Be Your Best

Todd Gifford – Success Coach

Based on a lot of reading about and interacting with many successful people, here are 7 ‘productivity drain areas’ that we all should work hard at avoiding if at all possible in order to drive the greatest results we can.  Some of them are pretty obvious, but some others not so obvious.  And finally, there are a couple in this list that will be down right challenging to break away from because we have habits built around them.

1. Doing the wrong work

This one seems too simple and obvious, but could, in fact, be the most difficult productivity drain to avoid.  This involves not setting good priorities, poor ranking of projects, and generally not being prepared for each day with what is most important to get done that day.  Another aspect of this is the pressure to adopt popular behavior vs. exercising effective behavior.  Finally, allowing your day to be highly dictated by other people’s emergencies can be a huge productivity drain.  This is not to say that emergencies are not important, however, just because something is an emergency to someone else, does not automatically mean that it is an emergency to you.

2.  Failure Environments vs. Success Environments

Many people have extremely challenging work environments that position them to be unproductive.  We have to do everything we can in order to create a work environment where you can achieve outstanding concentration and focus.  Distractions are plentiful, so it is critical to attempt to do everything you can to create a disruption-free work space.

3.  Poor, Undisciplined  Work Habits

What I have found is that the most successful people I know (the ones who would I would think of as not needing improvement in this area) are the ones that constantly challenge themselves the most and are the hardest on themselves with respect to work discipline and work habits.  The areas of focus are:  (a) avoiding jumping around from one thing to another (aka “multi-tasking”) and disrupting their work rhythm, (b) creating 100% distraction free time zones/slots where phone/email/people disturbances are avoided, and (c) not letting unscheduled activities disrupt their work flow.

4.  Not Having Rules for Those You Interact With

This is a challenging area, because we all want to be courteous with people, and not viewed as callous.  However, by not creating your own ‘rules’ of interaction and work flow, your time can be sucked away by ‘time vampires’.  This requires the ability to create and enforce productivity rules, have an intolerance to time wasters, have the ability to say ‘no’ occasionally, and you must be OK with receiving some criticism for your productivity methods.

5.  Unwillingness to ‘Buy’ Time

The unwillingness to buy time is essentially about not understanding the value of your time or devaluing your time.  By not truly understanding the value of your time, it negatively impacts your decision making about how you use your time.  An example of this would be where you choose to do something yourself (because you either think you can do it better than someone else or you enjoy to do that particular task), but a more effective strategy would be to have someone else do it.  I catch myself doing this occasionally.  By valuing your time at full value, you quickly determine that you could be utilizing your time better in many situations.

6.  Mental and Physical Fatigue

I am sure you knew this one was coming at some point in the list.  But really, this one is huge, and most of us burn the candle at both ends on a daily/weekly basis.  Not being in top physical condition (physical and mental power), dramatically lowers your productivity.  The irony here is that fewer high productivity hours will out perform many more unproductive hours.  Another aspect of this that many people don’t pay attention to is understanding what your highest personal productivity time zones are.  Everyone is a little different, so determining the times during the day you are at your most creative and industrious level, and then leveraging these time zones, is big for productivity.

7. Staying Stuck vs. Swift Sword

This is the productivity drain that is caused by the inability to recognize when you are in an unproductive situation or unwillingness to exit unproductive situations.  This is sort of a distant cousin to #4 above, where there is constant pressure around you to do certain things.  There are times when these things are clearly unproductive and it requires some confidence and self-reliance to exit those situations gracefully.

I have found this to be a pretty good productivity drain checklist to review periodically and make sure you stay in top ‘efficiency shape’.

Be Your Best,

Todd D. Gifford