#1: BEGIN EVERY DAY WITH THE END IN MIND
“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” – Henry David Thoreau
In today’s modern world, it’s so easy to get caught up in an activity trap. Caught up in the busyness in life. You can get a lot of things done, but busyness doesn’t always equal productivity. People often don’t know what’s truly important to them and often just takes on the things that are coming their way. They keep completing their heavy todo lists, but the tasks they are doing are not correlated to a meaningful goal.
Let me tell you something. If you are not doing the things that matter, you are not being productive
True productivity is achieved when you are efficiently completing actions that move you closer to accomplishing your goals. True productivity is NOT achieved by only getting a lot of things done.
vHow do you do that?
You need to BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND.
How do you want to end up? What is success to you? You need to define this. If something doesn’t fall into that criteria, don’t bother doing it.
The point of this is to begin every day, every week and every month with the image of how you want to end up. Each part of your life, today’s behavior, next weeks behavior, can be examined in the context of what really matters to you.
It’s all about having clear goals for your life that gives you an on-point understanding of where you are right now and the steps you need to take to come closer to where you want to end up.
Create your personal goal statement. I have created a word file that you are welcome to use when you are creating your personal goal statement. This is a statement that gives you a clear overview of your goals in life. Download it here.Learn more about how you should go forward with this in my recent blog post.
Try creating your own personal goal statement, make this your guideline for your life. Every week. Take a look at it. What actions can I do this month that can bring me closer to the end goal?
#2: FOCUS ON HIGH-VALUE ACTIVITIES
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, - Ephesians 5, 15–16.
We all got 24 hours. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Success is all about making the most out of those daily 24 hours.
Any type of activity in your life has some kind of relative value compared to the alternatives. You probably agree that an hour of work where you earn a wage is more valuable than an hour mindlessly watching reality television. Some kind of value can be assigned to everything you do.
What are high-value and low-value activities?
- High-value activities: Activities that bring you closer to your goals, dreams, and desires. E.g. quality time with family, productive periods of work, exercise, etc.
- Low-value activities: Low-value activities might include watching television, overuse of social media, spending too much time checking email, gossiping with friends or co-workers, inefficient work-meetings—anything that brings negative results into your life or actions that push you further from your goals.
Ask yourself
→ What are the 20% of the activities that will yield 80% of the results?
#3: THE ANCIENT “TODO LIST”
There is a reason everybody knows what a todo list is. The standard todo list is stupidly simple and incredibly effective.
Follow these steps to set effective to-do lists.
- At the end of each day. Write down the things you want to accomplish tomorrow.
- Order your tasks by importance.
- The next day, concentrate only on the first task. Don’t move on to the second before you are finished with the first one.
- When the day is over, move unfinished items to tomorrows list. Plan the upcoming day.
- Eat, sleep, repeat.
TIP: On Sundays create a note for each day in the upcoming week. Whenever you get a task that can be performed better later in the week, write it down on e.g. TODO Friday.
#4: FOCUS ON ONE THING AT THE TIME
The ability to focus is an undervalued skill. In today society people are often encouraged to multitask. But believe me, mono-tasking changes everything.
When you are focusing on performing one task at the time it forces you to focus.
The time-management technique timeboxing is a great asset when it comes to mono-tasking. Timeboxing is simply fixing a time period to work on a specific task.Instead of working on a task until it’s done, you commit to working on it for a specific amount of time.
During a timebox, your mind should be focused on one task, the task at hand. Multitasking is forbidden. This enables you to give the task you are working on, extra focus
BTW: Want to learn more about this technique? Grab this PDF for details.
“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends. “ — Brian Tracy
It’s a wrap. Don’t let this be another one of those Quora answers you just read, NO, take action and change your life.
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