Any entrepreneur will tell you that you have the same 24 hours in a day as anyone else on this earth and that the folks who use those hours most effectively are the most succesful.
The question then becomes who uses those hours most effectively?
When I used to teach, I'd often tell my students that they had to get into groups and had 10 minutes to put together a short presentation from the reading. This statement would always be followed by groans and complaints asking for "more time" to get ready. On the rare occasion that I gave them more time, it never made the presentations better. Every once and a while they developed something a little more complex, but what they did in 10 minutes was almost always better than what they did when given 30 minutes.
I eventually started to see why this is. If you have very little time, you optimize the time you do have. There's no time to complain, there's not time to worry about what you're doing being good, there's just you and the clock. And just like any athlete, the more you push yourself in that short time frame, the stronger you get.
So my suggestion if you are feeling like your productivity is low:
Give yourself LESS time.
That's right. If you blocked out an hour to do a task, try to do it in a half hour. You may not get it all done, but you'll hustle and you'll cut out the fat.
Take some time today and try to beat your time for each task. If you were going to spend 30 minutes on email, try getting through it in 15. If you were planning on spending a few hours filing papers, see how much you can get done in an hour. You'll be surprised at what you can accomplish when you push yourself this way.
Ok so now that the clock's ticking.
Beat your time.
Excelsior!
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Good advice, Michael; I recently attended a really intense/wonderful playwriting workshop, and we were constantly given tight little opportunities to come up with stuff. It was great! Concentrating the mind like that really does work.
I also learned that it's faster (for old-fashioned me) to use a pen rather than a pencil, because taking the time to erase and "correct" myself -- especially at this primal sort of pre-typing level -- wastes energy and interrupts the flow of ideas. Now I just scratch through anything I want to change, knowing I'll clean it up when transcribing.
Posted by: Rob | June 20, 2012 at 07:31 AM