Personal Productivity Improvement: A Practical Guide

This book will help you increase your productivity by showing you how to organize and maintain both your physical and digital workspace. First, you'll find out about the benefits of managing your workspace. You'll learn how creating a clutter-free workspace and effective filing can improve your productivity. But it's not just your physical workspace that needs decluttering – this book will show you how to manage digital files, which is just as important. Finally, you'll learn how to maintain an organized workspace.
The last time you were faced with a list of tasks, which one did you attend to first? Was it the most difficult? Was it a random choice, or did you choose the easiest task first? The latter points toward procrastination – a habit that sees urgent and difficult tasks pile up as you avoid them.
Procrastinators typically focus on the reasons not to do something, rather than just doing it. This undesirable quality can in turn produce undesirable consequences in the workplace.
Failure to submit important work on time leads to procrastinators being viewed as unprofessional and unreliable.
Procrastination is integrally linked to disorganization. Working in a disorganized fashion makes it almost impossible to function in a timely manner. For instance, think about the time wasted looking for a single document on a disorganized desktop. Organization can save you that time.
Wishing for more time is only wasting your time. Many procrastinators waste hours thinking about how they don't have time to work, rather than just working.
But focusing on saving time is missing the point. You have to invest time to gain more time later. Spending a morning planning the week ahead can lead to much more time being freed up later on.
Don't think about working more hours, think about working better hours. All workers would like to increase their productivity, but this doesn't necessarily mean more hours. Instead, use your time to get organized and avoid procrastination.
Throughout this book you'll learn how to avoid procrastination by becoming organized. The benefits of this are explained, as well as the causes of procrastination. Discipline is vital to overcoming procrastination, so the development of self-discipline is addressed. Finally, you'll learn how to set your priorities and know when to say "yes" to a new task and when to say "no."
The relationship between time and productivity has always fascinated people. Ancient cultures developed systems for marking the time for planting and harvesting by observing the relative positions of the sun, moon, and stars. In the Middle Ages, clocks were developed that tolled on the hour, publicly demarcating the workday. In the modern world, electronic timekeeping devices divide our workday into minutes, seconds, and even milliseconds.
But whether you count it in seasons, days, minutes, or seconds, the amount of time available to you is constant. You can't buy more time or trade it for another resource. You can't save it for later. But what you can do is increase your productivity – the value you produce in the time you have. And the better you understand your own personal productivity, the easier it will be to manage your time effectively.
In this book you'll learn about managing tasks in a way that maximizes your productivity. You'll discover the benefits of setting goals and how productivity is tied to your ability to assess time and set priorities. You'll learn about the process of "chunking" your time and the principles of efficient scheduling. You'll also learn about the different types of to-do lists, and how to use them effectively.