Personal Productivity

Productivity is the main outcome which your leaders or management levels want from your work performance. To achieve your strategic objectives in this role and feel satisfied with your life overall, you need to take charge of your personal productivity. Learning how to manage your time, focus, and stress frees you up to think about the bigger picture and get the most out of each day. Do this for yourself, your colleague, your team members, and your loved ones, who all need you operating at your best. For this view, we just want to take some key factors that would make you gain personal productivity.

• Managing your time is a deliberate practice that will help ensure you are using all the time available in the best way possible, matching up the time you have available with your goals and priorities.
• As important as finding time to do your work is finding focus in order to do it well.
• Stress is a physiological response to change, and it comes in good and bad flavors. Embrace positive stress and develop patterns to mitigate unhealthy stress. To minimize your stress, invest time to care for your body and your brain.
• Work-life "balance" may be a misnomer; aim for positive work-life integration.

How to get a handle on your:

• Understand how you use your time by tracking at a very detailed level for a few days.
• Look for patterns in the data you've collected about your time use: does it match your priorities? Analyze what's creating the gaps between your expectations and reality.
• Make a goal-driven master plan mapping how much time you'd ideally spend on each work activity, differentiating your highest and lowest priorities.
• Execute your plan by allocating time proactively to your highest priorities with time boxing on your calendar.

How to improve your focus:

• Clear your primary work surface. Leave out items you use all the time, and sort the rest into storage or the trash.
• Get comfortable. Adjust the height and positioning of your computer and your chair so you can work without any pain. If you don't have a comfortable chair, acquire one today.
• Clear your inbox. Sort emails if you have time or dump them all in a backup folder for later reference. Develop a consistent habit for how you'll proactively manage email moving forward.

How to be better manage stress and your work-life balance:

• Commit to reconnect to the meaning of your work at the start of every week. Remind yourself why you do what you do to rediscover your inspiration.
• Limit the toll of decision-making by adopting consistent routines for the things you do every day (get dressed, check-in at home, and so on).
• When you're feeling especially stressed, give your brain and body a moment to recoup by doing a puzzle or some stretches.
• Build-in time to relax during the workweeks so you don't burn out. Protect your weekend by keeping Thursday and Friday free of major deadlines whenever possible.
• Look ahead to any big deadlines that might pose challenges to your personal relationships and sit down with the people involved to let them know what's coming and to brainstorm together about fixes that might alleviate some of the stress.

Source: Harvard Business Review (2017). Manager's Handbook: The 17 Skills Leaders Need To Stand Out. Boston, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation.