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Work Smarter, Not Harder

 
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PostPosted: Dec Sun 17, 2006 12:42 pm    Post subject: Work Smarter, Not Harder Reply with quote

Work Smarter, Not Harder

The Top 10 Steps for Working Smarter, Not Harder

Time is finite. There are only sixty minutes in an hour, twenty-four hours in a day. You cannot increase the total time available, but you can dramatically affect the way you utilize it. Here are ten steps that will enable you to work smarter, not harder.

1. Be effective rather than efficient.
Efficiency is doing everything well. Effectiveness is doing well what is really important. Efficient people get bogged down in the dilemma that there simply isn't enough time to do everything, well. Effective people make choices. They focus on what needs doing, which leads us to the second point.

2. Establish a baseline of goals, objectives, and tasks.
For purposes of discussion, let's define a goal as something you plan to accomplish in a year or longer, and an objective as something to be accomplished within a year. Both goals and objectives pertain to end results whereas tasks define the steps needed to attain those results. All three are related. For example, you might have a goal of achieving financial independence within five years, objectives of getting a higher paying job and setting aside 10% of earnings in a savings account. Under each of these, you would have certain tasks, such as, to "begin investigating employment opportunities in my industry." Generally, you will want to limit your goals to no more than six, your objectives under each goal to no more than three. If you have five goals, then you could conceivably have fifteen objectives. As a practical matter, however, these will be spaced out over time so that, at any given moment, you will be focusing on a much smaller number.

3. Prioritize.
Rarely will all your goals or objectives be of equal importance. Inevitably, some will be more important than others. Prioritizing, either in terms of order of importance, (e.g. 1,2,3) or in terms of levels (most important, important, least important) is essential in order to maximize your effectiveness. In fact, one key to effective time management is to prioritize everything in terms of time, energy and resources. A good way to do this, at least at the beginning, is to ask yourself: "If I could only accomplish three of my goals, which would they be?" The end result of prioritizing--admittedly an often highly subjective process--is to enable you to become clear as to what's really important in your daily activities.

4. Analyze your current expenditures of time, energy and resources.
A good way to do this is to keep a time log for a couple of weeks but, if you do, be sure to pick a period that is fairly typical of your work and leisure activities. It's a good idea to keep track of your time in fifteen-minute increments. At the outset, you may want to set up some categories such as: work, leisure, community service, fitness--whatever is meaningful for you. This will help later when you aggregate your activities into time blocks based on a total 168-hour week. Then, a final step in your analysis is to relate your present time expenditures back to the goals and objectives you've established in Step 2. This can be an enlightening and sometimes disquieting exercise, especially if you discover that your time expenditures are poorly related to your priorities.

5. Reallocate your time in relation to your goals and objectives.
The key here is to relate available time, energy and resources to your prioritized goals and objectives. For any given day, there are two ways to do this. First, you can simply say, "Today I am going to accomplish the following tasks: ..." In some cases, that works, but often it produces more strain than gain. Another way is to allocate your activities in terms of specified time blocks (e.g., 45 minutes), then accomplish as much as you reasonably can within the allotted time before shifting to another activity. As a practical matter, you'll probably end up with some combination of the two. If, for example, you're dealing with an important tight deadline project, you might decide to work until you finish it, and when completed, schedule other activities according to the time remaining.

6. Delegate what you don't do well, what's boring, or what someone else can do better.
So far, in steps 1 through 5, we've discussed "what" you must do in order to begin working smarter with less effort and better results. Now, in these final steps, we're talking about the "how" of time management. The first "how" is to rid yourself of activities that are unproductive. The criteria for these delegations are absolute and relative competence and interest. If there's something that you don't do well, it only makes sense to get someone else to do it, even if you have to exchange services. Some examples of delegating tasks that consume time and energy: having a cleaning service, getting your car washed professionally, or using a software program to keep track of your finances. A clever way of expressing this notion is a phrase coined by Thomas Leonard, founder of Coach University. Thomas has been known to remark: "I don't do errands"! How many of us spend countless hours doing things that really aren't that important or that can be done by someone else?

7. Be ruthless in eliminating non-essentials and in making your work/living space time effective.
Do you get magazines that you never read? Are there clothes in your closet that you never wear? Is your living room or office cluttered with bric-a-brac or memorabilia? Does it take you forever to find that occasional file? What these questions are getting at is a harsh fact of time management: everything that consumes time, space, energy, or resources unproductively detracts from your effectiveness. Here are some implications of "yes" answers to the above questions: Cancel your subscriptions to those periodicals you're not reading. Get rid of the stuff in your office or home that adds to that cluttered look. Take time to reorganize and weed-out your files so that: (a) frequently used materials are readily accessible, (b) those used less-often are stored more remotely, and (c) the stuff that's filed "for record purposes only" gets moved to permanent storage. Remember, everything that you don't actively use or regularly enjoy uses up time, space or energy unnecessarily.

8. Tailor your activities to your work style. Are you an early riser?
Do you like to get up slowly, meditate, and do creative work first thing, or would you rather defer thoughtful pursuits until later in the day? When is your energy at its peak? Are there times during the day when you just want to work quietly, focused on a single project? Your answers to these questions should be factored into your daily planning. If, for example, your creative time is in the early morning, you might want to consider going to bed earlier so that you can utilize these early golden hours.

9. Build "reserves."
When faced with more than they can get done, most people elect to work harder and longer with an entirely predictable result: productivity, work quality, energy, and enthusiasm all begin to slide. Creating reserves of time, space, energy, money, etc. provides a psychological buffer against the mind-set that says, "I've got to work harder." While we're on the subject, there are three excellent ways to build reserves: meditation, cat-naps, and walks. Meditation establishes a deep sense of quiet that, with practice, can carry into your normal activities, thus reducing stress levels. Cat-naps (you can train yourself, through meditation, to cat-nap for prescribed periods, say ten minutes), can give you renewed energy and sharpness. Finally, taking a walk is a wonderful way to brush away the mental cobwebs that form after a long stint at the desk.

10. If, after all this, you're still being pressured by circumstance, consider "radical restructuring."
It's normal, when feeling the pressures of conflicting priorities, to think, "I've got to get this done" when, in reality, a better reaction would be to ask: "Should I really be doing this at all?" If you're operating under the relentless pressure of events, consider the possibility that the answer is NOT in working harder or longer, but in radically restructuring your goals, objectives, priorities, and activities so that you are able to achieve more of what you really want. And here's the hooker: often, the goals we set for ourselves are what you might call, "should" goals, that is, they're things that you feel obligated to do, versus things that you really want to achieve. One way to begin to get a handle on this issue, (part of restructuring) is to write your own epitaph--or description of what you'll be most remembered for by your friends and loved ones. Writing your epitaph, especially if it follows an extended and unsuccessful effort to "work harder" can be a life-giving exercise! Try it, you'll like it.

Submitted by Shale Paul, http://www.shalecoach.com/ © 1997-9, by Coach U
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