Background: If there is anything in the world that people try to achieve more than happiness on a daily basis is, improved productivity.  So, how do you do that? Three golden rules that are so basic yet many of us fail to abide by. Find out the secret to your personal productivity in this article by Ashok Thussu, Director of LMI India.

As car owners many of us keenly want to know what mileage it will provide. Rarely do we look into how much mileage we get in terms of our productivity during a day. One of the most unique experiences that people get while doing our Leadership Management India (LMI) interventions is that they discover that their day is just at a 30-40% productive level. Most of them are aghast on this discovery which urges the change that will correct this.

To put it simply; productivity, as defined for a person, is the amount of right activity that h/she does in a given period of time to generate outputs. The more time spent on the ‘right-things-to-do’ the faster they reach their results. So, if you are in sales and you make a million worth of sales that in a month, then that is your productivity. Or if you are designing stuff and you churn out 50 completed designs a month then that is your productivity.

In India we have personal productivity levels that are lower than China and far lower than the west. If we wish to be competitive, it will not be possible unless we address this critical issue. It is not just the productivity of a worker that matters, the productivity of the managers and leaders are critical for attaining higher performance levels too.

Also read: Focus: 5 steps to find it
 

But we are creatures of habit. We enter each day, not with as clear a purpose as we ought to, and we just enter into a daily transaction, work hard get the transaction done, go home. We have a mix of habits, some good, some average and some bad ones too. Trouble is that, good or bad, we tend to stick to our patterns.

If you want to enhance yourself then here are three ideas that will benefit you:

1. Get organised

Some of us are well organised and end up doing hugely more in the given day. The level at which you are personally organised is one key determinant on how productive you are. Organised working helps you retain greater focus on things that matter. It helps you as you a have a written plan, even a clear to-do will vastly help. Organised working helps you do the first things first and reduce the chances of crisis situations.

Not being organized on the other hand will let things slip, cropping up at inconvenient times and usually in crisis and stressful mode. So, we end up firefighting. An organized chaos can somehow get things done but it will also lead to doing things in a rush and produce suboptimal work, many times needing rework. This eats up time which otherwise could have been spent productively.

Look at it as an opportunity to grow your productive levels. If you find that things get left out, not done on time, crisis management happen to you quite a lot, you are behind in your tasks – then you must improve how you rganize your work and workday.

Productivity, as defined for a person, is the amount of right activity that they do in a given period of time to generate outputs. The more time spent on the ‘right-things-to-do’ the faster they reach their results.

2. Get rid of social media interruptions

One estimate is that with the advent of social media and the smart phone we interrupt ourselves on the average once every 5 minutes. Imagine you are driving and you stop or slow down every 5 minutes. It will take you much longer to reach your destination. Isn’t it? Similarly, every task you wish to complete, with the interruption from WhatsApp, sms, Facebook, LinkedIn,  Instagram or any other medium, gets slowed down. If you are losing say 10 minutes each hour, then in six hours you have eaten up one whole hour of productive time. Tackle this with self- discipline and you are sorted and more productive.

Don’t be misled by some inner thought that this does not happen to me!

Do you catch yourself peeking at work time on social media posts often? Do you watch numbers of videos each day? Then you have certainly caught the bug.

Refuse to look during work hours, and even if you do look to check a work message – just simply ignore non work messages at that time.

Also read: Minimise clutter to maximise productivity

3. Strive to do more

It has been said that work expands to the time available for it. So, whatever your goals are, you must put that slight stretch goal on continuously. If your norm is 50 designs, then aim next month for 52, once sustained grow to 55. Or if your norm is one million in sales, then next month add 5k to it.

Continuous enhancement is the key to see increased and improved productivity.

AT LMI we have worked with millions of people worldwide and have helped them work smarter and help them achieve much more of their potential. We work on over a dozen factors that help people enhance their performance and we have seen productivity enhancements across all types of participants, even the top performers are amazed at how much productivity enhancements they see happen.

Each one of us has huge potential and while that is true what also is true is that there is always a gap between potential and performance. Thus, opportunity to more is always there but only if you purposefully seize it.

Enhancing your productivity sets you on a right path to bridge this gap between potential and attainment.

Also read: 6 tips to practice mindfulness at the workplace

Image courtesy: shutterstock.com

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