5 Secrets to Improve Your Personal Productivity

Improving your personal productivity will help you to enjoy your work and your personal life.

Most of us are not happy with where we are at with our personal performance and productivity with regards to our business and personal life. We tend to fix the challenges we face with band-aid solutions and unfortunately the same challenges will come back to us time and time again. What I learned from Eban Pagan is that you need to understand what is happening within you physically, emotionally and mentally to improve your personal productivity by developing effective habits.

People are always trying to improve their efficiency and productivity. You tend to do this by replacing the unproductive habits with more productive ones. You may read a book, listen to audios and try to adopt the great habits that the experts give. This is what exactly we need to do, all the time replacing the ineffective habits with more productive ones.

Most of the people start developing a new habit but soon go back to the same old habits. This is because they did not pay attention to what is actually going on within them. Eban Pagan refers to this as the inner game of productivity.

These are the five secrets to improve your personal productivity

  1. Clearing off your mental desk – Just like when your desk is cluttered you cannot work efficiently, when your mind is cluttered your productivity will be low.
  2. Close all your open loops -You will have things that are incomplete in your life and business. Write them down and complete them or let them go. Couple of basic examples: model you start to build never completed and lying around, haven’t done your filing for weeks and papers are lying around.
  3. Getting out of the Grey Zone -Grey zone is where we mix up all the things that we have to do. With or without realizing most of us live in the grey zone most of the time. A good example for this is we are thinking about what need to be done with our family while at work and thinking about work while with family. Ultimately you are robbing both and you will be running at 50% of your efficiency.
  4. Diagnose the things in your life that rob most of your energy -Do a bit of “self diagnosis” to find out the 20% of the things that robs 80% of your energy. Put a plan in place to get them out of your life.
  5. Habit Gravity and escape velocity This is the natural process that is happening within our mind when we try to adopt a new habit. It takes about 30 days to develop a new habit and once you do that the momentum starts to build and the new habit will become a part of you. You can break the 30 days to 3 sets of 10 days. The first 10 days will be the hardest and you will be resisting the new habit, giving yourself many excuses. Eban names this part of developing a habit as you are “Defying Gravity”. Once you pass this 10 days you will be still resisting the change but not to the extent of the initial 10 days, but you still have to consciously work on your new habit. Once you passed 20days doing the thing everyday it will start to integrate to your life. By the 30th day this will be a part of your life that you will do anyway without even realizing. This is a general pattern, but the disclaimer is for some people and for certain habits this can take longer than this time period.

 

When you understand what’s happening within you physically, emotionally and mentally it will be a lot easier to get rid of the things that rob you of your energy . Then without relying on temporary solutions you will be able to develop lifelong habits to improve your personal productivity.


Damayanthi is an online marketing coach helping entrepreneurs to achieve their maximum potential. Visit Damayanthi’s blog to read more on how to Improve Your Productivity.