It's telling that some of the most popular blogs focus on productivity. I learned this when I interviewed productivity gurus about their best time-management tips last year and it became the post that bloggers link to most often on Brazen Careerist.
How to get more things done is a hot topic for younger workers especially, and one that has seemingly endless angles. That's because young people are good at multitasking, and yet feel as though true productivity goes a step further than simply working feverishly on more than one task at the same time.
Here are six productivity-blogger tips with some new takes on the old idea of blowing through your to-do list to feel good about your day. What's interesting to note is that each piece of advice actually encourages people to get more done by slowing down to focus rather than multitasking nonstop:
Having goals is more important than the content of the goals
Productivity should be aimed at meeting goals rather than merely keeping up with one's to-do list. It's a question of the big picture versus the little picture, and we need to be sure to have some big-picture ideas about our life or we won't be able to steer it.
So often, though, we don't set goals because we're worried they'll change. But they'll change regardless, and we don't want the same things throughout our whole lives anyway. As Eric Nehrlich says on his blog Unrepentant Generalist, "The particular goals aren't as important as the process of setting goals and working to meet them."
Knowing you can meet goals encourages you to set more, and setting more encourages more conscious thinking about what you're doing. That may well be the very core of productivity.
Get information at scheduled times
In a world where most of us are knowledge workers, the person who's best at taking in information and synthesizing it is going to stand out. The last thing you'd want to do, then, is stop taking in information. But there's limitless information, so you have to set your own limits.
Tiffany Monhollon at Little Red Suit suggests scheduling when precisely you take in your information. This means that it doesn't interrupt you constantly, which really undermines productivity, but it also doesn't elude you, which is the sure way to become obsolete in the workforce.
Read the rest at Yahoo Finance.
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Penelope, those are good pointers. One technique that I swear by is the “touch it once” rule. I like to complete things and move on to the next task so typically it’s easy for me to curb those multitasking tendencies. I admit, sometimes my productivity is at the expense of quality (my partner calls me “shortcuts”)… but I get things done.
Posted by Nina on July 19, 2007 at 1:12 pm | permalink |
It's true about to-do list. People get carried away in satisfying their to-do list, while they forget about the real reason why they do it. It should be clear about the goals we intend to achieve.
Posted by Fran on July 19, 2007 at 11:20 pm | permalink |
It's true and I would especially stress on doing first the most important tasks and shortening to do lists to several the most important items, which I really cannot manage without planning (this often happens while men multitasking:)
Posted by Andrey on July 20, 2007 at 5:52 am | permalink |
Great reminders. Having a to do list can sometimes make a difference. Goals are can be forgotten if people are not focused on the main purpose of their activities.
Posted by Alan on July 23, 2007 at 1:30 am | permalink |
Let's all stop searching for the big answer and pay attention to the obvious things that are so obvious we don't use them! Great stuff!
Posted by pablo on July 23, 2007 at 6:00 pm | permalink |
A quick commentary on your statement here concerning goals Penelope: Bravo!
Unfortunately, most people do not have written goals, and are therefore subject to the wind and waves and anything else that will move them, including the agendas of others. In the absence of goals, we simply float between items on a to-do list, perhaps not even our own.
I fully agree with your statement "Having goals is more important than the content of the goals."
It's far better to have a track to run on!
Posted by Daniel Sitter on July 30, 2007 at 5:11 pm | permalink |
After years of experience and many, many to-do lists, I, like many of us know that we never run out of things to do.
We are built that way. I think.
Some tools make it easier than others to manage the inevitable changes we know will come. What did Steinbeck say about the best laid plans?
Love what you say about goals.
Telia
Posted by Reel Logix on July 17, 2008 at 10:28 pm | permalink |
Delegation is the most important tip. For those that don’t have a staff, who do you delegate to? One way to overcome this is to use a personal assistant service. I just started a company called Delegate Source based in Denver. While there are quite a few concierge services out there, there are very few who approach lifestyle and household management broadly. It really is simple math. If a professional's hourly cost is more than the cost of outsourcing personal services, why not achieve a better work/life balance by delegating errands and tasks?
Posted by Brady Bagwan on November 23, 2009 at 4:42 pm | permalink |