Is your personal productivity all that it could be? How much do you really get done during the average day or week. And how much time do you spend doing it? In this article I'm going to discuss how to use a task based approach to increase your productivity.
Task Based Or Time Based?
I used to spend a lot of time planning and worrying about how long I would spend doing something. During high school and university I would use time based planning to get things done. What does this mean? When planning out my week I would say - I'll spend 2 hours Monday night on Company Law and I'll spent 3 hours Tuesday night on Business Finance. In short, my time management strategy was to simply break my time up into blocks and throw these blocks indescriminately at the sunbjects I was studying.
So wht is the problem with this? Many of you will have spotted it already. For those that haven't, the problem lies in the lack of goals or specificity of objectives. It was easy for me to spend 2 hours "studying" Company Law but what did I actually achieve? Don't get me wrong - I knew what work was due and normally got it done on time. But it wasn't the most efficint way of doing things.
A Task Based Approach To Time Management:
I discovered a better way. Instead of saying I'll spend 2 hours on Company Law I would say I'll complete my Week 9 Company Law tutorial questions and complete the first 3 questions of the mid-semester assignment. The time allocated was the same but the goals had become specific. I would know at the end of the session whther I'd completed what I'd set out to do.
To use a task based approach, you'll need to break your work down into discrete tasks. Time is still important - in fact estimating times becomes critical to planning and scheduling. But time is secondary as a means of measuring progress. The primary method of determining progress is to ascertain whether the allotted tasks for that day have been completed.
Each task should be large enough to represent a significant step toward meeting your overall objective, but small enough to fit into one day, or preferably less. You'll need to be able to look back the end of a session or a day and tick off each of the tasks you've completed.
I switched over to this approach to time management towards the end of university and never looked back. And it's served me well in the years since then as well. In fact I would put down my increased productivity as a major step forward in my own personal development.
Improving Productivity Using A Task Based Approach
Personal Development Goals
What are your personal development goals?
In my last post, titled "What Is A Personal Development Plan?", I discussed the importance of goal setting as part of the personal development planning process. These goals form the foundation or nucleus of such a plan and as such are worth exploring in more detail. So today I'd like to discuss setting self improvement goals in more depth.
Setting goals for yourself can a more difficult task than you might initially expect. Sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to distill all of your life's dreams and ambitions into a handful of written statements. Where do you start? Where do you stop? How much detail should you go into? What follows is a series of tips to help you set personal development or self improvement goals for yourself.
Setting Specific Goals:
In order to succeed, you will need to make sure you have specific goals. Having vague or abstract goals makes achieving them that much more difficult. How will you know when you've met your target?
Numbers can be a great way of expressing goals. A number has a certain quality about it which gives you a fixed point of reference. As everything in life ebbs and flows, a goal expressed as a number stands out like a beacon, guiding you towards your destination. Instead of saying "I want to lose weight", you could re-state your goal as "I want to lose 7 pounds" or maybe "I want to reach my ideal weight of 160 pounds". Now as the days and weeks go by, each time you jump on the scales you'll watch yourself closing in on your target weight.
What Is Your Expected Date Of Achievement?
Deadline can be an ugly word. It has connotations of externally imposed time lines. So instead of deadline, let's use the phrase - "expected date of achievement". This gives a much more positive interpretation of the time by which you'd like to attain your goal.
But regardless of when we call it, it's important for us to consider not only the what but the when. Without a concrete time line in place it's easy to slip back into what used to be one of my favorite activities - procrastination. It's easy to find something else to fill your time. Then days slip into weeks and even months with no progress. The next thing you know, another year has passed and you still haven't done anything about starting that further education you'd been promising yourself.
Break Down Your Goals:
Make sure your goals are realistic. Rather than having one enormous goal, try breaking it down into two or more smaller ones. For example, if you wanted to run 8 miles in under 1 hour by the end of the year, you might set an intermediate goal of 4 miles in under 30 minutes by the end of September.
Setting these mini-goals can work wonders for your motivation. If you can tick off each of these smaller achievements on the way to your major milestone you'll feel like you're making more progress faster.
But What Are Your Goals?
How do you work out what your personal development or self improvement goals are? While some people have no trouble in clearly articulating what they want out of life, others may be less sure of themselves. If you fall into the latter category, how can you determine what you really want?
