13b. How To Restructure For Productivity
Today I’m talking about two strategies.
One is to identify how much time you spend “at work and how much of that time is productive.
That will give us information.
Let’s say that you worked six hours productively out of eight, now you have two hours to do something else with.
You can either be done after six hours, just be super productive during that time period, and done early, or you can figure out how you’re wasting time and stop.
One of the ways that I used to waste time, and sometimes I still get stuck doing, is I have a to-do list I want to get done.
I do a little of each thing.
The days that I do that, I’m asking myself to shift in and out of too many different skill sets.
It eats time.
I can end up throwing other activities in there and get sidetracked.
A technique to help is to look at all the things you want to get done in the week, month, or quarter.
What are you focused on?
Breaking that into the types of tasks.
Perhaps one full day you work on one type of task.
It is a creative task one day.
The next day is a research task.
The next morning it’s a conglomeration of communication, and maybe in the afternoon it’s something completely different.
When you do that, you give your mind opportunities to focus and get productive on each type of task.
That works extremely well.
So once you are done with that block of time, you shift your mind to the next total mindset you need to be in.
By the end of your day, if you are highly productive, you should be able to break out of your work like a child running home from grade school, where you finished your work and feel free.
I want that for you.
If you can create free time every single day, every single evening, then every day you come to your work fresh, not begrudging the time you are spending on work.
If you have a 9-5 type of job working for someone else, you can use these same principles to design the time you have control of.
My goal today with you is to help you analyze and manage your productivity to figure out what you can do with your use of time.
Can you become more productive so you are not trailing work into the weekend or evening, or can you have extra hours off every single day so you are fresh when you work?
Analyze your schedule.
Make some decisions about how you can become more productive.
Let’s see if you can free up more downtime.