Guest Post: The #1 Mistake About Productivity

This is a guest post by Oscar From Freestylemind where he blogs with with the intention of touching other people’s life by providing real world information on personal development and personal experiments regarding all areas of life

The concept of productivity was originally born inside big corporations where employers were looking for ways to increase the amount of value produced by their employees while maintaining the same amount of working hour Their goal was to produce more value with less resources.

Today we use the word productivity in a multitude of new ways. We are in fact genuinely interested in how to get more out of ourselves especially outside a working environment. in fact productivity can be applied at home to pursue our dreams and to develop a high sense of accomplishment. In short, productivity is the kick in the ass we need to start following our dreams.

One of the major differences between working for yourself and working for someone else, is that when you work in the comfort of your home, you often don’t have a time limit.

When you are at work, you know that you’re going to leave at 5 pm no matter what (this, of course, is a generalization), and that if you don’t want to hear your boss yelling at you, you’ll better finish what you were doing.

When you are at home instead, you don’t have any limit, so you could have the illusion to have an infinite amount of time. In fact, the number one reason people wants to leave their job is that they want to be independent.

Of course, we all know that in reality our time is limited, but without actually having a specific deadline, it’s easy to postpone something for later or for tomorrow.

Not having a time limit or deadline is the first mistake about productivity.

Having a specific time limit instead, helps to prioritize important tasks, as you are aware that you’ll not have an infinite time and you are forced to do your best.

Knowing this, we can rethink of some rules that will help us to maximize our productivity without killing ourselves.

1 – Setting a time limit. The first advice is of course to set a specific amount of time before starting any kind of work. For example if you can dedicate four hours to work on a task, it may be a good idea to cut back that amount of time to only 2 hours, and set an alarm clock at the end of that time. The amount of time you can choose is generally up to you, but you have to create a sense of urgency, and at the same time have enough time to not sacrifice value. The goal here is to avoid having too much time and postpone important tasks.

2 – Planning in advance. Returning to our two hours example, it’s extremely helpful to plan our work in advance. I usually plan my activities the day before, as I’m generally optimistic about the day that’ll come. That way is hard for me to procrastinate, because I already have a list of stuff that I need to do, without having to stop and think about what to do continuously.

3 – Prioritizing. If your time is limited, you’ll naturally start working on the most important things. Learning to prioritize and doing the most important activities first is a big win. In fact I recommend to can cut down your time if you think you have too much of it. It’s better to spend 40 minutes doing high quality work, and then go to a walk of 2 hours with your spouse, rather than doing the same amount of work in two hours just because you had the time.

4 – Using the Pareto rule. The Pareto rule, also known as 80/20 rule, is an exceptional productivity tool when you learn how to apply it. As you’ve probably already heard, 20% of your activities provides the 80% of your results, so it’s really worth to take some time and identify those activities that provides the most benefits, and maximize them.

Productivity is measured by the amount of value you can extract in a given amount of time. Therefore it’s important to define exactly what that amount of time is.

But that alone is not enough. It’s also important to cut down the amount of hours to eliminate procrastination. The Parkinson’s law states that the demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource. It means that if you have three hours to complete a task, it’ll probably take three hours to complete it, but if you try to do the same activity within one hour, chances are that you are able to do it.

If you want to be more productive, my final advice is to stop wasting time on those activities that provides little or no value, and instead focus your energies into those which provides the most benefits. And then, enjoy your free time.

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