首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Triple Your Personal Productivity Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling th
Triple Your Personal Productivity Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling th
admin
2010-11-02
66
问题
Triple Your Personal Productivity
Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling that you didn’t get as much done as you’d hoped? When building a successful career or a business of your own, your time is perhaps your most valuable asset, and your income is a direct result of how you spend your time. You cannot buy any more time than you’re given, and the clock is always ticking.
A few years ago, I discovered a simple system that allowed me to nearly triple my productivity, and in this article I’ll share some very practical ideas you can apply right away to increase your effectiveness without working any harder than you do now.
Keep a detailed time log.
The first step to better managing your time is to find out how you’re currently spending your time. Keeping a time log is a very effective way to do this, and after trying it for just one day, you’ll immediately gain tremendous insight into where your time is actually going. The very act of measuring is often enough to raise your unconscious habits into your consciousness, where you then have a chance to scrutinize and change them.
Here’s how to keep a time log. Throughout your day record the time whenever you start or stop any activity. Consider using a stopwatch to just record time intervals for each activity. You can do this during only your working time or throughout your entire day. At the end of the day, sort all the time chunks into general categories, and find out what percentage of your time is being spent on each type of activity. If you want to be thorough, do this for a week, and calculate the percentage of your total time that you spent on each type of activity. Be as detailed as possible. Note how much time you spend on email, reading newsgroups, web surfing, phone calls, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. If you get up out of your chair, it probably means you need to make an entry in your time log. I typically end up with 50-100 log entries per day.
You may be surprised to discover you’re spending only a small fraction of your working time doing what you’d consider to be actual work. Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, moving around papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 am and begins to wind down around 3:30 pm.
Analyze your results.
The first time I kept a time log, I only finished 15 hours worth of real work in a week where I spent about 60 hours in my office. Even though I was technically about twice as productive as the average office worker, I was still disturbed by the results. Where did those other 45 hours go? My time log laid it all out for me, showing me all the time drains I wasn’t consciously aware of—checking email too often, excessive perfectionism doing tasks that didn’t need to be done, over-reading the news, taking too much time for meals, disturbed by preventable interruptions, etc.
Calculate your personal efficiency ratio.
When I realized that I spent 60 hours at the office but only completed 15 hours of actual work within that time, I started asking myself some interesting questions. My income and my sense of accomplishment depended only on those 15 hours, not on the total amount of time I spent at the office. So I decided to begin recording my daily efficiency ratio as the amount of time I spent on actual work divided by the total amount of time I spent in my office. While it certainly bothered me that I was only working 25% of the time initially, I also realized it would be extremely foolish to simply work longer hours.
Cut back on total hours to force an increase in efficiency.
If you’ve ever tried to discipline yourself to do something you weren’t really motivated to do, you most likely’ failed. That was naturally the result I experienced when I tried to discipline my self to work harder. In fact, trying harder actually de-motivated me and drove my efficiency ratio even lower. So I reluctantly decided to try the opposite approach. The next day I would only al low myself to put in five hours total at the office, and the rest of the day I wouldn’t allow my self to work at all. Well, an interesting thing happened, as I’m sure you can imagine. My brain must have gotten the idea that working time was a scarce commodity because I worked almost the entire five hours straight and got an efficiency ratio of over 90%. I continued this experiment for the rest of the week and ended up getting about 25 hours of work done with only 30 hours total spent in my office, for an efficiency ratio of over 80%. So I was able to reduce my weekly working time by 30 hours while also getting 10 more hours of real work done. If your time log shows your efficiency ratio to be on the low side, try severely limiting your total amount of working time for a day, and see what happens. Once your brain realizes that working time is scarce, you suddenly become a lot more efficient because you have to be. When you have tight time constraints, you will usually find a way to get your work done. But when you have all the time in the world, it’s too easy to be inefficient.
Gradually increase total hours while maintaining peak efficiency.
