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Plan Success in 18 Minutes Per Day
You are more likely to do things if you decide when and where to do them.
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Stay Focused on Top Priorities
Most time management systems focus on organizing work, not on managing work and time around priorities.
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Connect Your To Do List with Your Key Objectives
Peter Bregman selects five things to focus on. All his daily activities are organized around a to-do list that lists those five things plus the “other five percent.”
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One More Hour of Uninterrupted Time to Think
To get more time think, you need to eliminate whatever distractions you can and learn to manage the rest. Taking advantage of the acronym ACT lets you do both.
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Say No Without Alienating Others
When you are pulled in multiple directions, something has to give. It is possible to say no without endangering your relationships.
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Five Easy Ways to Stop Wasting Time
Five simple but critical steps can prevent you from wasting your time.
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Exceptional Operations Management: Focusing on the Customer
In this video Virginia Barnes talks about an operations manager who sets a new standard for operations and project management.
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How to Delineate and Maintain Boundaries
Knowing how—and when—to delineate boundaries puts you in control of your own life.
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Are You Working at Your Maximum Level of Productivity?
To increase productivity: 1) keep it neat; organize as you go; 2) stay hydrated with water; caffeinated beverages are diuretics; 3) stop being a perfectionist; 4) quit procrastinating; set deadlines for small chunks; and 5) visualize success at the start and end of each day.
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Time is the Most Precious Resource
Good time management is crucial to success. The eight biggest time wasters are the Internet, socializing, personal communications via electronic devices, personal business, smoking, arriving late and departing early, job-hunting, and spacing out.
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What is Stress?
Positive stressors include exercise and a promotion. Even negative situations such as fear of failure can drive productivity. Stress and productivity increase together up to a point; further stress lowers productivity. Disengage at that point to recharge your batteries.
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Slip Your Electronic Leash
Paying too much attention to your email can lower your IQ by up to ten points. Constant connection to electronic devices can have the same effect as missing a night’s sleep or smoking marijuana. Disconnect to socialize, recharge, and increase productivity.
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My Day Got Away! How to Turn an Unproductive Day Around
Try these techniques when you feel like you’re not accomplishing anything.
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Reduce the Unimportant - Maximize Your Productive Potential
Laura Stack identifies four steps to take to increase your productivity.
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Choosing What to Do
Jot down every task you do in a given week. Eliminate or delegate 50-75 percent. For each remaining task, ask whether you feel frustration or reward from its completion. If it’s frustration, do it quickly or delegate the task.
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How to Match Your Time with Your Key Priorities
Track how you spend your time for a week. It sounds easy but it’s not.
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Dealing with Distractions
Distractions aren’t intentional, yet dealing with them requires deliberate action. Dorie Clark shares her tips for dealing with the distractions that waste your time.
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Sustaining Productivity
Sustainable productivity involves more than just getting a bunch of work done.
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Pace, Place, and Space
Taking control of your time and schedule requires thinking through your pace, place, and space.
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Leapfrogging Your Career
Working at high intensity for short bursts can propel your career in spectacular ways.
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Setting Boundaries for Accessibility
Smartphone technology is new enough that there are no set guidelines around accessibility.
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Focus and Take Control
Having focus is the kind of skill that makes everything else simpler.
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Get Your Time Back
With a few simple tips, you can reduce the amount of time you spend on the phone or in meetings and start taking back your time.
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Simplify to Get Rid of Clutter
When you begin to simplify, don't try to tackle everything at once.
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Get Rid of Clutter
Using the example of Southwest Airlines, Lisa Bodell illustrates how getting rid of clutter can help you focus on strategy.
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Get Simplified
To simplify, you have to change your mindset and put simplicity at the forefront of everything you do.
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Time Management and Your Personal Brand
How you spend your time is direct reflection of your priorities.
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How to Get Out of Time-Wasting Meetings
With an average of 62 meetings per month, half of which is estimated to be wasted time, learning how to how to decline meeting requests is essential to productivity.
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Three Strategies to Maximize Your Time
Although it’s impossible to have more than 24 hours in a day, strategically choosing how to use the hours you do have can make it seem like you have more time.
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Getting Annoying Tasks Done Quickly
Everyone has a lot of little tasks to do every day, but not everyone completes those tasks efficiently. Use these strategies to tackle painful tasks and get back to doing what matters.
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Effective Goal Setting
How do you put a priority on the most important things you need to do when you have so many different things to do? Dorie Clark shares three essential strategies for setting goals.
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Three Tips to Stop Feeling So Overworked and Overwhelmed
Being overworked and constantly stressed out doesn’t have to be your fate.
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Willpower as a Tool for Productivity
The more willpower you use, the less you have, until eventually you run out. Learn the strategies to keep your well full so that you can maximize your productivity.
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Self-Awareness as a Tool for Productivity
Tired of productivity tips that never seem to work? There’s a reason. Productivity starts with self-awareness and figuring out what works for you, not what works for everyone else.
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Productivity Tip: Time Chunking
When your current approach to scheduling keeps you from getting your work done, the practice of time chunking increases your productivity.
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Stress and Sleep
Establish a bedtime routine. Go to bed at the same time. Keep the room dark; even the light from the alarm clock can be disturbing. Know that waking up every 90 minutes is normal. Medications don’t provide the right kind of sleep. Sleep clinics can offer suggestions.
