This quote by a famous American entrepreneur, Jim Rohn, seems to be helpful advice as we continue to work from home, isolated from our colleagues, due to the ongoing pandemic. Some of us may struggle to self-motivate, keep on track and be as productive as we might be in a communal work environment. Many are now working from home permanently and it is very easy to get distracted and be underproductive. There are a number of good concepts and techniques to help motivate and maintain momentum with our work schedules. They help us to be productive and time efficient with tasks and minimize the temptation for distraction and procrastination. Working alone can be frustrating, leave us feeling low, dissatisfied and prevent us from achieving our full potential.
The 80/20 Rule
Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian economist and sociologist born in the late 1840s, realised that 80% of Italy’s income was earned by 20% of the population. This lead to him to understand that most things in life are not distributed evenly. The idea that the majority of results come from a small number of causes became the “80/20 Rule”. If you look around you can see evidence of this everywhere and we can apply this rule in our own lives to become more productive. Here are some examples:
20% of tomato plants produce 80% of tomatoes
20% of group members produce 80% of the work
20% of the features in an app. produce 80% of usage
20% of customers at a restaurant or bar contribute to 80% of sales
20% of students in a classroom raise their hands 80% of the time
20% of the work yields 80% of the profit
This seems quite counterintuitive, but you can see evidence of this theory everywhere. What are the 80/20 rules in your life and do you think you might be able to adjust the way you do things taking this into account, to get better results?
If you are interested in this rule, here are some steps which might help you to put it into practice:
1. Determine your passion. What do you love doing? If you could have any job in the world, what would it be?
2. Find your 20%. Categorise each daily activity as an 80% or 20% task
20% Tasks – high leverage tasks that yield the most value for you and produce the greatest momentum towards your goal. They also provide the greatest return on investment. Most importantly – only you can complete these tasks. Examples are: (as a Health Nutritional Coach) designing content for an on-line course, experimenting with new healthy recipes, preparing for a coaching session.
80% Tasks – tasks that have a false sense of urgency or are not pushing you closer to your goal. These tasks can be delegated to someone else. Examples are: (as a Nutritional Health Coach) grocery shopping, doing laundry, posting on social media and designing a website.
Once you are very clear on your 20% tasks pushing you towards your goals you can take effective action on these each day. You can do this by diarising these tasks and perhaps getting someone to hold you accountable for them for added impetus. This prevents you from getting side-tracked and distracted by other tasks that need to be done but are not in your 20% category.
The Eisenhower Matrix
Dwight Eisenhower was a 5-star General in the Second World War and the thirty-fourth President of the United States. He famously said "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important and the important are never urgent". Stephen Covey, author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” repackaged this insight into a simple tool to prioritise tasks, known as the “Eisenhower Matrix", (and also known as "The Eisenhower Box", "The Time Management Matrix" and "The Eisenhower Method"). It is a framework for prioritisation which helps you get rid of time wasters in your life and helps you to focus on your goals.
It is very helpful if you:
Have a tendency to get side-tracked from your priorities reacting to everything that happens during your day.
Tend to be busy but don’t feel what you do achieves what you want
Are clear on your ultimate goals but never make progress on them
Find it hard to delegate things to others or say “No” to requests
The matrix helps us consider the long-term outcomes of our daily tasks and focus on what will make us most effective, not just most productive. It helps us to visualise all our tasks in a matrix of urgent/important.
It is pretty simple to use and can make an enormous difference to our productivity and effectiveness in all areas of our life.
Do – things with clear deadlines and consequences for not taking immediate action. For example: finishing a project for a client, submitting an article for publication, responding to some emails and collecting your ill child from school.
Decide – Activities without a set deadline that move you closer to achieving your goals. These are easy to put off. For example: strategic planning, continuous professional development, exercise and networking.
Delegate – things that need to be done but don’t require your personal touch and special skills. For example: uploading blog posts and posting on Instagram, responding to some emails and grocery shopping.
Delete – distractions that make you feel worse afterwards. Sometimes these are fine, but only in moderation. For example: scrolling social media, watching Netflix, playing video games and eating junk food.
Weekly Compass Exercise
This is a good technique which helps us use our goals to guide our tasks. This makes sure our weekly priorities are aligned with our goals and that we are generally clear on our priorities.
1. Make a list of your weekly activities. Underline the non-negotiable ones
2. Draw up a chart with 3 columns and write your top 3 goals for this year at the top of each
3. List below each of the 3 goals, the weekly activities that will bring you closer to achieving them
4. Anything you have not underlined in your list of weekly activities or written in your chart are negotiable tasks. When your calendar becomes full you have to decide what to do with these negotiable tasks. You can delegate these to others, reprioritise or re-evaluate them. You can ask yourself if your non-negotiable tasks are really so and whether some of them can be delegated too?
