One of the best ways to increase productivity is by doing less. Huh? That is right if you are looking to increase your personal productivity start today by deciding to accomplish less. This may seem a little odd at first but IF over the period of one day the 'quality' of your work does NOT improve by doing less I than stand corrected. Each one of us has become so accustomed to cramming our schedules with more to do in an effort to accomplish a greater 'number' of tasks. Quality does not seem to be used as much as quantity anymore when it comes to measuring success. By maintaining this approach, we have jeopardized the quality of our personal performance. As a result, various jobs or tasks suffer due to the lack of time or attention devoted to their completion. Now if a job 'well done' is NOT that important to you by all means continue measuring success by the number of things you accomplish. For those who place more importance on 'how well' they complete a task here is three ways doing less will boost the quality of your personal performance. Saves Time By getting rid of non-essential clutter in your schedule you free up time to devote to those more important tasks. Prioritize each task as it relates to achieving your ultimate goal. Rank what is of the most importance insofar as achieving whatever your objectives may be and rid your schedule of the rest, Instead of adding tasks or work assignments to your ever growing list and measuring productivity by the number of things you completed you can now measure success by the quality of your work. Saves Energy As meaningless as some tasks may appear to be they still manage to 'zap' your energy leaving you fatigued and unable to operate at your full potential. This results in doing less than your best at completing any scheduled tasks and therefore a decrease in the quality of your personal performance. Any job worth doing is worth doing well! Increases Focuses With more time and energy your ability to focus is that much better allowing you to produce better results from your efforts. The quality of your work now increases as the amount of mistakes decline thereby helping to boost your personal productivity as a result. As we have discussed here it is possible to increase productivity by decreasing the number of tasks we attempt on a daily basis. By minimizing our 'to do' list we are able to spend more time and better focus on the tasks at hand. This helps to boost our personal performance since the results of our efforts are of a higher quality. By resolving to do less, our efforts benefit in the three ways we discussed above which leads to an increase in our personal productivity. With more time and focus, the tasks we complete are done right the first time. By measuring success according to quality our work efforts become more meaningful and the results are generally more effective. So lets all decide to do less tomorrow in order to have a more productive day!
About The Author TJ Philpott is an author and Internet entrepreneur based out of |
I totally agree with you, Virginia. I've learned to pare down my daily to-do lists to leave room for unexpected challenges along the way. It's certainly made me happier and I don't procrastinate as much.
ReplyDeleteCheryl