New Productivity Rules... Or Are They?

Business consultant, Gihan Perera, has this to say about our productivity:

"The old rules of goal setting, productivity and time management don’t work. Our goals become meaningless when the environment changes, it’s difficult to stay productive when we’re constantly interrupted, globally dispersed teams make in-person meetings impractical, and the 9-to-5 workday just doesn’t make sense anymore. The new principles for high performance and super productivity are direction (rather than goals), signals (rather than interruptions), collaboration (rather than meetings), and flow (rather than time management)."

All the new terminology. Sounds scary, doesn't it? The good news is, it shouldn't. Although the words are different, we at Creative Learning and Prashnig Style Solutions have been advocating them for decades. We agree with Gihan Perera that the golden rules include:

• Working when your energy levels are high (this may mean morning for some of us, evening for others) - check your own Working Style to see how to increase your productivity.
• Process information faster and more effectively - your Working Style will help you do it in an optimal way.
• Collaborate - this will come to you easier if your Working Style has a preference for working in groups.
• Manage your email and mobile phone interruptions - if your Working Style allows global information processing, so much the better.
• Know the direction and the destination.

Work smarter. Work with your Working Style.

The secret to balancing work and life

Julie Ashton, Life Coach and Business Consultant, has this to say about managing time:

"It is well a known fact that you cannot manage time, you can only manage what you do with your time. Many people talk about ‘to do’ lists and priority management in order to get control of their ‘time’. However, while we need these tools, most of us do not question our habits, personality and belief systems when trying to improve how we manage our time. Often when trying to ‘prioritise’ tasks in order to gain control of our day, we prioritise on what we believe is important and those beliefs have been created by our values and other people’s expectations not on what is truly important to us in our lives."

What is really important? What is urgent but not really important? If you track your daily activities, you may be shocked to discover that you spend more than 80% of your time dealing with issues that are urgent and yet not important. Sometimes it's because they are small and therefore easy to get out of the way with a sense of accomplishment. Sometimes it's because they're persistent and won't go away (phone calls are a good example). Sometimes it's because we simply go through our lives, hour after hour, week after week, stuck in our routines (particularly if our Working Style has a non-preference for variety).

When you plan tomorrow's activities, classify each one in terms of importance and urgency. And, just for one day, try to do only the important stuff.

Manage Your Time

Do it in style - according to your own unique Working Style features. A Working Style is the way in which people concentrate, work on something new and/or difficult, make decisions, take information in and solve problems.

The time of day in which you concentrate best is part of your Working Style too. Is getting up with the birds every morning a challenge for you? Do you find it difficult to stay awake in the evening? Blame your Working Style, not just your workload. And how about the afternoon? Does it happen that you push unwanted tasks into the time after lunch and then find that you are stuck and don’t get the disliked job done? So you put it off to the next afternoon and even further if you can.

This is a classical mismatch between a time-of-day non-preference and the attempt to do something difficult or boring just then. Your natural Working Style will make it extremely difficult, often prevent it! You can try to fool your body clock by making it follow a certain work pattern, like early morning business meetings or working on an urgent report till after midnight, but unless that is your natural Working Style, you’ll be doing so at a cost to your overall productivity, even your health.

Whether you approach your work sequentially or prefer multitasking is also part of your Working Style makeup. The latest research shows that multitasking - the very quality so sought after by most employers - can often lead to stress and burnout if your natural inclination is to work on one project at a time. Nevertheless, today’s technology enables - or even demands - us to stretch our attention over several simultaneous activities.

What is your best time management style? Find out.

Time like water....