If you are creative and open to re-prioritising your weekly activities it can help you to cope with life’s shifts. If you use this technique regularly then it can help you to stay focussed and achieve what you desire
Big Rocks Demonstration
This is a great visual exercise and worth viewing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV3gMTOEWt8
It is a great concept when it comes to time management. It is so simple but very effective and hammers home the importance of:
1. Identifying your top five or six big things that you want to get done at any particular time.
2. Making sure you get these done before anything else, no matter what.
3. Plan this out carefully by prioritising the tasks required to achieve them through diarising, getting support from others to hold us accountable and not allowing ourselves to get distracted with other less important tasks.
4. Keep going until you achieve the desired goals.
If you approach things this way then the key things get done and the smaller, less important things often naturally fall into place afterwards. Some smaller tasks even turn out to be unnecessary in the end.
The Big Rocks Demonstration can be followed with the Time Management Tool below.
Time Management Tool
This is a useful way to start your week when you know how many hours you want to devote to your work and want to keep yourself on track. You have a start date and end date and total number of hours written at the top. You then categorise your tasks under the following headings:
Start Date……. End Date………. Total Number of Hours………..
1. Big Rocks (itemise)
2. Top Rocks (itemise and put number of hours set out for them)
3. Other Rocks (itemise with number of hours set out for them)
4. Miscellaneous (itemise with number of hours set out for them)
5. Accomplishments
It is good to have the accomplishments at the bottom of this plan so that you can be encouraged by what you have already managed to achieve.
Pomodoro Technique
Another effective way of quantifying and tracking our time, as well as keeping us focussed and on task is the well-known technique developed by a university student, Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. Francesco struggled to focus on his studies and complete assignments. He decided to buy himself a kitchen timer in order to get himself to work in short focussed 10 minute slots of time. He went shopping and chose one in the form of a tomato. Pomodoro is tomato in Italian and he named the technique after it, due to it's success.
The simple, yet very effective technique is as follows:
1. Get a “To Do” list and a timer
2. Set it for 25 minutes
3. Mark off 1 tomato and what you have achieved
4. Have a 5 minute break
5. After you have marked off 4 tomatoes take a 25 minute break
6. Continue like this as long as you have set yourself the time to work in any given day
This technique helps to break down large, overwhelming tasks into bitesize, actionable and realistic action steps. The biggest step is the first one and then you tend to be on a roll. Working in a very focussed and intense way for short amounts of time prevents us from:
getting distracted easily
working past the point of optimal productivity
helps if we have a lot of open-ended work that take unlimited amounts of time
if we are overly optimistic when it comes to how much you can do in a day
helps us a lot if we enjoy gamified goal setting, helping you to keep improving time after time
helps us track our progress and keep us motivated particularly with big, lengthy tasks/projects
As you can see from a few I have described here, there are so many ways we can get the most out of our days and maximise our productivity. Feeling in control of our time is a great feeling and although it is not always possible. There are however, many things we can do to try to avoid wasting this precious commodity:
Being clear on exactly what our goals are and the “why” behind them is absolutely key. We rarely get into a car and drive off without knowing where we are going, unless we have a lot of free time to waste and fuel to use up.
Breaking these goals down into realistic action steps stops us from feeling overwhelmed and put off starting new ventures.
Setting an alarm for a defined amount of time can be a very effective way to focus the mind and do intense and successful chunks of work. These accumulate into completed goals over time.
Eliminating multi-tasking is often a better way to do things better. We can often do too many things at once and end up doing none of them well. Single pointed focus on one thing at a time is often much more effective.
Simple things such as putting our phones on silent and email notifications off for chunks of our day enable us to be much more productive.
Creating a comfortable, cosy and quiet work place often helps too.
Remembering to regularly assess our approach to our goals and tasks is also important.
Being clear on boundaries and being able to say "No" to requests and the needs of others where appropriate is very important too. It is very easy to be robbed of your precious time by others.
Having a list of routine, small, quick tasks which need to be done is very useful. When you have five or ten minutes spare while waiting for someone, you can get these small things done, making maximum use of every minute of your day.
Making sure we have rewards for our progress. It is much more motivating to work hard each day and each week if we have fun and enjoyable things to look forward to in our free time and to have a plan in place for this too.
I work on many of these concepts and techniques very successfully with my clients and I hope you will also find them useful.
Sources:
The Institute for Integrative Nutrition
Comments