Category Archives: Productivity

Mar 26 Comments comments
Learner, Productivity

Maximizing Your Time: Learn To Say NO!

Hi! Welcome to Twenty Set. Here you will find 4-5 insightful new articles each week about personal and professional development. I write candidly from personal experience.

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Editor’s Note: This guest post about productivity and time management comes from Miguel at The Pursuit of Excellence.

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” - C.S. Lewis

Many of us know the feeling, attending school full-time along with work. Life can be crazy living on campus. I could recall numerous experiences from life in the dorms. I recently moved off campus, and living off campus presents different challenges.

Time has a way of escaping us, especially when you’re having fun.

As I reflect on different experiences throughout college, I realized how often I participated in numerous social outings; these events cost me a fortune both academically and financially.

Own Your Time!

Six points to remember:

  1. Time is money
  2. Learn to say NO!
  3. Make appointments
  4. Spend quality time
  5. Choose the right crowd
  6. Embrace new settings

 

1. Time is Money.

When all the numbers were calculated, the price per class fell between $86-$123 per day. When you miss a class, your flushing about hundred dollars down the drain! Ouch, doesn’t it hurt? If I manage to keep this in perspective, surprise, motivation comes in a hurry. Time really is money, especially when your paying for it.

2. Learn to Say NO!

This is easy, tell your friends NO! Don’t go with the flow - so what if everyone is going to the party. Stand apart from the crowd. Be yourself, tell them NO for once. Learning to use the word ‘no’ saved me from all nighters and major disappointments.

3. Make an Appointment

I tend to keep an appointment once set. Try it - plan your study times, workouts, social events, etc. Once you work yourself into the habit on keeping appointments, they becomes harder to break.

4. Spend Quality Time

Instead of hurting yourself because you wasted time with people that don’t respect it; invest your time into people who matter most. Remember, it not in the length of time spent, but how you made the most of that time spent.

5 . Choose the Right Crowd

Someone once told me, “Tell me who you walk with and I’ll tell you who you are.” This concept also applies to our social circles in college. Freshmen year I tended to play video games, or stay up all night with friends. Sound familiar? If there is one thing I’ve learned about peer pressure, it is no respecters of persons.

Surround yourself with individuals that share your interests, desire excellence, or those which practice daily a particular discipline or study habit your lacking.

Your success or failure may partly depends on your social surroundings.

6. Embrace New Settings

Sometimes the missing ingredient or cure for apathy is in finding a new or different place of study. It may not be wise to study in the room where you commonly sleep.

While living on campus, it was difficult to accomplish much of anything in my dorm room. I discovered a sense of focus, determination, and excitement in pursuing my studies at various places off campus, including coffee shops!

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Mar 20 Comments comments
Careerist, Productivity

The Power Of 80/20: Stop Working So Hard

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Editor’s Note: Jon and Matt are guest writers from The Corporate Hack, a blog for young professionals on navigation tactics for the corporate world.  They just started their blog and they have fantastic tips for more productivity, so make sure to visit and subscribe!

Confession #1: We’re kind of obsessed with the concept of productivity.  Confession #2: At work we play this obsession off as a means to get more things done, but in truth we don’t want more things to do anymore than the next person… we leverage productivity to focus on the things that truly matter, and eliminate the rest.

If you’re a working young professional you can surely relate to the constant pressure to do more. More sales, more reports, more analysis, more leads… always more.  Let’s face it, there will never be an end to the work.  You can come in at 7:00 every morning and leave at 7:00 every night, but it’s not going to put a dent in the amount of stuff your bosses would have you do.  In part we think twenty-setters are taken advantage of by their age - we’re new to the workforce and subconsciously fearful that if we don’t work ourselves to death we’ll lose our jobs.

So how do you deal with it?

Well, maybe that college degree you got a few years ago will come in handy. Remember microeconomics and that handy little concept called the Pareto principle?  You probably better remember it as the 80/20 rule - that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes.  We’ve found it incredibly useful when dealing with unwieldy management and inane requests to do more work.

We work in sales & marketing and regularly review sales data to provide insightful analysis.  Almost always, the 80/20 rule applies to what we see: 20% of the accounts provide 80% of the incoming business and 20% of the products lead to 80% of the sales. All the while, the low performing 20% of promotions and opportunities cost us 80% of our time to setup and run!!  If we didn’t watch ourselves, we could easily spend the vast majority of our time spinning wheels on things that largely don’t matter.  This leads to long hours, frantic management, last minute emergencies, mistakes, and lost revenue… and all for what?  You get drained, you hate your job, and end up generally bitter about life.

