6 Powerful Tips to Increase Your Productivity

Do you want to increase your productivity? This is a desire that is shared by a lot of people worldwide and the good news is that there are simple ways that exist for people to do this. In this article I will be sharing 4 tips that will be quite useful when it comes to increasing your output and at the same time deal with procrastination.

Tip #1: Prioritize

Sorting out the priorities is one of the most important skills that you will need to learn if you want to increase your productivity. You are not forced to do each and every job in one go and the key here is to choose the most important ones. This is why it might be important that you set some time apart each morning to prioritize your task. Some people like to create a to-do list which they will follow each day in order to keep them focus.

Tip #2: Delegate

No man is an island and sometimes you will need to learn how to delegate some of your tasks if you want to increase your productivity. Some people have some highly specialized skills and can accomplish some tasks much more quickly than you. It might therefore be more sensible to delegate such tasks as it can be a major time saver for you. One possible idea will be for you to seek the assistance of a virtual worker that will allow you to not only save time doing these jobs but also allow you to cut down cost.

Tip #3: Beat procrastination

This is a major problem for most people and can hinder productivity a lot. Procrastination is all about postponing task that you can do today for a later time. This is where it might be important that you learn how to motivate yourself in order to accomplish more. Also it might be important that you identify your more productive hours of the day. One simple tip that I often use is to accomplish the most difficult or boring task first thing in the morning when still fresh and leave the much easier task for the afternoon.

Tip #4: Change environment

In some cases changing your environment can also help you to boost your productivity. For instance you might want to switch workplace and try to work from somewhere else where you will feel more productive. This can be easy to achieve for those that work from home as you can try to work in some different room or even in the garden if you feel like. The key here is to make sure that you break from your everyday routine in order to provide a mental refresh.

Tip #5: Beware of perfectionism

Some people spend far too much time on perfecting tasks that would have been otherwise quite acceptable. Sometimes we pressurize ourselves in order to make a task as perfect as possible when we could have done it much more quickly. Getting rid of this mentality can help us accomplish far more work than we could have thought possible.

Tip #6: Reward yourself

Working intensively for a long period of time can give rise to burn out. It is therefore important that you learn how to reward yourselves from time to time if you want to keep yourself motivated. For instance you might want to have some ice-cream for every hour you spend at your desk or may be go on your favorite website. Doing this will allow you to focus yourself on the task ahead and ensure that you get your work done.

There are many different productivity tips that exist and the key here is to find the ones that fit your situation. Although you might consider some of your tasks as chores, it is only after accomplishing them that you will really understand the real benefits of these productivity tips.

Robert Bellarmine is the writer behind Visitask.com where he covers topics related to project management and other management topics as well.

Passion First – A Different Approach to Prioritizing

A lot has been said about prioritizing. We all know that we’re expected to focus on the most important, time-sensitive tasks and only then attend to other, less important tasks. The question is: what is important? In the absence of a definite deadline, what should we really start with?

1. First, there are those items that do have a definite deadline (a letter announcing next month’s campaign, a presentation for tomorrow’s meeting and of course daily emails and meetings) which we just can’t postpone. These should be taken care of right now or we will simply miss the train. With no other choice in hand, we usually rank these at the top of our priority list.

2. Then, we have the paperwork. This includes bills, invoices and ongoing reports that almost any job entails and almost any worker resents. We often find ourselves pushing these tasks back to the bottom of the priority list but at the same time, feeling extremely guilty about the ever-growing pile or outlook reminders that are getting harder and harder to ignore.

3. Last, among the many items on our “to do” list, there are a few tasks that we actually feel passionate about: An article we’re excited to write, a presentation for which we have an exceptionally creative idea or a lunch meeting with a fun, interesting client. The problem is that these items are not always considered “high priority” hence, we feel at fault spending time on them now and find ourselves putting them aside in favor of the due-tomorrow-report or the financial analysis we had promised ourselves to work on this week.

