How to boost your personal productivity

Being busy is part of the modern world. But these days, it’s crazy busy. People are stretched with work, demands from home and other interests. Emails, texts and phone calls keep coming in, people are demanding more of our time and we are flitting from task to task.

There are tell-tale symptoms: a tendency for you to feel in a rush and impatient, you lose focus when you are in the middle of a task or conversation, you spend more time on your BlackBerry or iPhone than talking to people, you seem to have projects piling up and not getting finished and you just feel powerless with the tsunami of stuff that’s pouring in.

Sound familiar? It’s a warning signal telling you to wrestle back control of your life.

That doesn’t mean closing your business, changing careers or moving out to the country. But it requires you to develop significant but manageable systems to get the best return on your investment in time. It means scaling things down, from the frantic to the manageable.

Experts say you can start with a diary to identify where all of those precious minutes in a day go. That not only includes work time spent in front of screens from computer to iPhone to iPad. It’s also for the personal stuff like shopping, catching up with family and friends or being at the gym.

The default diary

Business coach Ashley Thomson recommends his clients use a default diary. For most, a normal diary simply lists the events during the week. For example, it might have an appointment on Wednesday, a session on Thursday and a meeting on Friday afternoon.

A default diary turns that around. Let us say for example, you have to spend two hours every Monday afternoon working on the finances and every Tuesday, it’s an hour and half on the marketing plan. With a default diary, you put those down in advance, along with all the other set appointments. That can also include personal items, like sessions at the gym. It’s not hard to organise, it’s just a visit to Outlook.

“They’re not times where you meet with somebody but you have actually booked in an appointment,” Thomson says. “You’ve got your head around doing that marketing work or that finance work or whatever it is.”

“Also, you can tell the receptionist during this time to hold your calls because you will be in a meeting with yourself essentially.”

“At least that way, you can say I have had this week but I have been in control of the week because I have spent two hours on this, and hour and a half on that, three hours on something else and got things done that way.”

“You don’t book up all your time but 50% of your time.”

“That’s important, he says, because it leaves you with the flexibility for the unexpected, like the ad hoc meeting that might come up during the week.”

The beauty of the system, he says, is that it helps you manage times and avoids double booking.

“If someone rings and says can I met with you on Monday, you can say I already have that time booked but can I meet with you on Tuesday afternoon? How would that work? It means you don’t book over set times.”
He also recommends clients break down the time they need to spend for each task.

“I work it based on all the phone calls you need to make,” he says. “You have a list of all the emails you need to send, you have a list of all the projects and for me a project is something that takes more than five minutes, and you put all that together.”

“So if you have got some time at the end of the day or a bit of time before work, you can work on emails, but you don’t want to be making phone calls at that time. If you have two minutes before a meeting, that’s the time to flick off an email or two but it’s not time to work on a project.”

“When you do have that spare time around the main items in your default diary, you have a list of things, phone calls, one or two minute things like emails and anything between five minutes to an hour in terms of projects. You can work them into your time schedule that way.”

He says that while people rely a lot on technology to make it easier, the technology itself can only do so much. Technology, he says, is just an enabler.

“You might get a good system and hope to use technology to make it even more efficient. But if you’re not using a good to do list, putting it into an electronic format doesn’t make it any better. I have seen people with 200 tasks on their electronic to-do list and they just shy away from it because it just becomes too cumbersome. Get the systems right first, and then use technology to make it more efficient rather than using technology as the solution.”