Extreme Productivity

Three Big Ideas 1. Articulate you goals and rank them in order of priority. This helps you align your time allocations with you priorities. a. To be productive, you need to articulate your goals clearly and prioritize them. b. You should try hard to match how you spend your time to your top priorities. c. To enhance this match, write down your long-term Career Aims (5+years), your medium-range Objectives (3-24 months), and your short term Targets (1week or less.) d. For each type of goal, develop a clear rank order of priorities. e. To rank you Objectives, consider both supply (what you are good at and like to do) and demand (what your organization and your boss (customers) need from you f. To rank your Targets, consider the extent to which they further you high-ranked Objectives, either directly or indirectly. g. A high-ranked Target can also be a task that your boss considers to be very important, if it is consistent with an organizational Objective. h. Compare these rankings with how you currently allocate you time. If you find a mismatch, diagnose it. Whats the cause? i. Some solutions will require changes in your personal habits; many professionals procrastinate or micromanage too much. j. Other solutions will require changes in your organizations procedures or the way you deal with them. 2. Focus on the Final Product. In tackling high-priority projects, Quickly formulate tentative conclusions to guide your work. a. Focus on achieving the best results, not spending the highest number of hours at work. b. Write out the tentative conclusions of a complex problem before gathering too much data. This will focus your research. c. Formulate your conclusions in the form of rebuttable hypotheses, which can be changed by evidence and new insights. d. Stop midway through any project to revise your methods and conclusions in light of what youve learned so far.

e. If a project involves teams from multiple parts of a large organization, use the midflight check as a chance for all teams to share their intermediate results and coordinate approaches. f. To help you get started, reward yourself when you complete a task say, with ice cream or a tv show g. Set minideadlines before the actual deadline if you find yourself unable to get started. If necessary, make the minideadlines official by submitting them to your accountability part. 3. Dont Sweat the small stuff. Deal with low-priority items in a way that allows you to spend as little time on them as possible. a. Discard most of the emails and letters you receive 80% of your inbox is crammed with low-priority items. b. Respond immediately to important requests. Dont waste time by having to re-find an email or think twice about an appointment c. Multi-tasking is a good way of accomplishing low-priority tasks efficiently. Its perfectly okay to skim a report while listening to a conference call. d. Dont try to multitask if both activities are mentally demanding. The rapid switching between topics wastes your brains energy. e. Dont multitask in front of actual or potential customers; they expect your full attention. f. Reach an express agreement with your partners on what are acceptable emailing practices at meetings. g. Accept that you cant do every task perfectly. Turn in B+ for your lowpriority tasks so you can create A work where it matters more. h. Avoid the tendency to micromanage. Give your subordinates significant freedom to complete projects, even if you think that could lead to higher risk of mistakes. i. If you have the power to do so, eliminate the bureaucratic rules that force your employees to fill out needless forms to get advance approval for trivial matters. j. Learn how to deal with- get around bureaucratic impediments that force you to spend too much time on low-priority tasks.