So what did we have? First, the time sensitive tasks, then the must-do admin work and last, the less-urgent, more enjoyable items. Guess what? If you choose (very logically) to prioritize your “to do” list in this order, you will probably end up with very little efficiency and one big frustration. Very quickly, you will find yourself updating your status on LinkedIn / Facebook, browsing the web or even calling your mother-in-law: anything to avoid the dull day ahead of you. Your low motivation and lack of investment in any of these tasks will translate into mediocrity at best.

Prioritize with your heart and start with the tasks you’re most passionate about!

I know it sounds like a promotional slogan for an irresponsible decision-making process (have some faith in me, will you?) but there are some pretty sound arguments to following your heart.

First, remind yourself the reason you took this job / stayed in this position for 20 years / started this company in the first place: you wanted to make a living AND enjoy what you do! This goal should guide and inspire your every career-related decision.

Now, if you start your day with a task you enjoy, not only will you be more energized and motivated for the rest of the day, but you will probably maximize your performance and the successful accomplishment of all your daily tasks. Imagine yourself as a kid, running outside to play when that was exactly what you’ve been waiting for all afternoon.

Now, imagine being sent out to play “because mom needs some quiet time.” How invested were you in that playtime? In other words, working on that presentation just when you feel a great idea popping up in your mind and you’re all eager and steamy about it is nothing like working on the same presentation when the deadline is approaching. Furthermore, by postponing your “passion” to later in the day /week, you might lose momentum and either forget your brilliant idea altogether or approach it without enthusiasm, which is almost as bad as letting it go.

Now, since I promised prioritizing responsibly, here’s the plan: bribe yourself to complete some “must-do” work with every fun work you get to do. Just like you “bribe” kids to eat some veggies with their pizza, you are ought to pay for starting with a favored task by doing some agonizing paperwork / due-tomorrow task right after. In other words, you kick-off the day with something you enjoy doing but make sure to follow with some other essential work so you can still complete all your tasks on time.

Overall, we are probably looking at a similar balance of enjoyable vs. not-so-fun workload. The difference is in how we prioritize our tasks to keep ourselves motivated, enthusiastic and efficient when approaching each one of them.

It all comes down to following our hearts. The rest will follow.

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Daniella Balaban established DB Business Coaching in 2008. Her coaching training from the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and her background in business and marketing add to make the formula for helping business women and women entrepreneurs find balance and success in their life and career.
http://www.dbbusinesscoaching.com/

How to Tame Your Home Office Chaos in Seven Days

If your home office has become an explosion of paper and disarray it may feel like a hopeless goal to ever get organized. You may have the best intentions to spend a day getting everything in order but somehow end up with a bigger mess than you started with.

Help is on the way! Often, creative entrepreneurial types are so busy with new ideas and following their passion that the organizational side of their work space gets terribly neglected.

If you are one of those passionate individuals, driven to succeed, it can be discouraging when you try to get everything organized in just one day. Getting discouraged can be a big downer that affects your creative state of mind.

Take a deep breath and use these simple steps to tame the chaos in just seven days.

Day 1

This day is for making piles. Yes, you already have piles and that is part of the problem. Let’s keep it simple; one pile is for junk you will shred, one is for personal papers to be filed, one is for business papers to be filed and one is for ideas or future reference.

Day 2

This day is for shredding the junk. Ignore the other piles for now. After you have done your shredding it is time to evaluate the flow of your office. If you have enough storage space, great, if not then write down what you realistically need. You may need to rearrange things a bit to make your office easier to manage. Write your plans to arrange your office down but do not start doing it today.

Day 3

Today you will put the remaining piles in tidy bundles. Do not try to put them in folders or drawers yet, just stack them neatly.

Day 4

Today is a big day! Today you will rearrange the furniture and equipment in your office so that it is optimal for the work you do there. There will probably be some things you find you do not really need or some things you need but do not have, take notes!

Day 5

It’s time to go shopping. You have made notes and know that you will need some way of organizing the piles left over. This is a personal choice but you will need to make sure that whatever you choose allows for the items to be clearly labeled. If there were things you noted that would help you be more productive in your work space now is the time to get them.

