Have you ever looked at someone and wondered how they manage to achieve so much? It might be a colleague who’s just achieved another promotion for the 3rd year running or a friend who is always on the go, or even the stay-at-home-parent who is raising 5 kids while starting up their own business part-time.
In almost any scenario we can often find individuals who are achieving 2x, 3x, even 5x as much as the average person without significantly increasing the time they spend doing so.
The good news is that you don’t need to work 20 hours a day to get more done. The time management secrets these individuals use are open to everyone to learn and use, regardless of status or income.
Below we’ve unpacked four key behaviors these super-productive individuals use:
Track and Store Your Information, Ideas, and Meeting Notes
Most people forget things very quickly, retaining as little as 40% of information just one hour after receiving it. Many people wrongly assume that to be more productive they need to improve their memory and hold more information in their brain.
The truth couldn’t be any more different. No matter how hard you try you won’t remember all the ideas and information you come across in your working day. Even if you keep refreshing the information in your brain you’ll still forget it.
Source: Lifehacker.com
Productive individuals recognize the frailty of their own memory and implement a system to record information for them.
In the past this would have been a written system, but today powerful tools like Evernote and Microsoft Onenote can track your meeting notes, hold your to-do lists, keep copies of interesting web pages and much more.
When you need information you can search for it in your notes rather than spending hours racking your memory.
Prioritize Your Most Important Tasks
Who doesn’t love getting a quick win by ticking off those three easy items on their to-do list at the start of the day?
Unfortunately, this behavior is incredibly unproductive. How many times have you got to the end of the day and realised you haven’t tackled any of those really big tasks?
Discipline yourself to focus on your biggest and most important tasks first every day. Start by listing the 3 most important tasks you need to achieve each day and don’t get distracted by other items until you’ve ticked these off the list.
Schedule Your Day Effectively
Have you ever surprised yourself with how much you get done when you need to hit a tight deadline? This is because our work naturally expands to fill whatever time we allow it.
Get into the habit of imposing deadlines for yourself on every piece of work and you will find you can get a lot more done.
A great way to do this is to schedule your day into time slots and allocate these slots to items on your to-do list.
Stop Revisiting Items – Action Them Immediately
Every time you read an email or look at a piece of work and then set it aside for later you are wasting time because you’ll only need to read it again later when you revisit the task.
If you spend an average of ten minutes every day re-reading emails you’ve already looked at once you are wasting an incredible 60 hours every year on a task that achieves nothing!
Don’t read emails or look at tasks unless you are ready to take action immediately.