WORK SMARTER NOT LONGER

Forget long hours at the office. Use these six rules to work better, get home on time – and still impress the boss

You work too hard. We suspect you knew that, but in case you didn’t, here’s some sobering statistics: work-related anxiety led to 10.4million lost working days in 2011/2012, with 20 percent of us grafting more than 45 hours a week, according Government figures. Yikes!

Yet a study at Harvard Business School found employees who left the office on time increased productivity, by working more effectively. (We bet they felt a damn sight chirpier too.) The lesson: work less, accomplish more.

Here, we reveal smart tactics to help you avoid last-minute panics, steam through your to-do list and have a life.

1/ DON’T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS

Which should come first, the chicken or the egg? When it comes to cracking the career game, they’re level pegging, says Magdalena Bak-Maier, author of Get Productive!. “Think of yourself as a chicken and the eggs as the results you get,” she says. “Trying to produce too many eggs is counter productive – your chicken will burn out. Only happy chickens produce eggs, so maintaining a healthy balance between the two is important.”

To-do lists are useful tools to stay focused on goals, but be aware that, on average, we underestimate how long a task will take by 50-70%. Bak-Maier suggests choosing one result you want to achieve each day and breaking it down into bite-sized chunks. Use a minimal computer program such as Google Docs in full-screen mode to keep you focused solely on the job in hand.

2/ ESCAPE THE NET

Surfing the web can be a huge time-waster – as you may discover to your horror if you register at Rescuetime.com. The service tracks your website usage, giving weekly graphs to show where all those lost minutes were spent. (Our bet’s on eBay.) The solution: the site blocks your access to any sites you request, for however long you need to stay distraction-free. Plus, you can set up reminders to keep projects on track. How did we do without it?

3/ CUT YOUR CUT-OFFS

Parkinson’s Law, from a wise old bird called Cyril Parkinson, states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” You can apply this adage by setting yourself shorter deadlines, which forces you to work more efficiently. Time management consultant Claire Tompkins recommends breaking projects into clear stages. Asking a colleague to proof-read your work at a specific time will ensure quality doesn’t slip either.

4/ HIRE A VIRTUAL AIDE

Outsourcing isn’t just for banks. At AskSunday.com, you can hire your own PA to 10 hours of work, such as setting up meetings or doing research for reports, for £60. “It’s easy to justify the cost,” says Dr David Spencer, senior economics lecturer at Leeds University. He argues doing such jobs yourself dilutes your earning power. Good point.

5/ GET A CUNNING PLAN

Investing two hours each week to go through your calendar and to-do list can save you up to five hours the following week, according to David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. “Do it towards the end of your work week, ideally Friday between 2pm and 4pm,” Allen says. “Look at new projects and make decisions about forthcoming issues so they don’t blow up in your face.” The easiest way to do this is to make a list of all the tasks you need to have completed by the following Friday.

Also take time to look at what’s gone wrong over the past week. Reflecting on and learning from those experiences can stop the same thing happening next time you tackle a similar job. Which means come Monday, when it’s time to clock off you’re slinging your bag over your decidedly-more-relaxed shoulder.

6/ KICK THE HANDHELD

“Don’t use your smartphone for processing email,” says Allen (sending shivers down the spines of countless addicts). A survey by software firm NeverFail found that 94% of us use our smartphone to check email after work or over the weekend. But, as Allen points out, “unless it’s from abroad, it’s highly unlikely an email will come in that you have to deal with there and then.”

In fact, checking email out of hours can be counterproductive, since if can’t deal with the issue immediately, you may well have forgotten about it by Monday morning – leaving that message to disappear down your inbox. To avoid temptation, deactivate your phone’s push email setting as you head out of the office. Then you can switch off and get more out of your free time too.

http://www.womenshealthmag.co.uk/life-skills/career/255/work-smarter-not-longer/

Triple Your Personal Productivity

Have you ever had the experience of looking back on your week with the sinking feeling that you didn't get as much done as you'd hoped? When building a successful career or a business of your own, your time is perhaps your most valuable asset, and your income is a direct result of how you spend your time. You cannot buy any more time than you're given, and the clock is always ticking. A few years ago, I discovered a simple system that allowed me to nearly triple my productivity, and in this article I'll share some very practical ideas you can apply right away to increase your effectiveness without working any harder than you do now.