You need to do some firings!

There are truth in the numbers, and it’s up to you to determine how they apply to your job.  Maybe you spend all day on the phone with an account list in front of you, and it’s your job to talk to each customer once a month. Maybe you have a roster of products you need to sell, and you’re supposed to sell “at least x” of each one.  It’s a pretty safe bet that 80% of those accounts, and 80% of those products only bring in 20% of the results.  Stop working on them now.

We want to challenge you to closely evaluate the things you’re doing.  Are there things that really drain you in terms of productivity and appear to be soft in terms of results?  They’re likely candidates for being fired.  Yeah - fire customers, and fire poorly performing products.  They’re not worth your, or your company’s, time and energy.  How do you do it?

  • Gather: First you need to figure out what tasks you perform each month that have been assigned to you in the name of growing revenue. We’re not talking things like ‘checking email’ and ‘completing expense reports’, but projects like ‘calling clients on your account list’ and ‘running sale promotions’ and ‘creating new leads’. Jot these major activities down on a piece of paper.
  • Calculate: Based on your major activities, pull together data that will show how successful you are at these things.  Hard sales reports related to accounts activity or product-type are best, but if that’s not immediately available you may need to get creative.  For instance if one of your jobs is to ‘create new sales leads’, create a spreadsheet of all the various places you have looked to generate those leads over the past few months, then make a tally of where the most successful leads came from.
  • Analyze: Look for trends in the reports and tallies you have created.  Our assumption is that some areas of activity are dramatically more productive than others, and it’s been our experience that 20% of your activities are likely producing 80% of your successful outcomes.
  • Slash And Burn: Hone in on your list of the 80% unsuccessful activities - we want to find ways to minimize the amount of energy you have to spend on these time-wasters.  Brainstorm ways you can either cut down or cut out these areas: Can you call on your productive accounts more often and put these less productive ones on autopilot? Can you put these unsuccessful products on the back burner? Are there certain types of promotions you’re running that aren’t working?  Stop doing them now.
  • Present Your Case:  Work with your manager and show them this concrete evidence you’ve gathered.  Explain how it would be financially more beneficial for the company to pull back on the low performing areas you have outlined and in turn put more focus on the high performing areas. It can be tough to convince your supervisors of this often offensive data, but the results can be incredibly freeing. 
  • Moving Forward: Use your new insight to create bold changes in yourself, your position and your company.  Use your data and knowledge to help increase the sales of your top performers, and make your middle performers act more like your top performers.  You’ll have more free time to plan, analyze and develop, and as a result your sales should actually go up. Instead of blindly pushing awful promotions and stunted products into the market, you can focus on what’s really important: meeting your customer’s needs and providing a quality product/service on a consistent basis. 

There are two great positive outcomes to leveraging the power of the 80/20: First, you’re spending your company’s resources more effectively and increasing bottom line. Second, you live with the knowledge that you are doing things that matter in the context of your job, and that reduces stress and makes working that much more enjoyable.  When corporate success intersects with personal fulfillment, you’ve hit on the sweet spot of career satisfaction. So push yourself to get out of the same-old same-old, fire your ways of thinking and move into a new way of doing business.  The definition of corporate laziness: staying in a routine and working on the same processes just because you always have.  You have to change and you have to think new to hack corporate life.

Editor’s Note: I’m running a contest this week at Twenty Set, and every comment on this post (and all others for this week) counts as an entry.  Please review the prizes here.  Thanks!

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Mar 11 Comments comments
Productivity

5 Techniques That Help Me Stay Productive

Image Source: Ton Boelens via FlickR

People often ask me how I write so much for this blog and others when I also hold a full time job and attend night classes.  This has happened so much in the last two months that I worried I was portraying myself as some kind of superwoman who sleeps upright in some odd yoga position and fights crime undercover on her lunch break.

So here’s the truth: I’m not a productivity guru.  I spend time looking through people’s pictures on Facebook, I play video games, I take forever to get ready in the morning, I’m horrible at planning ahead, and I forget to do simple things on a regular basis, like my laundry.  Now you know, and writing it down has given me motivation to work on it.

While far from perfect, I do like to think I can get things done, for the most part.  Here are some techniques I use in my own life:

Utilize Downtime

Most people would agree there never seem to be enough hours in the day, but I believe you can always squeeze out a little bit more by utilizing downtime.  I’ve gotten good at utilizing my downtime, from my train ride to work to my gym routine to blow drying my hair.

