Schlagwort-Archive: increase

Seven easy things you need to do to become more productive.

Recently I did find an article explaining 7 things you need to know to become more productive. In this article Ilya Pozin explains what he did learn from his meeting with Tony Wong, a project manager whose client list includes Toyoto, Honda, and Disney, just to name a few. This rules are easy to follow. So if you want to get more productive, here is how it works.

  1. Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
  2. Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
  3. Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
  4. Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
  5. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
  6. Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day.
  7. Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

Hope this one helps you to increase your productivity. Further I would like to recommend a book that is even more effective than this seven rules. It goes far beyond them. Please be aware that you need to be willing to change your way of doing business completely. Are you ready? Ok, than go and get this book.

REWORK by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. 

By far the best business book on the market. Enjoy the rules as well as the book.

The „no response means go“ strategy.

If you are in business you often have to deal with another team members. Sometimes a decision simply can´t be made because of one team member was not able to reply in a regular time. Not being able to make decisions slows down your efficiency, interrupts your workflow and simply prevents you from being successful. In my business life this happened several times until I found a solution that really works.

Once you send out an idea, a plan or just a guideline for the upcoming strategy you simply need to enter one single sentence. „If no reply till XXXXX at XX am it means that you agree to the plan“. I could not believe it. But after having this started years ago everybody involved has started to take my emails into the first row. Everybody knows that I have already a plan, or at least I plan to make a decision. If my team members don´t reply in time it means that they have agreed as well.

No worries. In average I don´t get any replies since most of the time they agree with my plans.

Some of you might think that this reduces the creativity of the team members. To be honest, I don´t care! We have to work on time, we have to decide fast and we have to do a perfect job. So if you can´t follow the speed of the team you might want to change your team. But please don´t ask me to wait for your input. But talking about team and writing a sentence like this does not really match. Of  course this guideline has to be used by every member. This does mean that of course also I have to reply in the given Time frame. At the end it´s also a sign of respect giving the your team player a high importance in the row of tasks you follow.