Brian Tracy presents an 11-point checklist for increasing personal productivity. The speaker emphasizes goal-setting, written action plans, prioritization, focused single-tasking, lengthening productive time, working with urgency and skill alignment, batching tasks, and eliminating low-value steps to achieve more in less time.
Hello there. Personal productivity is a key differentiator between people who succeed in their chosen fields and those who do not. Individuals at the top of their game have learned how to achieve more and better results in less time than most people. Increasing your productivity is a critical step in achieving your personal and professional goals and creating the success you envision for yourself. To achieve a high level of productivity, focus on the following 11 key areas. 1. Develop clear goals and write them down. Because higher productivity begins with clear goals, goal setting is a key component of our coaching program. As you know, a goal must be specific and measurable to be effective in guiding your behavior. It must reflect your beliefs and be within your power to achieve. 2. Write a clear action plan. If you want to turbocharge your productivity, make sure that you have a clear written plan of action. Every minute you spend in careful planning will save you as many as 10 minutes in execution. 3. Set your priorities. The third step is always to prioritize your list. Analyze your list before you take action. Identify and start with the high value tasks on your list, especially the most important. 4. Concentrate and eliminate distractions. In this step you choose a high value activity or task. Start on it immediately and then stay with it until it's done. Focusing single mindedly on one task allows you to complete it far more quickly than starting and stopping and coming back to it over and over again. It's one of the great secrets of time management is called single handling. Touch the job only once. Number five Lengthen your workday but increase your time off. By starting your workday a little earlier and working through lunchtime and staying a little later, you can become one of the most productive people in your field. You can add two to three hours of productive time each day with without really increasing the length of your day at all. Number six Work harder at what you do when you're at work. Concentrate on work all the time you're there. Don't squander your time or fall into the habit of treating your workplace as a community where socializing is acceptable. Many people look upon the workplace as a continuation of school where you go to play with your friends and so they come to work and they play with their friends for as much as 50% of every every working day. Don't let this happen to you. 7. Pick up the pace at work. Develop a sense of urgency and maintain a quicker tempo in all your activities. Get on with the job. Dedicate yourself to moving quickly from task to task. Number 8 Work smarter. Focus on the value of the tasks you complete while the number of hours you put in is important. What matters most is the quality and quantity of results you achieve. It's not activity, it's accomplishments. 9 Align your work with your skills. Skill and experience count. You achieve more in less time when you work on tasks at which you are especially skilled or experienced. Always do things you're better at because you get much more done. 10 bunch your tasks. Group similar activities and do them all at the same time. Making all your calls, completing all your estimates or reports or preparing all your presentation slides at the same time allows you to develop speed and skill at each activity. You get better and better and do it faster and faster. 11 cut out steps in the process. Put several parts of the job together into a single task and and eliminate several steps wherever you can. Cut lower value activities completely. These are all skills you can learn with practice until they become automatic and you will then get vastly more done and have more time off.