Keep a detailed time log.

The first step to better managing your time is to find out how you're currently spending your time. Keeping a time log is a very effective way to do this, and after trying it for just one day, you'll immediately gain tremendous insight into where your time is actually going. The very act of measuring is often enough to raise your unconscious habits into your consciousness, where you then have a chance to scrutinize and change them.

Here's how to keep a time log. Throughout your day record the time whenever you start or stop any activity. Consider using a stopwatch to just record time intervals for each activity. You can do this during only your working time or throughout your entire day. At the end of the day, sort all the time chunks into general categories, and find out what percentage of your time is being spent on each type of activity. If you want to be thorough, do this for a week, and calculate the percentage of your total time that you spent on each type of activity. Be as detailed as possible. Note how much time you spend on email, reading newsgroups, web surfing, phone calls, eating, going to the bathroom, etc. If you get up out of your chair, it probably means you need to make an entry in your time log. I typically end up with 50-100 log entries per day.

You may be surprised to discover you're spending only a small fraction of your working time doing what you'd consider to be actual work. Studies have shown that the average office worker does only 1.5 hours of actual work per day. The rest of the time is spent socializing, taking coffee breaks, eating, engaging in non-business communication, shuffling papers, and doing lots of other non-work tasks. The average full-time office worker doesn't even start doing real work until 11:00am and begins to wind down around 3:30pm.

Analyze your results.

The first time I kept a time log, I only finished 15 hours worth of real work in a week where I spent about 60 hours in my office. Even though I was technically about twice as productive as the average office worker, I was still disturbed by the results. Where did those other 45 hours go? My time log laid it all out for me, showing me all the time drains I wasn't consciously aware of -- checking email too often, excessive perfectionism doing tasks that didn't need to be done, over-reading the news, taking too much time for meals, succumbing to preventable interruptions, etc.

Calculate your personal efficiency ratio.

When I realized that I spent 60 hours at the office but only completed 15 hours of actual work within that time, I started asking myself some interesting questions. My income and my sense of accomplishment depended only on those 15 hours, not on the total amount of time I spent at the office. So I decided to begin recording my daily efficiency ratio as the amount of time I spent on actual work divided by the total amount of time I spent in my office. While it certainly bothered me that I was only working 25% of the time initially, I also realized it would be extremely foolish to simply work longer hours.

Efficiency Ratio = (Time Doing "Real Work") / (Time Spent "At Work")

Cut back on total hours to force an increase in efficiency.

If you've ever tried to discipline yourself to do something you weren't really motivated to do, you most likely failed. That was naturally the result I experienced when I tried to discipline myself to work harder. In fact, trying harder actually de-motivated me and drove my efficiency ratio even lower. So I reluctantly decided to try the opposite approach. The next day I would only allow myself to put in five hours total at the office, and the rest of the day I wouldn't allow myself to work at all. Well, an interesting thing happened, as I'm sure you can imagine. My brain must have gotten the idea that working time was a scarce commodity because I worked almost the entire five hours straight and got an efficiency ratio of over 90%. I continued this experiment for the rest of the week and ended up getting about 25 hours of work done with only 30 hours total spent in my office, for an efficiency ratio of over 80%. So I was able to reduce my weekly working time by 30 hours while also getting 10 more hours of real work done. If your time log shows your efficiency ratio to be on the low side, try severely limiting your total amount of working time for a day, and see what happens. Once your brain realizes that working time is scarce, you suddenly become a lot more efficient because you have to be. When you have tight time constraints, you will usually find a way to get your work done. But when you have all the time in the world, it's too easy to be inefficient.

