Posts Tagged ‘personal productivity’

Being a leader can be extremely challenging. It can feel like a never ending treadmill which is constantly on maximum upward incline.

Sometimes, when in the role of the leader, you are so consumed by the needs of the different stakeholders that you forget to take care of you.

When you don’t take care of you, the true value of what you are doing is sometimes lost. You might not be so impactful, productive or focussed as you could be.

So what can you do to take more care of you and deliver great results?

• Set some boundaries around the hours you work.
• Make a point of taking some form of regular exercise.
• Don’t forget about the important people in your life.
• Keep things in perspective. There is always tomorrow.

The truth is, taking care of you on an ongoing basis will always be continual work in progress. It’s not a onetime fix that lasts forever.

So the big question is, what are you doing to take care of you and deliver great results?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

Tip 1
• Get clear on what’s priority and what’s not.

Tip 2

• Invest your time in the priority activities.

Tip 3

• If you have something that you have to do, make sure that you have the skills to do it.

Tip 4

• Keep track of where you are spending your time so that you can be sure that you are investing it wisely.

Tip 5

• Reflect periodically and make changes where necessary to take your personal effectiveness to the next level.

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

“Too much to do, too little time”, is an all too familiar cry these days. So what can you do to get more done and achieve better results?

1. Know what’s important and priority and what is just a time filler.
2. Set yourself challenging but realistic targets for each day, week and month.
3. Set start and finish times for every task.
4. Don’t leave things half completed otherwise you end up with a whole lot of work in progress.
5. Get organised so that you can find things.
6. Automate whenever you can to boost productivity.

What additional tips would you add?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to achieve success and realize their professional potential through being highly effective leaders and managers. For more information and to sign up for his free audio e-course click here

Despite all of the advances in technology, managing time and getting things done seems to be tougher than ever. Trouble is that time, unlike memory on your computer, cannot be added to, so it is how you invest it that matters.

So what can you do to take control of your time?

1. Know your priorities – what is it that your success or otherwise is measured against at the end of the day?
2. Set time limits for everything you need to do in a day – you will be amazed at the difference it makes.
3. Do a periodic time audit so that you know where your time investments are going.
4. Start thinking of time like money and choose carefully where you invest it.
5. Don’t overload your plan with too much otherwise you will get de-motivated.
6. Try, wherever possible, to batch similar types of activity so that you make better use of your time.

Remember that time management is really all about planning and decisions. So what’s your best time management tip?

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements helps accountants and health professionals to become highly effective leaders and managers. For more information click here

If you are a leader, your the ultimate measure of your success is what you deliver.  Yes there are other factors that contribute to how you are rated as a leader but at the end of the day it is results that count.  If you are in any doubt about this, just pick up the business section of any good quality newspaper or sector publication and chances are you will come across:

1. Some leader who is under pressure to deliver a certain result.

2. Some leader who has been removed because the results delivered were not good enough.

With all of this focus on results, it is important that as a leader you use your biggest limiting factor wisely.  So what is the biggest limiting factor?  In my experience it is time.  There are always many options open to you on how you could use the time available but the amount you are allocated in a day, week, month or year is fixed.  Contrast with a constraint like the amount of budget you have available.  You can make a case for more financial resource and if your case is compelling enough, you have a good chance of securing additional resource.

So if time is a major constraint, you need to know when your own personal prime time is.  It will be different for different people.  Some people are at their best first thing in the morning, while for others burning the midnight oil is best.  When you know your personal prime time you:

1. Can schedule the most important tasks for the times when your performance is optimal.

2. Avoid wasting optimal performance time on anytime tasks.  You know things like e-mails, routine phone calls or texts.

3. Deliver better results, because you focus your attention on the things that have greatest impact on the results you deliver.

Bottom Line – Your personal productivity greatly influences your results.  So what steps are you going to take to do the most important things in your personal prime performance time?