Today is the beginning of a short series on productivity and effectiveness. You will learn how to better focus on your tasks, and get more out of your time. I am a big opponent to the idea of ‘time management’ because the mere concept is just silly. We all of the same amount of time. What we all must learn to do instead is manage ourselves, and make better use of the 
time that we do have. The true currency here is energy. Wouldn’t you like to be able to reduce the amount of time that you spend working while multiplying the amount of work that you actually get done? Of course you would. The problem is that either you do not know how to make the most of your time, or you have not consciously made the decision to focus on increasing your effectiveness daily.
My March Challenge
During February, I did not prepare an ideal challenge or habit change for myself, however March is going to be a different story. I learned a lot last month, yet I did not get as much done as I had hoped. I have decided that the theme for March is going to be a focus on and PRODUCTIVITY AND EFFECTIVENESS.
I challenge YOU to join me, or to find your own theme for March and stick with it. Make a list of things that you would like to change, and declare a 30 day challenge for yourself starting today. For me, I will make a constant conscious effort to improve my productivity and effectiveness as a daily habit, rather than only applying these principles every now and then when it is convenient.
I have always known many of the laws of productivity and effectiveness, yet I tend to not apply them every day. In order to effectively achieve the goals that I have set for the month of March, I will be following these laws which I will write about. If you apply these laws without fail in your life daily, you might just be surprised at the results that you can achieve.
With that short spiel about myself, I will move on to the first law of productivity
Law #1 – Set limits
By creating limits, our creativity is expanded. This is actually a universal principle which may be applied to many areas of life. By the context of productivity, it allows for greater focus.
For instance let’s say you are a home designer, and you are given a task to create a masterpiece. You are given free reign to create anything you can imagine, and there is no time limit. Chances are, you will spend an enormous time designing this home and you will never feel complete.
On the other hand, imagine you are given a strict budget, a 1 month time limit, and the home must appeal to a middle class family of 3 who is into retro style living with a mix of new age technology. I bet your mind is already racing with ideas and you aren’t even a home designer, are you?
The same idea applies to you no matter what profession or task you are involved in. Next time you sit down to work on a task, see how far you can limit yourself. Set time limits, budgets, and even constraints on what you can do and in what context etc. It is magical.
One of the best examples of this is scheduling blocks of time in which you are allowed to work on something. You must decide what works best for you, however for most projects a good block of time would be 2 hours. Use a website such as e.ggtimer.com to track how much time you have left. Take a 15-30 minute break and then jump into another block of work.
That is all for today. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS for the rest of the series! So, will you take the challenge? Have you had any breakthroughs by using the method discussed today? I look forward to seeing your comments and hearing about your success!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 0 comments… add one now }