Your Personal Productivity is a Function of Your Self-Management
The use of cell phones, faxes, e-mail and computers have not gained us more time. If anything, our time has become more precious and seems to be in shorter supply. People can reach us instantly with either printed or verbal messages. Everybody has got a business card that shows their mobile phone number, their landline number, their e-mail address and their fax number. We are accessible more than ever before. But what has all this gained us? Harris out personal productivity increased? Certainly, we have no more time available than we had before. There is no more time and consequently no more freedom.
All around us when we look carefully we can see families juggling multiple hectic schedules, exhausted workers and frazzled parents. The value of managing our time is to improve the way we live and our personal productivity. To achieve this, there are four important areas to consider.
1. Stress. Managing time well can prevent much of the stress that is present in much of our society and especially our workplaces. When we run out of time our stress levels rise. We tried to do too much in too little time. We make hasty decisions and we take actions when we are under pressure. Not the best environment for decision-making, taking action or being very productive.
2. Balance. Are you consistently working long hours? Are you putting all your energy into your work rather than your relationships? Are you addicted to your work? You need to address all those questions to establish whether or not your life is in balance. It has been established through research that people that live lives that are unbalanced between work and family and work and relaxation, live shorter lives.
3. Productivity. One of the most common words that we hear today is the word, “productivity.” We hear companies that are “belt tightening,” “downsizing,” “restructuring,” “cutting back,” and all the other phrases that mean the same thing. The answers to all these situations seem to revolve around the need to increase, “productivity.” You only have to look at the rise of the Japanese industry leaders to realize that they used productivity improvement as the tool for becoming the second largest economy in the world. There are many ways that you can improve your personal productivity. Anyone who makes a serious effort can save at least one or two hours a day. That’s 10 hours a week, 40 hours per month. That’s the same as having three months extra work time per year per person.
4. Goals Without goals it’s very hard to be a productive, and it’s very hard to manage your time because you have no focus. It is necessary to link your management of time with achieving your goals. There is plenty of evidence around to show that if you carefully look after your time, your goals will become easier and your personal productivity will increase.
With careful attention to the way that you use your time, you can gain an extra one or two hours per day. When you achieve this, you have to consider what are you going to do with this extra time. Are you going to take on more projects and use it all up? Or are you going to improve the balance of your life.