It’s a simple fact that when we have 4 hours to complete a task, we’ll take four hours. Alternatively, If we have one hour to complete the task, we’ll still get it done.
Allow me introduce you to one article about how working less hours will make you more productive. In the article you’ll see his daily time tracker.
The factors that will allow you to actually work less hours while maintaining productivity are the following:
- Know what you need to do
- Plan what you will do
- Identify how long it will take you
- Schedule it into your calendar
- Honour your schedule
- Do what you said you’ll do – as my father would say “do it like your life depends on it kid!”
Acknowledge that you accomplished something (positive self talk is good for the soul) and move on.
A quick story about my productivity.
I use Rescue Time to track where and how I spend every minute at my computer. I have consistently achieved 72-78% productivity, which is not bad however, my unproductive time or “very distracting time” as they refer to it, was always while I was on the internet. I can be a bit of a “follow the shinny object kind of person” and this was starting to bother me.
I really wanted to accomplish the same but do it faster and better. So, I devised a plan that I started working on a few weeks ago to help me with this goal of increasing my productivity while at my desk. Here is the quick overview:
Problem: Research and internet surfing for professionally related purposes is taking more time than I want it to. I want to get the same results in less time.
Solution: Capture articles of interest in a systematic way that I can refer back to easily.
- First, I created a legend for tagging articles so that I never have to wonder what words I used to define a ‘category’. I use this in both Evernote and Excel.
- Second, Evernote.com allows me to capture and tag articles so that I can find them later. Example: work place, living space, psychology, science, time management – all related to organizing.
- Lastly, in my Excel spreadsheets which I’ve compiled since long before Evernote, I quickly sorted and tagged information using the same methodology as I use in Evernote. One day they might merge but that is a lot of links to click back through and I’m not prepared to go backwards!
Some of you might not like the idea of me using Excel for capturing information and that’s ok but try not to judge the way I work. Remember that we all organize in a way that will best suit our needs :)
Outcome: My productivity increased to 86% !!
Another article you might be interested in about how we spend our time is Time Tracking Sucks
