Five Time Savers

The birds are loud this morning. Today I need to make up for low productivity yesterday. My assistant is on holidays so the contributed but that was not it. I did not focus hard enough on the right things to be highly productive. And many unplanned things present themselves during the course of a day that take my time and attention. Fortunately, this is a new day...

One advantage of blogging on a theme like time management or efficiency is that people get to know that this is an area of interest and as such send me interesting articles and books on the topic. One of my staff recently sent me an article by Dr. Donald Wetmore who is an author of, BEAT THE CLOCK and KISS Guide to ORGANIZING YOUR LIFE.

The article starts with a hard hitting paragraph, "If you can recapture a wasted hour here and there and redirect it to a more productive use, you can make great increases in your daily productivity and the quality of your life." So true. It is the momentum of the little things that creates great productivity.

He has five time savers:

Systematize: I am a great believer in this and I am constantly working on my systems whenever I have to deal with more volume. This is the first thing I do when I feel I need a productivity boost. This is the only way I have found to scale myself. I cannot do things now like I did when I did $50,000,000 in sales (despite the temptation to do so)

Plan adequate sleep: It is great to hear another author saying this. I think this is something that I should still add to my list.

Attend a speed reading class: I have long been an advocate of attending speed reading courses and don't understand why everyone doesn't do this. My variation on this would be to take another speed reading course and practise.

Develop your communication skills: Communications skills are something that everyone should have more of and can never hurt to do that.

Develop your people network: His logic for that is he believes that good cooperation of people allows you to get things done. One thing about having a larger people network is having people in your network absolutely takes more time. I constantly struggle with this and the feeling that I am letting people down who want to have me in their network. Adding people to my network takes more of my time so part of my systematizing lately has been to be a bit more ruthless about adding people to my network.

Off for a productive day.