The Most for Your Minute : Productivity501
One major difference between people who are productive and those who aren’t is how they view long term investments of their time. Often, activities that will have the biggest positive benefit are the ones that have very little or minimal short term gains. For example, when I started writing Productivity501 and had virtually no subscribers it seemed like there was very little benefit to sitting down and writing a new post for the site. Honestly, it took several years to start seeing a significant benefit from my investment. However, after making the investment in content for five years, we have over 18,000 subscribers and over 1 million unique visitors. Productivity501 is successful enough that it bought me a nice house overlooking a river valley on one of the few hills in our part of Kansas. But, it took years to get to this point.
It is hard to work on things that don’t give you an immediate return. Time discounting causes us to under estimate the value of future gains. This makes it harder to mentally justify investing our time now for future benefit.
When you invest in things that will give you a long term benefit, you use current efforts to secure a more desirable future. People who don’t have the ability to make future investments are usually left wondering why everyone else is so lucky.
- The point of increasing your productivity is so that you have more time to do the fun things. Or anything that gives you personal satisfaction – like spending more time with your family.
The Most for Your Minute : Productivity501
The point is that certain things work better when done in a particular order or at a particular time of day. If I sit and watch television for 4 hours in the morning, and then try to write late in the evening, I am not being my most productive. It is far better for me to write in the morning and then (if I have time), watch some television before going to bed.
Some of this comes down to understanding how your body mind works. For me, I’m better off doing any writing before noon or a few hours after lunch. I do better programming, when I know I will have no interruptions so I often am at my best when everyone else has gone to bed for the day. If I’m meeting with a client to discuss their business processes, I am at my peak mid morning around 10 am. It is personal and can be different for each person, but you have to make a conscious effort to understand yourself and put tasks where the work the best.
A task out of place (like trying to read a dense report when you are exhausted) can easily take twice as long as a task placed optimally in your day. By giving a little thought to the order in which you do your tasks, you can easily get more done with less effort.
The Productive Scholar : Productivity501
2. Plan ahead. Fastidiously.
A few years ago, my mother went back to school for a short while. To accommodate for the time she spent in school, she would get up at about 4 o’clock every morning to plan her day. This included lesson plans, when would be the best time for her to study that day, dinner plans, etc. While this may seem awfully early, it allowed her to be much less stressed because she knew exactly what she wanted to accomplish for the day.
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