One can find numerous tips to be more productive and efficient at work from different forums. What really amazed me was that most of the top attractive posts held a title with something negative in them. They included phrases like, ‘never do’, ‘common mistakes’ and ‘ruin your career’ etc. This posed a question if we are more afraid of doing mistakes rather than trying something new.
A golden rule for productivity and efficiency has been to decide, start and finish your task. It is good but I would say that only one word can make you much more productive and that word is ‘reject’. If you are able to reject all the non-necessary rituals at a certain time, you’ll be left with the one that is most important. This would allow you to fully concentrate on that particular task. However rejecting alone won’t be of success unless after rejecting all non-necessary tasks you start and stick to the one at hand.
Many of the career coaches have been saying to burst the Routine to keep our interest in career and life. They have suggested us to try different things so that we stay interested in life. Agreeing to this to a certain level I would say that we still would need some type of routine. I call this a 3 routines formula.
We must develop 3 types of routines in our every day life. First lets say our work needs something done every day like answering important queries, so we need to do it. This helps us to hold our grounds at the stage we have already reached in our life or career. If we don’t do it not only we’ll be out of touch with our existing situation and duties we may face an ultimate danger of loosing that position also.
Next Routine Window should be the one in which we invest on ourselves. Successful people never stop investing in them. One must use a routine to improve her every day preferably. It could be learning something new relevant or irrelevant to your career or simply becoming expert in your existing skill. Only with continuous improvement and learning one can avail more chances in life. Limited skills would lead to limited doors only. Limited skills would be like having only few keys that are of no use when another door probably leading to a better pathway appears on the way.
Last routine interval should be the one in which one does all unnecessary tasks. It could be answering non-urgent emails or any other task less important than the ones you completed that day. This is actually a great blessing. It allows you to postpone these less important tasks instead of completing them while you were busy with some other more important tasks. Lets say that while working on some important project you receive an email or phone call from a friend, you may postpone answering it to this 3rd routine window. Thus you reject the interrupting tones at time you were busy and dealt them later in a routinely manner. A practical way is to keep a paper and pen near you and whenever any such interrupting call of work arrives note it for the 3rd routine window to be tackled later. This would also allow you not to pile up unnecessary but to be done tasks.
In the time left other than these 3 routine windows you may do whatever is required but sticking to these 3 routine rituals can make a lot of difference in your life for good.