Gradually increase total hours while maintaining peak efficiency.

Over a period of a few weeks, I was able to keep my efficiency ratio above 80% while gradually increasing my total weekly office time. I've been able to maintain this for many years now, and I commonly get about 40 hours of real work done every week, while only spending about 45 total hours in my office. I've learned that this is ideal for me. If I try to put in more time at the office, then my productivity drops off rapidly. The interesting thing is that the system that allowed me to optimize my effectiveness at work also created a tremendous amount of balance in all other areas of my life. Even though I was able to use this approach to triple my business productivity, I still gained plenty of time to pursue personal interests.

Time logging is the intelligent choice to ensure optimal productivity without increasing your hours. But time logging need only be done periodically to provide these benefits. I do it for one week every 3-6 months, and over the years it has made a huge difference for me, always providing me with new distinctions. If I go too many months without time logging, my productivity gradually drops as I fall back into unconscious time-wasting habits. You'll probably find as I do that your gut feelings about your productivity are closely related to how much real work you actually get done. When you feel your productivity is lower than you'd like, raise your awareness via time logging, measure your efficiency ratio, and then optimize your efficiency to boost your productivity back up where it belongs. Time logging is a high leverage activity that takes very little time and effort to implement, but the long-term payoff is tremendous.

http://www.stevepavlina.com/articles/triple-your-personal-productivity.htm

The Most Important 20 Minutes of the Day

What are the most important moments of the day? The 20 minutes you commit to planning. 

You're thinking, Planning? Yuck.

I know for some people it's a dreaded word, but don't worry. I'm not talking about writing a business plan or setting annual goals. I'm simply talking about dedicating 20 minutes to prioritizing and organizing your day. 

The 20 minutes you spend today can save hours tomorrow and turn a good day into a great day. 

Everyone knows that the most valuable resource entrepreneurs have is time. So stop giving it away to people and spending it on activities you don't care about. People say if only there were more hours in the day, they could get everything done. But what about those two hours spent watching The Bachelor? Or that hour-long meeting with a vendor trying to sell you something that you know you aren't going to buy? Been there? I know I have. 

It's crucial that entrepreneurs protect their time like the Night's Watch guards the wall in the Game of Thrones. This means declining interesting opportunities. This means choosing one person over another to schedule that long meeting with. This means saying no without worrying about hurting someone's feelings. This means realizing that saying no today allows you to say yes tomorrow to something that means more. 

My daily plan.

Today I completed my morning planning for the 504th time. It's a daily routine of mine that is now a programmed habit. I started this habit on Dec. 4, 2012, and I call it my "8 for the Day." The process is simple: 

1. I write down the eight goals I want to accomplish that day. I figure if I can’t get eight things done in an eight-hour day, then I’m doing the wrong things. 

2. Six of those goals are professional and two are personal. Personal goals include things like going for a run or having a date night with my wife. 

3. The next morning, I check off the goals I accomplished, see how I did, reassess and then create a new list for the day.

4. On Saturdays, I flip the ratio and set six personal goals and two professional goals, which may be as simple as paying the bills. This is an effort to encourage weekend fun and discourage weekend work.

On Sundays, there is no list making. I need time to rest and a day free of lists.

Committing 20 minutes a day (sometimes less) to setting daily goals and organizing priorities has been so beneficial to my work, personal life, and overall health and well-being. The "8 for the Day" exercise is something I created that works for me, but there are other great tactics for planning your day.

Tim Ferriss suggests writing three to five things down and then choosing one task to commit time to completing. Gina Trapani chooses her most important thing or MIT. Choose or create a system that works for you.

The point is not when you plan your day, just that you do it. I love to start my day with dedicated time to focus on and visualize how my day will unfold, and what I can do to make it successful. Others like to spend the last 20 minutes before they go to bed thinking about tomorrow and making a game plan. 

You choose your most important 20 minutes of your day. The question is, How will you spend them?

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/239297