How to Double Your Personal Productivity in Under Two Weeks

There just never seems to be enough time in the life of a manager to
get all the things queued up in front of you done.

Do you know that feeling?

It doesn’t have to be like that though.

Two simple skills can make you up to 16 times more productive!

Read on to see how you can double your personal productivity in two weeks.

Our headline says you can master them in two weeks but, if you really want to make your life a lot simpler and a lot more productive, you can blitz through them in 2 hours.

Most of  the rest of the time is unlearning your less productive habits and ingraining the new, more productive ones, this 12Faces article will introduce to you.

The first skill to master is the extraordinary power of the 80/20 Rule.

This says that (for example);

• 20% of what you do takes 80% of your time
• 80% of customer complaints come from 20% of the customers
• 80% of your staff problems come from 20% of the staff and, most importantly for now,
• 80% of your time can be frittered away doing non-mission critical things

Why is this handy to know?

If just  20% of your time goes to to managing important business changing events and 80% is taken up with less important and less productive events, we could say your time productivity is 20/80=0.25.

On the other hand, if you can focus 80% of your time on the important things, and just 20% on less important, your productivity is 80/20=4

The difference between high productivity and low productivity is 4/0.25= a whopping 16 times.

Master this discipline and you could be 16 times more productive.

The second skill to master is the application of the 80/20 Rule to the one resource you can never get more of – time using time management.

Ready to dramatically improve your personal productivity?

Here is your homework:

• Go to the Skills Module introduction: SM2.0 80/20 Sales Growth; Double Sales, Triple Profits 
• If it takes your fancy, register for the Skills Module
• Pause and reflect on the 80/20 concept. Consider how you could be a lot more productive (up to 16 times) if you focused as much as possible on the comparatively few things that really make an impact on your personal productivity
• Now read the article on time management – Time Management Tool 
• Can you see how dividing the demands on your time into a multi-dimensional Eisenhower Matrix helps you focus on what will contribute most to your productivity?

Now make a new habit

 We are all creatures of habit.

Many argue this is because if we had to think about everything we do (for example, how to walk), we would be overwhelmed.

Habits/routines let us do lots of things on automatic pilot.

Including wasting our time on unproductive things!

It takes a conscious effort to give up a habit/routine in favour of a new one.

How hard is it to start an exercise regime when you have not being doing it before?

The only way to start/change a habit, is to start doing it and then doing it long enough so it becomes automatic.

So now, if you are serious about dramatically improving your productivity, you have to implement the 80/20 Rule and apply it to time management as you have read in our articles.

There is no other way.

No one else can do it for you.

We said you can improve your productivity in 2 weeks.  In fact it will only take you a day or so but you have to keep repeating the effort for two weeks (at least) so that it becomes a new ingrained habit and you do it fairly effortlessly.

We have been conservative

At the top of this article, we said you can double your personal productivity.

We may well have underestimated that figure.

After all, the 80/20 Rule says it could be as high as 16 times!

But, it will be zero if you, and only you, don’t learn this new productivity habit.