Are You Ready for the Next Level of Productivity?
by Chris Seidl, B.Eng
Are you feeling
the stress of not accomplishing all that you, your manager, or your business needs to achieve? Are you in a situation where more is expected of you with fewer colleagues and less time? Are you struggling to keep up with changes and lead a balanced life style?
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Chris Seidl
Corporate coach
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Most of us would answer yes to some and maybe all of the above questions. One way to address the issues of today’s competitive and demanding workplace is through achieving a new level of productivity.
Most of us are familiar with and practise fundamental productivity tactics. These include basic time management activities such as keeping a schedule of appointments, maintaining a contact list, using a to do list, grouping like activities together, minimizing interruptions to focus on a task, using all available resources to improve results, using a specific time for long-range planning, and effectively using tools such as personal organizers and cell phones.
Those of us not leading a balanced work life are eating on the run or skipping meals, doing email and reading late into the evening, and getting little sleep while worrying about the issues of the next day. These behaviours will catch up with you in many ways and could lead to physical problems and potentially depression.
Change your mindset
New levels of productivity that would help you achieve superior results without adding undo stress in a large part relate to our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours around productivity. In most cases, you can increase productivity by changing how you think about it.
Instead of focusing on feeling unproductive and stressed, you need to focus and believe you can make the necessary changes to achieve superior results. Change your identity into believing you can make a difference while facing the fears and forces that will try to stop you. In any organization, those who attempt to change will run into others attempting to keep the status quo. It takes courage and strong motivation to persevere.
With a strong frame of mind, the first step is to analyse how you spend your day. Look at all the key activities that you perform and the processes that you follow. For each activity, capture the benefits and costs associated with each. Benefits are how the activity applies to your objectives and your organization’s key mission (e.g. profit, customer service level, sales). The costs include time spent, people involved, and resources used.
By analysing each activity, you can rank each based on a cost/benefit analysis. In particular, about 20% of your activities account for 80% of your most productive work. The key is to maintain the focus on that all-important 20%. For the other 80% or so, it is time to be bold and decide what can be dropped altogether.
Look for inefficiencies
Once you have decided what you will continue to perform, look at how you get the job done. There are always inefficiencies in what we do. Try to change the frequency of activities or the processes that are used.
Some examples of inefficiencies are:
Is more than one person in your group attending project meetings? Can one person represent the team and report the key information to the right people?
Are you on too many distribution lists at work and spend time receiving email that you do not need? Get yourself off the distribution or tailor your email software to file these messages.
Are you getting too many interruptions that do not allow you to focus on your task? Look for ways to manage your interruptions.
As you look into current practices and procedures, you may run into one warning flag that begs more investigation. When you come across a procedure that begs the question “Why do we do it like this?” and the answer is “Because we have always done it that way,” this means that the logic behind the approach has been lost and is usually no longer relevant. This may be hard to change, but should result in productivity gains.
The above approach does not need to take a significant amount of time. In your role, you have a good feeling about what is productive and beneficial. A key skill to master is relying on your intuition as it can provide you with an answer based on your years of experience.
By using your knowledge and intuition, you are able to identify the key changes you need to make in your thoughts, choices, and daily activities, and you are bound to achieve new levels of productivity for yourself and your organization.
Chris Seidl, B.Eng, is a corporate coach and consultant in the Ottawa area specializing in leadership development and organizational change. He can be reached at Seidl@sympatico.ca.
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