Maximising productive time

Let us face it! A lot of people in our country are far less productive than their true productivity potential. Most people spend a lot of time on things that are of little or no value at all, wasting potential time for genuine productivity. If you are to rise and shine, you need to maximise your productivity all the time. And maximising productivity does not come by accident. You have to proactively make your productivity plan and embrace it as a new way of life.

A lot of people waste time on things that have no bearing on their life. They will spend a lot of time talking about others and events and yet they spend much less time on productive actions that can have impact. The evolution of social networks has made such people waste even more time. Some people cannot stay five minutes without updating their Facebook status and they cannot last 60 seconds without checking their WhatsApp messages. While such tools are becoming more than luxuries and bordering on emerging necessities, moderation is needed if you want to maximise your productivity.

As a rule of thumb, if you want to be successful, you need to balance the amount of time you spend on ‘fun’ things with the time you spend on productive actions. It is important to employ the principle of ‘delayed gratification’–where you need to earn your right for fun and enjoyment. You have to challenge yourself to first produce a lot of results before you can allow yourself a little (only a little) time for non-value adding things, including entertainment, hobbies, chatting, social networking and other similar engagements.

There are other time wasting activities that seem to be out of your control like long meetings chaired by other people, queuing up at the bank or waiting for your turn for hospital consultation with the doctor or at the hospital laboratory. If you think outside the box, you can still minimise the impact of such distractions.

A couple of years ago, I tried to measure and I discovered that typically, a visit to the hospital took a good two to three hours during normal working hours. I then tried to go very early around five or six o’clock in the morning at the next visit and I discovered that due to reduced numbers of outpatients, the turnaround was less than one hour. I had improved my productivity by two hours per hospital visit.

Even at the bank, you can do a few things to gain on productivity loss arising from spending time on bank queues. For instance, you can organise your finances in a way that you can do most of the transactions using technology like online banking, cash machines (ATMs) and even mobile money solutions. I know that using automated-teller machines (ATMs) can also waste a lot of time with queues that we sometimes find at ATMs. However, if you check properly, again you will discover that there are periods of the day when there are no queues at the ATMs.

Additionally, you need to make sure that for every action, you do it in the most effective and the most efficient way to minimise time taken to complete the action. This calls for good planning before you act. When you take time to complete an action, you need to review at the end to learn the lessons that will help you to do better and faster next time. This way, you will have embraced a personal culture of ‘continuous improvement’.

Lastly, avoid doing things that ordinarily need to be done by others. If it is something you have chosen to volunteer for then that is fine. Otherwise, do not become one of the people that do many actions that belong to others without having a chance to deliver on their own actions. Be economic with your time and volunteerism for causes that are not your real need.

Today, we have discussed the importance of maximising your personal productivity. We have also shared a few tips on the important steps that you can take to boost your productivity levels. Good luck as you rise and shine through maximising your personal productivity.