One of my New Year resolutions is to do less and achieving more. The following taken from an article in December 2008 issue of Men’s Health, with a twist from my personal experiences:
Under-promise, over-deliver. UPOD. Always ingrain that acronym into your head. This means saying that a task will take five days to complete when you can do it in three. Use that extra two days to put the finishing personal touches on the product and deliver it “early.” It’s not enough to UPOD, your delivery date has to appear aggressive, yet more than possible for you personally.
Be perfect only when it matters. The law of diminishing returns dictates that at a certain point, a unit of effort put into a task will output less than a unit of production. There is no such thing as perfection. When you have edited and edited and edited, and you attempt to edit more, all that will happen is that time will stop and the universe will implode on itself. At some point, your work product needs to be packed and shipped.
Multitasking stalls your system. Coming from a generation of multi-taskers, texting while e-mailing, listening to music, writing an article, and eating; we soon realize that we are most efficient when we dedicate our time and resources one task at a time. Prioritize your tasks, focus your energies and go down that list. Alternatively, if your list is over, use the snowball technique: sort your task list from easiest and quickest to do to the most complicated and longest to do and cross of the first to the latter. These “quick wins” will motivate you to later tackle the harder ones.
Play hard to get. Cell phones, voice mail, twitter, e-mail, texting, paging has all made us available 24/7. Consider setting office hours during a lull period of your day. During this time, people can expect to reach you via phone, e-mail, or even twitter. All the peak periods of your day, shut yourself away and focus on complicated tasks. Ever notice how effective you are when you’re not connected. In fact, this post was written pretty quickly on the plane where I have no internet connection, stream of tweets, and e-mails.
Doing some or all of these techniques in the coming year may take you a few steps closer to that corner office. What other tips do you recommend to improve productivity?
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I’d recommend the mastering the art of delegation. By delegating routine tasks, you allow yourself more time to concentrate on more difficult tasks while helping others around you develop new skills. However, it’s important to keep in mind that you can only delegate work, not responsibility.
Great recommendation. I’m also entertaining hiring a virtual assistant and also a personal assistant to outsource busy work and focus on higher level work.
I’ve found that delegation is one of the toughest things that a manager can do.
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