Improving Personal Productivity (by 2 hours per day)!

Think about it – if you can pick up 2 productive hours a day, that would give you 10 hours a week and 500 hours a year! That’s not changing your whole work style, just a small part of it. Now the question to ask is... how do you know what 2 hours to “fix”? I’m a firm believer in a time log and an initial assessment of how you spend your time. We always think we're already doing everything we can and are pretty good at it. The surveys taken by our groups say we're typically pretty average, and that we need to continually practice fixing the small things in our lives.

One of the first “fixes” most often recommended is that we give ourselves plenty of time to do the small, easy things. Usually we budget much less time than necessary for a simple task and then it ends up overlapping into our other priorities. This can begin a day of frustration from the start. A phone call that we think will take 1 minute, takes 6; drop-ins should take 2 minutes, but take 10; and the meeting that was scheduled for 30 minutes – yes, it took double that! Did you know that 50% of the calls made do not require two people actually conversing at the same time? 80% of calls result in the receiver being unavailable and we try 5 more times to reach them. Mastering personal productivity comes from understanding where you exceed your time budget, just like overspending your monetary budget.

The small things are hard to change, because we are usually unaware of them. But, they are also often the tasks that we actually use as excuses so we can avoid the harder stuff. They become procrastination crutches. They go unnoticed by those around us, and therefore stick to us like superglue! It’s these small “fixes” that are the hardest to maintain as well. They seem insignificant to the overall scheme of the day, and are therefore habits we easily slip back into. Since they have been developed overtime, they take some time to change.

Spend the time up front to find these small “fixes”. They add up - big time!

The reason that this is one of our top rated workshops, with benefits for the individual and the team that are felt immediately, is that participants actually make changes. Participants feel the difference and make more commitments because we enhance each workshop with one-one coaching, not just from our facilitators, but also from the individual participants coaching each other right in the workshop. Participants with strengths in one area help someone who lists that area as needing development. This results in an action plan and buddy system for follow-up.