For example, I write posts for Twenty Set all the time on my downtime, like this one, which I wrote in the shower.  By that, I mean that I came up with the idea for the post, thought of 5 bullet points, and worked through the examples I was going to use for each point.  No, I didn’t bring a laptop in the shower with me, but by doing all the real work in my head, by the time I sat down to write the post it was practically already there.

There are plenty of other things you can do during your downtime.  You can listen to foreign language courses on your drive to work.  You can read on the treadmill.  You can play self-improvement games while waiting for a ride.  Some would call it unfocused multi-tasking, but really, how much focus do you need while taking a jog?  Your mind drifts anyway; let it drift to something useful.

Delegate

Delegating is one of the most obvious ways to get stuff off your plate, but people don’t use the technique nearly as often as they can.  It’s easy to delegate to people who work for you, but you don’t need people who work for you to delegate, as long as you can figure out an incentive.

The first step to delegating without having any authority is to figure out what other people are good at.  This takes respect for others and their strengths, and it takes a few minutes of your time to dig into a person, beyond the facts and credentials.  Once you know what people are good at, plant the seed.  Talk about what you need and who you are looking for to fill that need.  Finally, ask for it directly.  You would be surprised how willing people are to help when they know you had them in mind all along.

An example of when I’ve used this is to get guest posts for my blog.  I know Twenty Set is growing fast now and soon I’m not going to have time to manage it by myself.  So I wrote a post about it, even though I didn’t want to because self-promotion gets annoying.  Then I made a list of people I wanted to write for Twenty Set, and started emailing them.  I still haven’t made it very far through my list, but luckily the few people I did get a chance to contact responded well.  And for some people, planting the seed was all it took - they came to me and offered.  Some people wanted me to give them topics too, but instead I told them what I thought they were good at, and you know what?  Those posts have turned out great so far.

Prioritize

Yes, make to-do lists, if you like.  But prioritizing goes beyond keeping track of everything you need to do.  The way I’ve come to think of a to-do list is a list of things I need to have done.  Because then you can delegate the things you are not good at, and keep the things that play to your strengths and you can get done quickly.  Maximized productivity.

For example, I need to have my bills paid on time.  But I’m really bad at paying my bills on time, because every bill has a different billing cycle, and then there’s a lag time to account for when sending payments, and then I have to remember to buy stamps, and as I said earlier I’m bad at planning ahead.  (And no, not all bills can be paid online, particularly when you have a mortgage.)

Luckily my husband is great at paying bills on time.  Which frees me up to worry about other things, like how we’re going to get the money to pay the bills.

Declutter

I mentioned earlier that it takes me forever to get ready, and part of that is because I have a problem many women have - a closet full of clothing and accessories, but nothing to wear.  Then I attended a talk about dressing for work from former Chicago Fashion editor Stacy Wallace-Albert, and her basic message was less is more.  She convinced me to buy classic clothing as often as possible and cut my wardrobe in half by getting rid of items that I can’t wear multiple times a month.  One of the benefits she touted was I would not need as much time to get dressed in the morning.

I tried it, and Stacy was right.  There is a lot written about the paradox of choice: that given too many options, people choose to take no action at all because they can’t settle.  There is also evidence that the more viable choices we have, the more unhappy we are once we’ve made a decision because we had to give up so many other choices.

By embracing a minimalist lifestyle, you can be more productive because you’ve cut down on one of the biggest productivity busters - deliberating over choices.  Declutter your closet, your house, your daily processes, and your mind in the name of getting something done.

Pull Strategy

If you ever study distribution strategies in business, they talk about push vs. pull.  Push is when you have a product and spend a lot of time and energy finding your customers, while pull is when the customer comes to you for the product after seeing advertising or hearing about it some other way - in other words, consumer demand drives the distribution.  In most cases, businesses have to do a combination of both, but a pull strategy can be a lot less work for obvious reasons.

Having a pull strategy helps productivity because information comes to you rather than you seeking it.  For example, members of Gen Y have been commenting or emailing me a lot lately to introduce themselves.  I love it, because I get to learn a little more about my readership and I also get to check out their blogs, which I would never have found on my own.  Finding new blogs provides content, a different perspective, and inspiration for my own posts, including this one.

Pull strategies have everything to do with networking, so if you want to use one, learn how to network well.

How do you stay productive?  Share your tips in the comments section.

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