A technique I've found useful is to remove any constraints, obstacles or roadblocks, both perceived and real. What if money was no object? What if you had unlimited time? What would you do? Imagine you are independently wealthy - you have no need to work and have time on your hands. What would you do with yourself? What do you feel passionate about?
Or what if the opposite were true? You had limited time left (a comet is on a collision course with our planet - okay, maybe a little melodramatic, but you get the idea). What would you do with the time you had left?
Sometimes doing these mental exercises can be a good way to gain some perspective on things. Your mind has incredible power within it. Sometimes you just need some help to unleash that power. But that is a topic for another day...
There's no time like the present. Take some time out of your day and consider the question at hand. What are your personal development goals?
What Is Personal Development?
What is personal development and what does it mean to you?
It an attempt to put a framework in place for this website, I went looking for a definition of personal development. I was looking for a generally accepted understanding of what it means - a standard, one-size-fits-all description which I could just reference and use as a starting point for discussion.
But I was surprised at how difficult it was to find such a thing. While there are plenty of websites which have taken a stab at it, I couldn't find an authoritative source which I felt captured the essence of what personal growth and development is about. Even the ever-reliable Wikipedia didn't offer much help.
So then I thought - I'll just write my own definition. I figured I could do as good a job as anyone else. I've given the matter a great deal of thought over the years and indeed taken a number of steps to improve myself. I should be able to distill my thoughts and experiences in this area into a succinct and useful definition. But when I sat down to pen my definition, it hit me. Personal development is different for everybody.
Is this a cop-out? I'd like to think not. I know what personal development means to me, but I couldn't presume to put a label on it for everybody else. Broadly speaking, personal development is an activity undertaken by an individual in an attempt to improve one or more aspects of themselves or their lives. It might relate to such areas as health and fitness, personal productivity, relationships, personal finances, spirituality or just a general sense of self.
For me, this is the key. Everyone has different priorities - and people's priorities change over time as their circumstances change and as life experiences shape each individual's outlook. While career advancement or pursuit of their first million dollars may drive some people, for others losing weight or gaining self confidence might be more worthy goals.
What follows are some areas of personal development which I'd like to explore in more depth. I intend to do this in upcoming articles on this blog.
Health and Fitness:
Most of us would like to be healthier and fitter than we are currently. Your goal might be weight loss for the sake of your general health and wellbeing. You might want to give up smoking. Or maybe you aspire to running a marathon or achieving some other feat of physical and mental endurance. As with most areas of self improvement, priorities will vary greatly for each individual.
Personal Productivity and Organization:
Do you get as much done each day as you'd like to? Have you ever thought there must be a way to organize your time in such a way as to maximize the tasks you can complete each day. Many people (myself included) want to improve their time management and organization skills so they (and I) can get more done. I'm aware of a number of systems which can be adopted in an effort to maximize your personal productivity. I'll explore these in detail in the near future.
Wealth, Money and Personal Finances:
There's a lot more to life than money. I can't emphasize this point too much. However, the reality for most of us is that we will need to manage our limited financial resources (both money and our ability to earn money) to provide an adequate, if not comfortable, lifestyle for ourselves and our families. This is a very broad topic and covers everything from basic budgeting and day to day money management to wealth generation with a view to achieving financial freedom.
Motivation and Goal Setting for Success:
Getting started can be one of the hardest things about personal development. How do you motivate yourself to do more? What drives you to achieve your goals? Just as importantly, how do you set your goals? Do you have a structured approach? Are your goals (and the time-lines you've set yourself to achieve them) realistic? Do you have a plan - a clear idea of what you want to do and how you're going to do it? For me, motivation and goal setting are inter-related. I find the act of setting goals helps motivate me and achieving these goals spurs me on to do more.
Happiness and Self Esteem:
For me, this is ultimately what personal growth and development is all about. And that's why it's such a personal and individual thing. What makes you happy may not - in fact probably wont - make the next person happy. But there's more to it than that. Do you really know what will make you happy? What is happiness anyway? Is it something you can strive for and once achieved will be permanent? Or is it a temporary or even fleeting state?
These are some of the topics I'd like to explore - and anything else that takes my fancy. I think I've rambled more than I'd have liked. But to be honest, I don't think there is a simple answer to the question - What is personal development?