Over a period of a few weeks, I was able to keep my efficiency ratio above 80% while gradually increasing my total weekly office time. I’ve been able to maintain this for many years now, and I commonly get about 40 hours of real work done every week, while only spending about 45 total hours in my office. I’ve learned that this is ideal for me. If I try to put in more time at tile office, then my productivity drops off rapidly. The interesting thing is that the system that allowed me to enhance my effectiveness at work also created a tremendous amount of balance in all other areas of my life. Even though I was able to use this approach to triple my business productivity, I still gained plenty of time to pursue personal interests.
Time logging is the intelligent choice to ensure optimal productivity without increasing your hours. But time logging need only be done periodically to provide these benefits. I do it for one week every 3-6 months, and over the years it has made a huge difference for me, always providing me with new distinctions. If I go too many months without time logging, my productivity gradually drops as I fall back into unconscious time-wasting habits. You’ll probably find as I do that your gut feelings about your productivity are closely related to how much real work you actually get done. When you feel your productivity is lower than you’d like, raise your awareness via time logging, measure your efficiency ratio, and then optimize your efficiency to boost your productivity back up where it belongs.
Time logging is a high leverage activity that takes very little time and effort to implement, but the long-term payoff is tremendous.
It’s found that office workers usually spend one and a half hours every day on ______.
选项
A、real work tasks
B、having lunch
C、commuting
D、socializing
答案
A
解析
选项A与原文该句中的actual work同义,故为本题答案。其他选项是一般上班族除了1.5小时真正工作以外所做的事情。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/PRs7777K
0
大学英语六级
相关试题推荐
Nooneshouldbeforcedtowearauniformunderanycircumstance.Uniformsaredemandingtothehumanspiritandtotallyunn
A、Thewomanisupsetbecauseshedidn’tpasstheexamination.B、Thewomandoesn’thopeforapromotion....C、Themangetsused
OldageintheUnitedStatespresentsmanyproblemsandopportunities.Withtheresultof【S1】______improvedmedi
TheAmericanbabyboomafterthewarmadeunconvincingU.S.advicetopoorcountriesthattheyrestraintheirbirths.However,
ThebeliefthatAmericanexpansionwestwardandsouthwardwasinevitableandjustwasfirstcalledmanifestdestinybyaDemocra
Theroleofmanagerisanothercriticalcomponentinthedevelopmentofanoffice-systemscareer.Onestudyreportedthatin76
A、Shehastocatchthetrain.B、Shehastocatchthebus.C、Shehastogotowork.D、Sheistired.B选项和女士有关。从I’dliketotellyo
______(要是当初你听从我的忠告早点节食),youwouldn’thaveallthesediseasesnow.
Videorecordersandphotocopiers,eventicketmachinesontherailways,oftenseemunnecessarilydifficulttouse.LastDecember
TheNextDisaster:AreWeReady?AreWeReallyPrepared?AftertheattacksonSeptember11andthehurricanesthatslammedt
随机试题
A、相须B、相使C、相畏D、相恶E、相反牛半夏配乌头属
港口与航道工程的索赔程序中,()是承包商应完成的工作。
根据《工伤保险条例》规定;职工符合认定或视同工伤条件,但是出现下列情形(),不得认定为工伤或者视同工伤。
H公司是一个高成长的公司,目前每股价格为20元,每股股利为1元,股利预期增长率为6%。公司现在急需筹集资金5000万元,有以下3个备选方案:方案1:按照目前市价增发股票250万股。方案2:平价发行10年期的长期债券。目前新发行的10年期政府债券的到期收
已经十点半了,你现在必须去睡觉。
【2010.江西】个体在道德意识的支配和一定的道德情感激励下,表现出来的一系列具有道德评价意义的行为方式和习惯是()。
领导派你去参加一个“五五普法”联合调查小组,里面你的年龄最小、资质最浅.你如何尽快和大家熟悉起来?
下列与修改表结构相关的命令是( )。
设X为整型变量,n=14,n的地址为4000;m=6,m的地址为2000;执行语句x=&n后的结果为()。
NursingatBethIsraelHospitalproducesthebestpatientcarepossible.Ifwearetosolvethenursingshortage,hospitaladmin
最新回复
(
0
)