Power up Your Personal Productivity

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Have you ever won­dered that there are so many things to do but yet so lit­tle time to use?  Have you always been busy at work?  Have you always been say­ing, “I’m busy”, “not now…” or “I do not have enough time!”  At the end of the day, you feel there is no sense of achieve­ment from a long day at work and you have no clue about it.  Have you always envy the per­for­mance and time man­age­ment of your co-workers? (Or you sim­ply don’t care).  Do you want to power up your per­sonal pro­duc­tiv­ity and improve your time man­age­ment like your co-workers?

We’re going to intro­duce you a power con­cept that will make you effi­cient and pro­duc­tive at work.  It’s called the 24-hour pay check.  It’s the base prin­ci­ple in get­ting self-disciplined for time man­age­ment (good time man­age­ment requires self-disciplined).  Every­day, you are given a pay check of 24-hours.  No more, no less.  How­ever, this “free” pay check can only be uti­lized in a day.  Like a one-day voucher at the shop­ping mall.  You can­not ask for more (time) in the check nor can you deposit and reuse it for another day.  You have to use it in that day only.

timeIn a nor­mal week­day, you spend 7 hours sleep­ing.  3 hours trav­el­ing to and from the office.  You work aver­age a day of 8 ½ hours with lunch breaks included.  Now how much time do we have left?  That’s an esti­mated 5 ½ hours left in the pay check.  With the remain­ing 5 ½ hours left, you need to have break­fast, buy gro­ceries, shower, din­ner and wash­ing the dishes.  Say that takes another 3 hours.  You’ve got 2 ½ hours left.  These 2 ½ hours will be your only leisure and self-improvement time.  Not for­get­ting if you have kids, part of the remain­ing hours will be used attend­ing to their needs… And all this CANNOT be brought for­ward to the next day!

Now you can see that time is a pre­cious com­mod­ity and we should trea­sure every expense of it.  Using this pow­er­ful con­cept, we can iden­tify what are the time wasters and what are the things to do to be pro­duc­tive.  The time spent at the work­place is an aver­age of 8 ½ hours.  1 hour is used for lunch break.  ½ hour is used for tea break.  Another ½ hours maybe spent at the water cooler on gos­sips and rumours.  Back at your desk, you enter into pro­cras­ti­na­tion mode for another ½ hours in and out through­out the day.  You received an aver­age 6 phone calls of 5 min­utes inter­val every day and this sums up to another ½ hour being used.

How much time is left from the 8 ½ hours?  We’ve left with 5 ½ hours… yes, we’re not fin­ished yet.  You have to han­dle fire-fighting tasks such as co-workers’ enquiries/requests and attend to emails.  That will be another 1 ½ hours.  You spent time chat­ting on the instant mes­sen­ger for another 1 hour through­out the day.  This includes time to respond to your buddy and time wasted flip­ping your tasks and the instant mes­sen­ger.  Finally, with all the things going on in the work­place, you give your­self another ½ hour of per­sonal breaks through­out the day.  Let’s not also for­get that there are peo­ple who spend time read­ing news­pa­per or look­ing at stock prices at work…

Now how much time do we have left?  Only 3 hours is left for you to do actual pro­duc­tive work.  Can you see how much time is really effec­tive used if you were oper­at­ing daily like this?  If you can opti­mize the time, wouldn’t you be able to achieve more things in a day?  Now re-look your daily sched­ule in the work­place.  Does it resem­ble any­thing like that?  If it does, our advice is you need to rethink of the impor­tant things in life (and office) for your­self.  Of course, “impor­tant things” can mean dif­fer­ently with peo­ple.  But if you stum­bled upon here seek­ing for time man­age­ment solu­tion, you will know deep in your heart the def­i­n­i­tion of “impor­tant things”.

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