Would you rate yourself as an highly productive person?

Learn how to improver your performance at work or during your studies

We have read and studied a lot about productivity and about what makes some people more productive than others. Studies and researches focus all on some habits that can change your working flow: developing daily routines, planning your schedule, coping with messages, getting a lot done, running effective meetings, honing communication skills, and delegating tasks to others, working longer hours does not necessarily means getting higher on personal productivity. Working smarter is the key to accomplishing more of your top priorities each day. 

Secondly also age and seniority are highly correlated with personal productivity, usually older and more senior professionals accomplish more tasks than junior colleagues. This may suggest that business professionals attain higher levels of seniority in part by cultivating good productivity habits. More senior respondents achieved high productivity from better planning of their schedules, getting a lot done, and stronger communication skills. This trend seems to reflect the benefits of learning from years of experience how to work smarter. 

There are not many changes in terms of productivity between male and female professionals but is possible to notice that women usually tend to score particularly high when it came to running effective meetings, finishing them with an agreement on the next steps to take. Women are also great on scheduling an efficient agenda in advance and on monitoring their emails. By contrast men, goes particularly well when it comes to cope with high message volume, not looking at their emails to frequently and to skip over messages of low value. They are also better on keeping some free slots in their daily schedules and to get quickly to the final product.

Some other trends that promotes productivity are habits, in particular is noticeable that workers or students tend to do the best on the same cluster of habits. They usually plan their work based on their top priorities, and then act to pursue a definite objective. In this way they develop effective techniques for managing a high volume of information and tasks, understanding the needs of their colleagues through short meeting, responsive communication and clear direction.

What doesn’t promote productivity is procrastination, getting to the final project and focusing on daily accomplishments is what proactive and productive people do, planning schedules the night before is also pretty important and helps to rise personal performances. 

So what is important to do to become more productive?

The 20 rules to start following to become a highly productive professional

1. The key is to develop an array of specific habits.
2. Planning your work based on your top priorities;
3. Act with precise objective;
4. Revise your daily schedule the night before to emphasize your priorities;
5. Write down the objective that you have for each appointment in your calendar;
6. Send out a detailed agenda to all participants in advance of any meeting;
7. Sketch out some preliminary conclusion before embarking on large projects;
8. Develop effective techniques for managing the overload of information and tasks;
9. Make daily processes, like getting dressed or eating breakfast, into routines so you don’t spend time thinking about them;
10. Leave time in your daily schedule to deal with emergencies and unplanned event;
11. Check the screens on your devices once per hour, instead of every few minutes;
12. Skip over the majority of your messages by looking at the subject and sender;
13. Break large projects into pieces and reward yourself for completing each piece;
14. Delegate to others, if feasible, tasks that do not further your top priorities;
15. Understand the needs of your colleagues for short meetings, responsive communications, and clear directions;
16. Limit the time for any meeting to 90 minutes at most, but preferably less;
17. End every meeting by delineating the next steps and responsibility for those steps;
18. Respond right away to messages from people who are important to you;
19. To capture an audience’s attention, speak from a few notes, rather than reading a prepared text;
20. Establish clear objectives and success metrics for any team efforts;
21. To improve your team’s performance, institute procedures to prevent future mistakes, instead of playing the blame game;