Welcome back! In the previous session, we talked about Success Factors and we talked about the fact that you need some skills, you need knowledge and you need some personal development.
And in the area of personal development, we talked about issues such as productivity. So productivity simply is getting more things done in less time. Getting more things done in less time, how do you do that to get more things done in less time?
I gave you this example in some previous sessions of one of my colleagues. Who we used to be so busy he would run from one end of the office to the next to the other end of the office when his phone rings and on one occasion what he said to me is “Knight I know I’ve been busy today, but if you ask me exactly what I’ve done today, I wouldn’t be able to tell you.” That’s the thing he was busy attending to all these distractions, but he did not focus on one single item that produced more value, that was the issue. So around the same time I had these 21 schools, 21 school projects that I was looking after and the value, the total value was just over 400 million pounds. In today’s money it’s more than that because that was 10 years ago. And the approach I used to use to make sure that things got done was to produce some priority lists, so I would prioritize my work.
At the end of the working day I would list the things that needed to be done for the following day. And then pick the top three priority items, and the following day, what I would do is start working on the top three items, start the first one, until it is completed, before moving on to the second one and then the third one. The advantage of this was that at least even if I’ve completed just one item, I had something to show for. But in most cases, I completed all the three items. Because they needed to be done for that particular day.
The other method that can be utilized is what is known as the 80-20 rule or the Pareto Principle. This is based on the fact that eighty percent (80%) of the most valuable tasks. Eighty percent of the most valuable work is contained within 20 percent of the tasks using the pareto principle. So what you do is you look at just one fifth or 20 percent of the tasks that contribute to 80 percent of the value of the work and just concentrate on those. When those are done, you know, you have completed eighty percent of the value of the work, which you can show as something worthwhile that you have achieved for the day. That way you are becoming more productive, you’re producing more value.
The third way of doing it is to create some systems, so in this case, what you might have is you’re producing some. It could be like in this case I was producing some course. So I had these twenty one projects but then some of the items were similar between these different projects, which meant that I could produce some systems or templates that were common in all these different projects. And that way after producing the first one, you save time on the second one and on the third one and so on. So that’s another way of saving some time and being more productive.
The third way is to kill some distractions. I give this example of my colleague who was mostly distracted by these phones, because people called him from different directions, they needed things done then, and then, and because of that he was abandoning what he was supposed to be doing for the day and attending to those phone calls. And hence, by the end of that working day, he would not be able to demonstrate what he was working on. So you have to kill these destructions, make sure that you are in an area where you’re not disturbed. One system I’ve used before is to make sure that all my phone calls are routed through my personal assistant. And then. A message is actually a lift to indicate that I’m busy and I’m going to return those calls afterwards.
That way you end up with a productive day instead of having all these distractions. So what I’ve done is created a separate course on productivity, which is the productive professional and the productive entrepreneur, and in that course, we go through some different different productivity. Techniques that you can utilize. So they are different systems that you can utilize, and other methods that you can utilize, for example, getting. The most difficult work is done first and how to avoid distractions like we’ve given an example of destruction, which is actually this phone call, that’s just an example of a distraction, but there are more distractions that you can encounter in a typical waking day. And this course goes through those in much more detail. Yeah. Click the link below this video and it will take you to the course unproductive professional, which takes you through more detail on how you can be more productive. My name is Knight Khonje, thank you for listening. See you in the next video. Thank you!