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The Benefits of Stress
We need stress. Stress motivates and energizes us, and helps us be better at problem solving. Our muscles are stronger. Athletes want a certain amount of stress. Without stress there is no motivation to change and progress.
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Take Micro Breaks
You can’t work for long periods with high productivity. You need breaks. They don’t need to be long. Stand up. Go for a walk. Get a glass of water. Micro breaks keep productivity high. If you have a difficult problem, step away to let the subconscious solve it.
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Break Down Big Goals
If you want to achieve a big goal, break it down into smaller goals first.
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Where You Should Put Your Time
Change is not about trying to fit more into an already overloaded schedule. It’s about putting energy into the right things and eliminating the things that don’t make a difference.
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Take Back Control with Electronic-Free Zones
Your phone isn't the one out of control; you are. Take charge of your phone to take control of your life.
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Don’t Multitask. Singletask!
Despite its perceived worth as a business skill, multitasking is detrimental to the brain and to productivity. Singletasking, however, increases focus and efficiency.
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Dealing with the Fire Hydrant of Life
We are all overwhelmed with the demands of everyday life. Most people want to push it all away. That doesn’t work. Embrace the fire hydrant. Most of the demands are unimportant, but some of them are. Prioritize based on important people and important tasks.
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The Myth of Multitasking
The time it takes to complete a task is increased by about 30 percent when you allow interruptions like phone calls and e-mails. The more you are fully focused on a task the more quickly and more thoroughly you complete that task.
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Flawed Assumptions of New Women Leaders
New women leaders often assume they have to do all, but reframing this flawed assumption prevents problems for them, their employees, and their organization.
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The Second Mindfulness Capacity: Inquiry
Inquiry stimulates a genuine interest in what is taking place in and around you. By pausing to reflect, you gain insights that lead to greater efficiency and productivity.
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Tap Into Your Unconscious Brain
Your unconscious brain — your prefrontal cortex — will help you achieve a goal if you define both the goal and where you are with respect to that goal. For example, if you want to get a promotion in six months, ask yourself frequently how you are progressing.
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Achieve Goals with If-Then Plans
Goals like lose weight and exercise more are too vague. Increase your chances of achieving goals by pairing specific conditions with specific actions. If it’s 3:00 I will walk up and down three flights of stairs — exactly what to do, and when and where to do it.
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Mindfulness Is a Powerful Tool
To manage stress and improve performance, mindfulness is a mighty tool.
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Manage Distractions with Mindfulness
Have trouble paying attention? Take a mindful pause to reset your brain and get back on task more quickly and more effectively.
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How We Spend Our Days Is How We Spend Our Lives
The quote, from Annie Dillard, is a reminder to be mindful about how we spend our days. Step back from time to time. Are you productive? Are you around people you like and admire, at home and work? Are you serving people in ways that only you can?
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Time Management and Productivity
As Allison was interviewing for the job of coaching a new CEO, he was invited to participate in a vendor selection meeting and asked Allison if he should attend. She said he had people for that. He needed to step back and consider the highest and best use of his time.
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Setting Goals in Four Dimensions
Write down your priorities for the short, medium, and long terms in four major categories: your career, your relationships and family, your role in the community, and as caretaker of your mind, body, and spirit. Review and rebalance the priorities periodically.
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Habit 2: Begin with the End in Mind
Stephen Covey advises us to create blueprints to guide our lives, as individuals, families, and organizations.
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Habit 3: Put First Things First
To put first things first we must learn to say no to other things that may be urgent but not important.
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Do the Hard Things First
An investor in Silicon Valley said the most important advice he ever received was, at the end of each day, to prioritize the top six activities for the next day. Then spend up to two hours on the highest priority activity when he first arrived in the morning.
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The Myth of Multitasking
You can have a conversation with the person in front of you and the person in the Blackberry, but not at the same time. That’s impossible.
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Choosing What Not to Do
For those times when you have too much to do, Murli Thirumale shares advice on how to choose what not to do.
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How to Manage Your Time and Energy
Managing your personal energy can help you be a more productive worker.
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S.M.A.R.T. Goals
Changing a long-held habit can be difficult, but applying the S.M.A.R.T. method gives you an edge.
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Time Management: The Six Box List
A six box to-do list can help you be much more productive on your main goals.
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Busyness Does Not Equal Productivity
Being busy doesn’t always guarantee that you’re being productive.
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The Secret to Ultra Productivity
It takes only a few simple habits to become ultra-productive.
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Email Sanity
As email arrives decide whether to delete it, file it in an action folder or a reference folder, or act on it if the action takes less than two minutes. Make your decisions quickly.
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The Keys to Getting Things Done
First, you need to know what “done” means. What is the outcome? Second, you need to know what ”doing” looks like, where it happens, and who is doing it. That is, what is the next physical action?
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Build in your Personal Reset Button: The Weekly Review
A weekly review is a one- or two-hour period when you look at your list of projects and your calendar or diary, step back, reset, clean up, see things from a different perspective, and start fresh.
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Mastering the Five Stages of Workflow
The five stages of planning are 1) define the purpose, 2) define success, 3) brainstorm the elements of success, 4) organize the elements by priority, sequence, or major components, and 5) decide what to do and who will do it.
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Priorities: Making Trusted Choices
Deciding what to do next depends on your overall strategy; where you are, the available time, and your energy level; and type of activity—whether to work items already on a list, respond to unplanned activities, or process incoming information to define the work.
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The Most Important List (The Projects List)
A projects list is the most important list to make you feel in control of you work.
