Productivity EngineerInternet Marketing Tools to Enhance Your Productivity

Are you always reacting to the events and circumstances around you? Is your life being controlled by external forces?

When you allow yourself to live reactively you give up the power to control your destiny.

If you want to achieve more in your life you need to live proactively. As long as you are reactive (always saying “because” instead of “being cause”) you keep yourself in a powerless position.

It is a good practice not to make excuses. Nobody really cares about your excuse, but it needs to go deeper than that.

As long as you are giving yourself reasons, it is doing a disservice to yourself. You need to empower yourself by
thinking of how you can do better next time, instead of dwelling on why you were (in your opinion) “powerless” to get it done last time.

Consider Steven Covey’s quadrants as I discussed in this previous post. Living reactively keeps you in quadrants 1 and 2 where everything is urgent whether it is important or not.  This leaves you no time or energy to do the important work that is not urgent.

You must take control to get what you want out of life.  It sounds difficult when you have ingrained habits of reacting to the events in your life.  The best way to break a bad habit is to replace it with a new (good) habit.  Get in the habit of planning what you should be doing each day the night before and first thing in the morning.

You may find when you think about what you need to do before going to sleep, things will be clearer when you wake up in the morning.

Then make a habit of watching what you are doing.  If you are not doing what you planned, why not?  Are you reacting to something or someone else?

Each time you catch yourself being reactive, take a minute to think of what you could do to prevent this limiting behavior from happening in the future. Make that your habit to replace the habit of reacting to things beyond your control.

Take personal responsibility in everything you do and you will find you can get more done, instead of playing the victim of circumstances all the time. That is what being proactive is all about.

Productivity is all about getting things done, but it’s not just how much gets done. It also depends on what gets done.

A lot of people spend all day being very busy and they can actually say that they got a lot done, but can they say they what they should have done got done?

If you spend all day checking your email, you may be very busy. You may be constantly answering customer questions or researching new products. There are a lot of things that will keep you busy and it seems that they are endless.

But you have to prioritize what you are doing to make sure the important things get done.

If you categorize all your tasks as important or unimportant, then also categorize them as urgent or not urgent, you can fit all your tasks into one of the quadrants of the chart to the right.

Most people spend their lives in the Important Urgent quadrant. They jump from one urgent important task to the next with occasional interruptions by urgent unimportant tasks like a phone call from a friend.

Ideally, you want to be able to spend a lot of time in the Not Urgent Important quadrant. This is when you can do your strategizing to grow your business. If you are always busy handling urgent important tasks, you will never have a chance to grow.

In order to get more time in the sweet spot of important not urgent work, you need to systematize your day-to-day urgent important tasks so you can get them done quickly.

Then schedule them at a time when you can get the most done without interruption leaving more time free to handle your important not urgent business.

As a bonus, once you have your tasks systematized they can easily be delegated to others. If you don’t have a staff to handle these tasks, you can outsource them. The key to successful outsourcing is to have a good system that you can use to communicate exactly what needs to be done and how it should be done.

I will be posting more about outsourcing in the near future. I am working on a project to help entrepreneurs build systems to grow their businesses by outsourcing. Allen Davis The Productivity Engineer

Anytime you can offload things you need to remember from your head onto paper (or your computer), the more you set yourself up for taking action.

Your brain hates stress, and having to remember all the details related to preparing your taxes, or everything you need to schedule, reserve, and buy for a vacation just weighs you down.

Checklists help you get rid of a lot of this stress by acting like a ‘mini-blueprint’ you can easily follow anytime you need it, without the worry that you’re forgetting something important.

For any process or sequence of actions you perform on a regular basis, take a little time to create a checklist for it and use it as needed. It may take a little time to create initially, but it will save you gobs of time and energy in the long-run.

If you need a bit of inspiration when creating your checklists, just search Google for some ideas. For example, to create a travel checklist, begin by searching Google for travel checklist. You’ll find plenty of ideas for things to add to your own.

To help you take greater control of your time, so you can begin enjoying more of your life on YOUR terms. Here’s a page that reveals a simple 3-step system that is hands-down one of the best ways for getting things done.

Click here to visit it now (you’ll need a simple notepad and a timer, like an egg timer):

Action Machine Pro

All the best,

Allen Davis
ProductivityEngineer.com