Day 6

You are ready to tackle those neatly stacked piles! Since you have already de-cluttered your space and have appropriate storage, this is a breeze!

Day 7

Today you will enter your office with a whole new feeling. The furniture and equipment necessary to be productive flows and you no longer have paper everywhere. Everything has a place and it is clearly labeled so you can not only find what you are looking for, you can also promptly file new documents.

By breaking up the tasks needed to create order from chaos you will regain a sense of control and need never waste your creativity again.

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Michael has been writing articles online for 10 years. When he is not writing about self development, he writes about health and fitness. Visit his latest website http://www.icecreamfreezersreview.com/ which helps you find the best ice cream maker so that you can make delicious ice cream.

Kill Busywork: The One Skill to Focus On What Matters

Imagine everything you do could fall into one of three buckets:

1. Bad Work.

2. Good Work.

3. Great Work.

I’m not talking about the quality of the work you deliver – I’ve no doubt that’s fine. I’m talking about the meaning the work has for you and the impact it makes.

Let me explain.

Bad Work is the work that makes no difference yet consumes your time and energy. Put less politely, it’s those soul-sucking, spirit-draining activities that make you question how you ever ended up spending precious moments of your life on anything like this. Endless meetings. Paperwork. Busywork.

Good Work is most likely the work you do most of the time, and you do it well. It’s necessary stuff that moves things along and gets things done. Organizations are primarily set up to do Good Work: create a product or service, do it efficiently, sell it to the world.

There’s nothing wrong with Good Work– except for two things.

First of all, it’s endless. Trying to get your Good Work done can feel like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain, a never-ending task. And second, Good Work is too comfortable. The routine and busy-ness of it all is seductive. You know in your heart of hearts that you’re no longer you stretching yourself or challenging how things are done. Your job has turned into just getting through your workload week in, week out.

And then there’s Great Work. Great Work is what you were hoping for when you signed up for this job. It’s meaningful and it’s challenging. It’s about making a difference, it matters to you and it lights you up.

It matters at an organizational level too. Great Work is at the heart of blue ocean strategy, of innovation and strategic differentiation, of evolution and change. Great Work sets up an organization for longer-term success.

The challenge is that Great Work carries with it uncertainty and risk as well as impact and reward. We’re pulled towards what Great Work promises and pushed away by its threat. We want to free ourselves from the regularity and comfortable rut that is Good Work, and yet we’re tugged back by the familiarity and certainty that it provides.

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The Hidden Art of Achieving Creative Flow

Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?

All of these times you were in a state of flow.

Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi of the University of Chicago, who has studied the phenomena his whole career. Daniel Pink reintroduces the concept in his new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Many people flow through their lives in an effortless fashion, while countless others have a difficult time achieving a flow state.

Why flow is hard to achieve
Flow is a moment in time when you’re both challenged at the activity that you’re doing, and when you also have complete autonomy in the task you’re conducting.

We engage in flow under your own volition, with a skill which we’ve had some amount of experience.

If you’re not flowing, it’s probably because you aren’t allowing yourself to be challenged, you’re completely overwhelmed, or someone else is holding you back.

The majority of my experience with flow has been with dance and writing. I’ve studied dance for many years, and one of the technical skills that dancers work on is called improvisation. Improv is very tricky in dance. You have to turn off your mind and simply dance with your instincts.

When you’ve mastered improv dance, you’ve reached the sweet spot between your brain transferring commands to your nervous system. There is no longer any thinking involved, as thinking in improv dance will make everything stop. There just isn’t any time for brainwork when you are constantly moving.

Csikszentmihalyi hypothesizes that these moments of flow occur because we’re simply activating too many neurological functions. Because of this we no longer have capacity to be aware of what functions we’re engaging in. So the ‘conscious of me’ part of the mind switches off, your awareness of yourself slips away, and you just do.

You’re simply flowing in the the present moment
I have also experienced flow in writing. I think it’s very important for writers to engage in flow. A lot of writers stop and meticulously edit their work after every sentence, but writing this way (for most people) is counterproductive.

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