Day 4: Be productive, right now.
Productivity Action Day 4. How are you doing so far? Are you noticing anything about what’s happening with your time?
At this point it is not uncommon for you to begin to see little threads of thought and wonder.
When I work with my private and group clients on the 3 TOP Steps for Productivity it is at this point they have begun to see some light. Meaning, they are now understanding why they can’t seem to be productive.
Your Mission Possible for Productivity Action Day 4, if you so choose to accept it is:
Create clarity.
Take your list that you created on Productivity Action Day 2 (and continued with on Productivity Action Day 3) and go over it with a fine tooth comb.
You want to do two things today.
- Look at your categories, are they too broad, do you need to break them down
- Is there anything you listed that you now know you don’t want to do or be the one to do it?
Let’s say you wrote down Marketing and estimated two hours a day.
When you say marketing, what exactly are you doing for marketing? Are you going out of the office and networking, are you speaking, are you writing blog articles, are you having phone calls with others. What exactly are you marketing activities?
This is where interesting things happen and you’ll:
- Realize you don’t even know what you are doing for marketing
- Have no idea how to be effective at marketing
- See that you are doing way too much marketing with way too little results
- And many other things may come to light here
In order to create clarity, first break down your activities into the smaller activities. You may have automatically done this when you did your estimations.
It’s easy to lump things together and that’s where it gets sticky. Creating a blog post and actually going outside your office to network have two completely different time parameters, actions and mindsets involved.
Your goal is to use your time effectively.
Remember your goal is to use your Time effectively and in order to know how to do that, you need 1) know how much of it you have for work and then 2) know what it is you are doing during that time.
That is what you have been working on this week.
It may sound granular. What it is doing for you is taking you from the big picture view that you created earlier to now a smaller picture view.
You could say, the view where the rubber meets the road.
It is necessary for you to see exactly where you are spending your time and how much of it you are spending.
Only when you can see both the big and small picture, will you be able to see why the things you are doing aren’t fitting into the time you have to work and why you don’t get things completed, have too much on your list and feel frustrated. Not to mention never getting to where you want to go.
By investing the time to do this now, you’ll save yourself so much time later.
Additional References for you.
Blog: Productivity Actions That Will Help You Be Productive
Video: It’s Not That Hard To Be Productive
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