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Be More Productive Slow Down

iUniverse, Inc.

Contents

Introduction...........................................................xi1. The Fast-Changing World: Living Without Purpose.....................12. Static Survival: Living Without Growth..............................143. Models for Managing Change..........................................274. The Life Control Model™:......................................375. Slow Down to be More Productive.....................................486. Slow Down for Your Well-Being.......................................637. Rediscover Who You Are..............................................858. How to Plan.........................................................1029. Stick To Your Plan..................................................12310. Reassess Your Plan.................................................13811. Maintain Your Joy..................................................152About the Author.......................................................159Appendix...............................................................161Bibliography...........................................................167

Chapter One

The times we live in are moving at a faster rate every year, and we can get caught up in these busy times. It is crucial for us to respond to the fastchanging environment by planning our life, knowing that these conditions will continue.

Picture the Goals

What does it take to meet your goals? We will briefly look at the professional side of setting meeting a goal and then the personal side. A leader needs to keep people in the company focused on the outcomes of the annual strategy or mission. First, it's important for you to know why you are doing certain work. Leaders must then help you stay focused; not only on why and where you are going, but also on how you execute the work. Usually you are left on your own to do the work. Good leaders continuously remind others of the purpose and direction. It's your role to figure out how to fulfill the mission with the help of others through cooperation and collaboration. Leaders must create pictures of the outcomes or goals of the organization. You may have seen such pictures on the office walls. Some corporations have spent over one million dollars to print and post illustrations of the journey of the mission on the interior walls of the buildings. They want the mission understood in simple terms, pictured in your mind. It works.

Why shouldn't you do this for your personal life? Pictures of your future plans and desires help you navigate the journey. Pictures keep you on track and help you maintain momentum as you move toward your goals. Integrating your personal and professional purposes is important to creating appropriate balance and control in your life. It's easy to let business or work control your personal life. It's easy to lose perspective of what is right for you or even what may be right for the business. Fooling yourself into thinking that your work life is the more important because it facilitates survival can warp your perspective. This misconception can also take you in a direction that throws you off of where you really want to go. You can become a workaholic, working yourself so hard that it impacts family life.

Busyness, Multitasking, and Overcommitting

Work is where we usually relate to productivity and speed, since we are measured by these elements. Let's look at the work environment to understand the importance of purpose, planning, and slowing down. Speed and simply accomplishing tasks may be busyness that satisfies the desire to check things off our "To Do" list. However, priorities must drive activities in the work environment. If you aren't working on meaningful activities, you may be wasting your time. Working too fast may also affect the quality of work you do. The quality of the work will definitely impact the desired outcomes.

Busyness, multitasking, and overcommitting are habits that reduce effectiveness and decrease genuine productivity. Busyness is when we are busy doing tasks that are not significant and are not focused on our mission or purpose. For example: I can be busy checking my e-mail frequently throughout the day, researching information on the Internet and making phone calls to follow up on volunteer activities. "It was important for me today to call prospective clients and follow up on referrals, but I just couldn't get to it." This is how I rationalize wasting time.

Interruptions frequently add to busyness and disrupt concentration and focus. These uncontrollable events can affect our productivity and the quality of the outcomes. A New York Times article pointed to a research project at the Institute for the Future of the Mind at Oxford University. It suggests that the popular perception of multitasking is open to question. A group of eighteen- to twenty-one-year-olds and a group of thirty-five- to thirty-nine-year-olds were both given ninety seconds to translate images into numbers, using a simple code. The younger group did 10 percent better when not interrupted. But when both groups were interrupted by a phone call, a cell phone short-text message, or an instant message, the older group matched the younger group in speed and accuracy. "The older people think more slowly, but they have a faster fluid intelligence, so they are better able to block out interruptions and choose what to focus on," said Martin Westwell, thirty-six, deputy director of the institute. Westwell has changed his work habits since completing the research project.

Completely focusing on the task at hand, without interruptions, generates speedy conclusions, as well as good results. By the same token, focusing on speed, trying to think about too many things at a time, and allowing interruptions can slow down the process and negatively affect results. Multitasking can be harmful to an individual or group of workers. It is usually stressful to think about so many things at one time. Leave the multitasking to the computers, machines, and robots. We humans were not made for multitasking. We can only think about one thing at a time.

Interruptions frequently come in the form of switching tasks. In choosing to multitask, you may be choosing your own level of interruptions, less productive work, and mediocre quality.

In 1984, Tom DeMarco, author of Slack, and his colleague at the Atlantic Systems Guild began a three-year study of software developers titled "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace."

"We collected information about the environment and recorded each and every task switch. To no one's surprise, people who were interrupted less often performed better. We modeled performance against task-switching frequency and came to the conclusion that the best way to understand task switching was to assume that each switch imposes a direct penalty of a bit more than twenty minutes of lost concentration. We also noted an average of nearly 0.4 switches per hour. This result is a direct loss of productive effort of more than one hour per day," reported DeMarco. "Fragmented knowledge workers may look busy, but a lot of their busyness is just thrashing, switching continually from one activity to another."

Perhaps pressures surround you, forcing you in...