

Making slight changes in your working environment will make a huge difference in your willingness to work. When you shift things around it makes work feel new again which is great for re-igniting motivation.

To be more productive do some of your work outside of the office or redecorate your office and add more color. See what would happen if you sat on the other side of your desk to face a new wall or window. Try adding soft music or white noise. It is also of great benefit to add some form of life such as plants, fish or a fountain for the sound of water.

Changing the appearance and location of your working space helps you to think in different and more innovative ways. The more innovative you are the more you thrive in business.

2. Strive to be your best.

Always envision yourself as being your “ideal successful self,”  that part of you which is out in front encouraging you forward. This part of you is holding up the guideposts, ideas and possibilities for your growth, happiness, expansion and success.

Work backward from your “ideal self” by setting small, incremental goals for each area of your business. Keep your mind focused on the positive. Before you know it, you will be thriving at higher levels than you ever anticipated were possible.

To succeed at these levels you must not only be a great starter but an even better finisher. Accept that you may get redirected on your path, but strive to have the resilience never to quit. Hold the belief that if you can dream it, you can achieve it.

3. Change your patterns.

When you break routines you essentially create new life. Habits are easy but there is no risk because habits are lazy. You cannot succeed stuck inside the traps of familiarity and comfort. To increase your productivity you must be creative and brave.

Make healthy changes to your diet. If you go to the gym after work, try raising your heart rate before you get to the office. If you feel tired during the day get up, move around and change your scenery. Spend time outdoors. Leave your cubical and go out for lunch.

Expand your perspective by changing patterns and breaking outdated habits.

 4. Shift your priorities.

Your daily schedule is a reflection of your deepest priorities. If your calendar is booked up with meetings and other responsibilities, with no free time for fun, family and friends, you are missing out on the juiciest parts of life.

To inspire your passion for work, make sure to schedule time for yourself. On a plane they always tell you to put your oxygen mask on before helping someone else. Once you have scheduled personal time to refuel, then block times to enjoy with family and friends, adding joy and vitality to your life.

In your last moments of life, you are not likely to look back and wish you had spent more hours in the office.

5. Invest in personal growth.

The responsibility for achieving success is on you. Make the effort to keep yourself in a place of personal expansion, whether that means going to seminars, meeting weekly with a coach or therapist, reading books and writing down goals, or making the commitment to become fully knowledgeable in your field of service.

Life is your greatest mentor. View every challenging situation as a necessary lesson. Utilize people and sitautions, which are against you, to create such a deep stirring within you that they serve as a counterforce motivating you to be even more successful. Allow people and situations to help refine your skills and, ultimately, drive you towards levels of success you may not have been able to reach without those types of pressures.

6. Change your circle of influence.

The people with whom you surround yourself profoundly influence you. If you are lacking motivation and feeling down, it might be time to upgrade your circle of influence. Negativity is contagious, as is positivity. Those closest to you should bring out your best qualities and inspire you to work harder.

The best-of-the best, have the best-of-the best as mentors, friends and partners. Learn as much as you possibly can from other successful, fulfilled people who want to share their wisdom with you. When you spend time with successful, happy, fulfilled people you elevate your own personal productivity, so choose wisely.

7. Change your thoughts.

You are what you think. You cannot think negatively and have unlimited success. If you think negatively about business and finances, your subjective experience will be a lack of both, whether or not that is true in reality.

Discipline your mind towards the goals of what you want your productivity to look like and start putting the effort in right now to get there. Keep in mind that suffering over your own suffering doesn’t work.

Know the negative thought patterns you hold which require change and be deliberate in changing them.

8. Be authentic.

There is nothing more success promoting than having a natural and understated charisma about yourself. When you are committed to respecting yourself you exude a quiet confidence. Your focus is on being genuine, kind, strong, courageous, intelligent, successful, steadfast and fulfilled.

Be successful, not boastful. All successful businesses are built upon the foundation of good relationships. In being authentifc, you are who you are and who you are doesn’t change from person to person or situation to situation. This authentic quality builds trust into your relationships. In business, take care to cultivate relationships that can be depended upon and which serve both parties equally.

These changes are not easy. Each requires a deliberate change of habit. However, because reaching for those higher levels of business productivity is critical to your overall success, it is certainly cause for some radical changes and the outright shattering of your outdated habits. Great things can come only from feeling passionate and motivated every day for your work, for your family and for yourself. In this way, your success is a win for you and a win for those who depend on you.

