Productivity doesn’t necessarily mean that you get the right things done. It just means you get a lot of stuff done. And if you want to do your job well, earn money, live a meaningful life, learn skills, etc., you HAVE to get shit done.
Results matter the most
You might work for 50 hours a week, but if you don’t experience any growth personally, emotionally, financially, you’re not effective
- To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks
- A simple exercise from The Effective Executive that you can apply to become more effective
Step 3: Eliminate the time-wasters
Identify the critical tasks from the trivial tasks in your life.
- Do two stretches of two-three weeks a year to keep track of your time and identify time wasting activities
- This forces you to think about your daily routine and helps you become aware of pointless habits
Step 1: Know thy time
If you don’t measure your time, it’s tough to stop procrastinating or improve your productivity
- To know where your time goes, keep an activity log
- The specific method you use for your activity log doesn’t matter, the only thing that matters is that you want to keep a record for at least two weeks
Step 2: Identify the non-productive work
What would happen if you would stop doing these recurring activities?
- If the answer is “All hell breaks loose” then stop doing them.
- Otherwise, nothing would happen.
- Call these activities time-wasters
