Personal Productivity and Time Mastery

Time and Personal Productivity in the New Economyr
By Danielle Gault

Personal productivity is an inside job. It is intrinsic and as natural as breathing. Whether you work on your own or for an organization, personal productivity is influenced by how you see and work through obstacles; how creative you are with problem solving; and how capable you are in sustaining your personal motivation to build constructive connections with others.

Work Through Obstacles
It’s not easy to apply common sense at work since the rules of our social fabric are so unclear. The structures and systems during the fifties, sixties and seventies are outdated in today’s economy and you’re right in the murky zone of transition and change, struggling to adapt. This adaptation takes energy, commitment, perseverance, and self understanding.

Self understanding is the cornerstone to sustaining successful habits and changing those habits that block productivity. Steve Jobs, Apple Computer wizard, said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”

For maximizing personal productivity in the new economy:

1. Change the software: Understand, appreciate and work with the personal preferences which are the mental software of our souls and can be defined as a blueprint outlining our tendencies.

2. Change the practices: Clarify these tendencies to understand how our behaviours affect our outcomes. To change productivity-related issues, rewrite the software by increasing awareness of those behaviours that are strengths and re-programing those behaviours that act as obstacles to productivity.

Change what you can and accept and work around what is not natural for you; but you must adapt to the way the world operates if you wish to be a player. By adapting, life mastery issues around time constraints and the associated stress and possible health challenges these constraints place on us, will be diminished.

Time is the new money: people would rather spend money than time dealing with outcomes and output. If time is the new money, you have to use it wisely and negotiate our lives in meaningful ways continuing to shift from the mechanistic view of the workplace and outdated time management practices of a previous era to a framework where time is more organic.

Creative Problem Solving
Today it is more important to develop our own sense of balance and rhythms so that you can pace our activities in a way that is personalized. Our orientation to time can be self determined, fun and provide us with joy and satisfaction.

Using a wholistic approach for balance in our lives, you can change the way you see things using our Mental Side, the way you interact with others and do things using our Social Side, and on the Physical Side, you change your results.

Mental Side -- The old way used time as something you could manage, box in, and control. The new way sees time as a resource for living a life that is on purpose -- a life of meaning as opposed to just ambition.

Social Side -- You are all guilty of spending too much time on computers connecting to the global community. Information comes so fast that you get overwhelmed as you strive to process all the content. The old way of boxing time doesn’t work because the box is no longer big enough to hold all the data and activities. In the new economy, you have to be better at saying "no" and learning what comes from this. Turning down some requests can free up energy to say "yes" later. When feelings of guilt or thoughts of wondering what you're missing show up, simply thank your mind for sharing. You don't need to be everything to everyone, do everything that presents itself to us, or have everything in life right now.

Physical Side -- The old way forced us to look at the clock and assigned time-based activities to all our action items. But the new way requires that you use your inner wisdom by asking yourself open-ended questions such as: How can I use my time more effectively and accomplish my activities? What is the next most important thing for me to do? What contributes the most to what you’re striving to manifest right now?

Perhaps it is not your style to have such fast through puts – some of us may need to reflect more, some of us are better at pulling out the succinct bits of information and making bullet points quickly, and some of us just wish you could hold on to the past and go back to the way things used to be – a slower pace and a lot less data to absorb.

Personal Motivation
Change in your patterns comes from your willingness to learn and grow. Whether you are adapting to this world of change or resisting it, change you must and accepting the new reality is crucial to coping with time and productivity issues.

You are forced to interact with others to solve problems as time is too short and there is too much to do to waste our efforts on inefficient methods. Learning is definitely not a spectator sport and courage is required to shift to the new way of thinking about productivity and time. To sustain personal motivation and evolve at work you must continuously ask: what am I learning, how can I use it, and who else is involved that can assist me?

Personal productivity is definitely an inside job and has to be measured by our abilities to recognize and utilize our strengths in meaningful ways by creating ongoing opportunities for self-discovery and professional growth.

For information, please email dgault@dbreflections.com or call: (905) 844-2495 or go to www.wellness-training-services.com or www.corporate-training-services.com