Professionals

5 Things You Should be Doing to Have an Insanely Productive Week

productive

A productive week depends largely on what you focus on every working day and how much time you allocate to activities that take up your time (i.e. busy work). Working harder does not necessarily mean you are being productive. There will always be a better way to complete that task. Find it, work smarter and get more done in your working week.

These are a few things you can do to have an insanely productive week this and every other week:

 

[box type=”shadow” align=”aligncenter” ]1. Stop planning, start doing.

It’s okay to make time to plan what needs to be done in the week or month but when you get back to the planning table often, you lose precious productive hours. So instead of plan, just do it. The option to work on a task in the future instead of now seem comfortable but not prudent. While you keep telling yourself you don’t have to do it now, that task won’t go away. And somebody will have to eventually account for it. So instead of procrastinating, get on with it and check it off your to-do list.

Also, are your meetings really worthwhile? Most people spend too much time in meetings, when they should be working and getting things done. To ensure you are making the most of your time, create a time budget. This will help you realize how much time you are losing to meetings or planning when you should be doing actual work. You will be surprised at how much you can get done every week if you start tracking how much time you spend planning or meeting.

2. You don’t have to say “yes” to every request.

“The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say “no” to almost everything.” — Warren Buffet.

Saying “yes” to a request seem easier than a simple “no”. Yet every time you agree to do something for somebody that brings low or no result, it makes it difficult to have a schedule you can really control. You don’t want that. You can achieve more if you know what you have to do, when you have to it and what you expect to accomplish. All that can be done in controlled schedule.

3. Don’t be a perfectionist.

If you keep chasing perfection, it could take you longer to get your tasks done – and you will most likely be less productive than you planned. The reason being is when you activity strive for perfection you spend more time on a single task than required, causing your other responsibilities to get pushed back. This will cause you to lose time and possibly annoy your immediate boss in the process. Perfectionism is even higher when you don’t account to anyone but yourself, as the fine tuning never ends.

4. Get everything out of your head.

Don’t rely heavily on your memory. It will fail you when you need it most. Instead, write things down.

There are hundreds of options for taking notes — everything from the good old sticky notes to applications like Evernote, Any.do, and Wunderlist. By jotting down everything that needs to get done in the week, you will have a better picture of what needs to be accomplished – and set priorities accordingly.

5. Review and measure your accomplishments.

Just before you close the week and prepare for next week, review your achievements, along with everything else that needed to be done, to see if you really got work done. Get back to your to-do list and check them off and find out what you were not able to do and why. Celebrate your accomplishments, take note of everything you postponed and learn from your mistakes. You will be better prepared for the following week.[/box]

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Professionals

For Professionals: 4 Tips for More Productive Meetings

Meetings are a corporate oxymoron: an essential practice that generates groundbreaking ideas but also sucks the life out of a workforce. Employees waste away in conference rooms trying to pay attention to others give languorous presentations on mind-numbingly boring TPS reports and listening to overviews with no impact on his or her job function. Don’t do this to your employees.

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Here are four key considerations you can use to keep co-workers engaged and productive.

1. Be timely.
Meetings are major investments and should be expected to create a substantial return. Before holding a meeting, ask yourself if the opportunity cost of conducting the meeting is worth it — will the benefits exceed the cost? Additionally, meetings should be no longer than 45 minutes, as humans focus best within that timeframe. If the agenda clearly looks to take longer (it shouldn’t unless there are special circumstances), split the meeting into 45-minute periods with a rest in between.

2. Have an agenda that makes sense.
Not only do meetings take time, but they also impact the way we manage our time. Consider the frequency with which meetings are called around a specific project. Do you really need daily status updates or can it be shifted to weekly? Meetings take people out of their workflow and promote procrastination. Most workers see the half hour before and after meetings as dead time, because there isn’t enough time to dig into work tasks.

3. Be selective on who attends the meeting.
Only invite people capable of contributing to the discussion. This way, employees feel valued and are more likely to positively engage in the discussion. Employees need to understand that their time is more valuable than their presence at every meeting. Management is giving people more time to complete their work task — not diluting their value to the company. In fact, fewer meetings should increase interoffice communications and keep everyone informed.

4. Determine if you really need the meeting.
This is the ultimate question people should ask themselves. We live in a world of Skype, email, Wikis and a million other collaboration tools. These tools do not make all meetings irrelevant — particularly for those involving problem solving, brainstorming and other types of creative thinking — but they can be used to free up quite a bit of time if used effectively.

Source: CEO.COM