Charging Up Your Personal Productivity

*found on EZine Artlicles

by: HS Tan

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.

In 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 rumors. 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".