book.chapter 1.Principles of personal efficiency

To enhance personal productivity, plan your day in advance, choose a suitable productivity method, and set a single daily goal. Planning ensures you know what tasks need completion and their timelines. A productivity method keeps you focused, while a daily goal helps concentrate efforts. Additionally, create a workspace with natural light to improve well-being and eliminate distractions for better focus. Prioritize your objectives Begin by writing down all your professional tasks and potential projects on a few sheets of paper. Categorize these tasks into short, medium, and long-term goals, assigning one or two immediate action steps to each. Reflect on your career aspirations, strengths, and what is expected of you by your boss or society to prioritize your goals. Create a list of enabling targets, which help advance your goals, and assigned targets, which are obligatory tasks, ranking them by importance. Evaluate how you currently spend your work hours, including time wasted on administrative tasks, and plan for the coming year. Address any discrepancies between your priorities and time usage by creating a dynamic to-do list. This list should be updated daily with minor adjustments and reviewed in detail each weekend, adding new priorities and removing less important or delegated tasks. Keep the list concise for effectiveness. Remember, as Robert Pozen notes, most professionals allocate less than half their time to top priorities, suggesting the need for personal habit or organizational procedure changes to align activities with goals. Visualize the final outcome To effectively complete high-priority tasks, it's essential to concentrate on the desired outcome rather than the time spent. Start each project by establishing a preliminary conclusion, then gather data to confirm or revise your hypothesis. This approach prevents getting bogged down in excessive analysis. Midway through the project, take time to reflect on whether there's a more efficient method to reach your goal, especially if working with a team. This is an opportunity to align efforts and share findings. Additionally, rewarding yourself and your team after accomplishing significant tasks can build momentum. It's important to recognize that productivity is about the value delivered, not hours worked. For those accustomed to hourly billing, consider shifting to value-oriented billing to align incentives with efficiency. This could include fixed fees, contingent fees, or retainers. Adopting a hypothesis-driven approach from the outset, akin to the scientific method, can prevent wasting time on unnecessary information gathering and lead to more effective project management. Expedite minor tasks To boost productivity, start by quickly discarding non-essential emails and letters, as they likely constitute about 80% of your inbox. Respond to important messages promptly and eliminate the rest. Embrace the "Only Handle It Once" (OHIO) principle to deal with low-priority items efficiently, either by doing them immediately or deleting them. When multitasking, choose less demanding tasks like reading documents during calls or answering emails in transit, but avoid it during high-focus tasks or customer interactions. Set clear expectations with colleagues regarding email response times and encourage selective sharing to reduce inbox clutter. Accept that not everything requires perfection, especially low-priority tasks; focus on excelling in critical projects instead. Avoid micromanaging; trust your team to handle projects and simplify procedures to remove unnecessary bureaucratic approvals, allowing you to concentrate on high-value work.