Why increasing personal productivity isn’t just for overworked executives

Many people know they have to be at their desk for eight hours a day regardless of how quickly they get things done. They have no incentive to become more productive because they know their only reward will be more work or staring blankly at an empty screen. They might as well just string things out to fill the time.

In the world of productivity writing there is an assumption that the audience is up to its eyeballs and so needs ways to work more efficiently. For those people there’s a lot of awfully useful stuff around.

But what about people who aren’t quite so busy, who have always managed to go home on time despite living in their email inboxes and never having drawn a single mind map?

Does this describe you? Most likely you’re not passionate about your work but it’s tolerable. The pay and hours suit you well enough not seriously to consider leaving.

What can way to increase productivity offer these people?

• renewed motivation: if you become more productive you’ll get the little buzz of finishing a task more often. Making the effort to really concentrate and get on with things increases your chances of getting into the Flow state, and once you get a taste for it and understand how to get it, you might well keep coming back for more.
• a way to tackle overdue tasks: some tasks have a habit of lingering on your to do list for much too long. You see them and you skip over them in search of something more enjoyable. By squaring up to those tasks and finally evicting them from your list (and quite possibly the back of your mind) you’ll enjoy another small win.
• a means to eliminate the gnawing sense of anxiety: David Allen talks about this experience in his massively popular book Getting Things Done, that creeping feeling that you’ve missed something that’s going to come back and bite you somewhere sensitive any minute. If you’re not mega-busy you’ll be juggling fewer balls, but unless you’re grotesquely underworked you’ll be doing more than just tossing one ball in the air. Having a trusted system for managing your work eliminates the fear.
• more fun time: depending on how closely supervised you are, increasing your productivity might leave you with some chunks of time each day to do enjoyable things that can be done in the workplace. I’ll leave this to your imagination and give you a warning: if you get caught, your bosses will soon find plenty more for you to do.

So whether you make yourself more productive to get those annoying tasks off your plate or to create time for a long lunch break, you don’t have to a stressed out executive to make the most of sound productivity principles.

photo credit: Lili Vieira de Carvalho

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