Ways to work towards your goals effectively
How can you be more selective and productive
During the pandemic, our life changed drastically. I personally felt the value of time. Our lifestyle was pretty much impacted by this situation. We started to work from home and had to deal with a routine that was fully based on a frame. There would have been moments where we felt overworked, overstimulated, over-informed, and overwhelmed is often as unproductive as doing nothing. I would like to share my personal thoughts on how to focus on the important tasks and ignore the rest.
Firstly it’s really important to dig in deep and determine what is efficiency and effectiveness.
“Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe.”
– Tim Ferriss, American author and entrepreneur
The above definition helps us to distinguish between efficiency and effectiveness in your working life and overall life. Ferriss has two key points to make that can help us think about efficiency and effectiveness:
- Doing something unimportant fast and doing it well does not make it important.
- Because a task requires a lot of time, it’s not necessarily important: Being busy is often a form of laziness.
The more effective you become, the faster you’ll finalise the tasks that bring you closer to reaching your goals. Effectiveness is how much you get done that is actually beneficial to you, your company and your life. On the other hand, efficiency is how much work you get done.
You need to understand the difference between efficiency and effectiveness and so you can be effective rather than being efficient. So what would be the ideal steps to follow to be effective and productive.
Define Your Goals and Track Your Time
You gain results from effective, productive work that helps you reach your goals.
It starts from a pretty basic step as, writing down the goals and then measuring how you spend your time at work. Lastly, you can compare the two to see if you’re actually working towards your goals and what kind of work you can skip if it’s not effectively bringing you closer to your goals, and what kind of work you can reduce to a minimum.
You will be amazed about the outcome, to be honest, this will free up lots of time and energy to do stuff that will bring you closer to your goals.
How to Use the Distinction and Eliminate Excess Time Spent on Emails
We all spend quite a considerable time checking and answering emails. It makes our routine pretty busy. It can be efficient if you have a process to help and guide you to manage all of your emails. But it can never be effective. Emails can and should be kept to a minimum.
If you are a person who is spending hours on emails the below method will ease you to free up your time to do more valuable work which brings you closer to your goals:
- Set aside as little as 15–30 minutes a day for emails.
- Use the least productive time in your day for this. If you tend to “let go” just before lunch or before the end of the day, that’s the ideal time to work on emails.
This approach allows you to use your most productive and focussed time to be effective with tasks that really do matter. This is often early mornings or the hours following lunch.
Emails may keep the world informed at a brisk pace and oil the wheels of business, but they can become just plain time-consuming and counterproductive to manage. The trick is to aim for the least costly part of your day so as to do your e-correspondence effectively.
Conclusion
In my personal opinion, I believe that identifying the key difference and refocus your working life on being effective rather than efficient, will help us to reach our goals. Been focused on performing only the most important tasks, creating awesome results, and doing that so much faster than you ever believed you would be able to make us feel great from inside as well as from outside. End of the day it’s all about,
“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” — Tim Ferriss, American podcaster, author and entrepreneur.
