Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

7 Step Productivity Plan

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Staying productive during rough patches is the true test. Here are 7 ways to maintain your committment to productivity even when life gets tough.

Being Productive Despite Your Workload

We all have goals that we want to achieve, dreams that we want to attain. Our goals differ from each other, but reaching these may not be as easy as it looks. Yes, you have the perfect work attitude, and yes, also know how to prioritize. There are, however, some things in life that you just cannot control.

A sudden blackout may hinder you from completing your work, or an important family gathering may require you to let go of all your chores. What do you do when this time comes? Do you blame the things you cannot control for your failures? While this may be the easy way out, it is far from being right.

Life is made up of two types of people: the positive and the negative. The positive tend to win all the time because they also take responsibility for their failures by embracing them. The negative, on the other hand, simply walk away and point their finger at everyone but themselves.

How do you win in life? How do you become a productive person while being able to keep a very busy work schedule? The first thing you must know and accept is that you simply cannot win every time. It’s what you do when you fail that counts. Here are some helpful tips to know and follow so that you can go through trials and misfortunes as smoothly as possible:

1. Don’t blame other people for your failure – to blame them is to pass on your responsibilities. This is tantamount to throwing your arms up in the air and saying, “I give up!”

2. When problems arise, deal with them accordingly – plan what you need to do. Ask for help if you need to and let failures serve as lessons learned.

3. Never forget – remember what caused you to create the mistake in the first place. Keep these in mind and avoid situations wherein you’ll be forced to make the same mistake twice.

4. Never let anything stop you – as you strive for success, there will always be hurdles to face. These hurdles simply slow you down, but that’s all they will do.

5. Plan your life – make a careful schedule for each task to be done. No matter how many tasks there are, each undertaking achieved allows you to cross something off your list of things that have yet to be done.

6. Know that you are in control of your life – have a firmer grip on your responsibilities. Familiarize yourself with each objective and do research if you must. The more you know about something, the easier it will be for you navigate your way through it.

7. Think positive – this may be the most important thing you can ever do. Believe in yourself and in your abilities. You simply have to meet achievers to know that these people are the ones who believe in themselves the most. Success is not so much about talent, but more on the idea that with effort and an optimistic attitude, you can do most anything.

Productive people are those who know what they’re doing. You can be one of them if you simply work on honing your talents and abilities. It’s a matter of fine-tuning and letting yourself be more in touch with the aspects in your life.

Remember, nobody is excused from making mistakes. The fact is, every living person has made many of them. You simply have to figure out what you need to do to attain every single dream that you have.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Motivation and Goal Setting

Sunday, May 10th, 2009

Goal Setting – Putting Motivation Into Perspective

If you’ve ever worked in a corporate environment, especially in a management position, you’re no stranger to the concept of establishing goals and their importance to any organization that practices management by objectives.

Even if you’ve never been in a position requiring you to define specific, measurable goals, you may not realize that every single day you’ve done so. Chances are, by not knowing you were actually setting goals, you were able to achieve them with far less analysis than accomplished through formal goal setting.

The difference between achieving formal goals versus informal goals is one of motivation. Quite often with formal goals, we may make progress towards our objective, but not have a clear understanding of the process required – and we often see a decline in our motivation to continue or to continue effectively.

This is perhaps most often seen in group work environments, where one or two members of the group seem to “Get It”, while others just sort of follow along, contributing as asked and simply waiting for others to ensure the goal is achieved at some hazy future point.

Yet as individuals, we are often able to accomplish our own informal goals almost subconsciously. Each and every day of our lives, we plan, act upon and accomplish innumerable short-term goals, while simultaneously working towards longer-term goals, by establishing patterns of activity.

For example, you may get up a 6:00 AM each weekday, shower, dress, have breakfast and drive to your place of employment. Odds are you’ve done these thousands of times without giving it a second thought and yet, you are in fact achieving five goals every morning.

You’re able to do this for several reasons – first of course, you understand the primary goal of getting to work on time each day at the task level. Next, your motivation for doing so no doubt includes the desire to avoid being fired for continued tardiness. Another motivation is simply a need to demonstrate being a reliable member of the organization.

On a longer-term basis, we often plan for and follow through on everything from vacations and holidays to paying off our mortgages and other debts. Here again, we have plenty of motivation to do these things and we do them subconsciously. And yet we often meet or exceed these goals with little or no effort.

What’s most interesting about this is that in our personal lives, we rarely use any elaborate system to track and complete these tasks. No software, no systems and at best might scribble down a reminder not to ourselves and stick it on the fridge.

If you really sit down and think about it, there’s no reason why you could not apply the same approach to your business or work related goals. A task is a task, whether it’s having to meet with a teacher at 2 pm or having to ensure a critical order was placed and is being tracked.

If you can find your motivation for staying on top of things at the office as you do at home, you’ll never again have any serious difficulty meeting your business goals!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Time Management Brings Happiness

Friday, May 1st, 2009

The Big Benefit of Time Management or What Makes The Effort of Time Management Worth the Bother.

Exercising time management requires–you guessed it–time.  It seems a bit of a paradox, doesn’t it?  In order to develop effective time management skill, you must take more time out of your busy schedule that already contains more tasks than you have time to accomplish.  But the investment of time used to schedule your time will create more time available to you in the long run.

So if you’re already overwhelmed by your to do list, and you find yourself making excuses not to do what you know must be done, then you need some motivation.  You can find that motivation in the Big Benefit of Time Management.

And what might that big benefit of time management be, you ask?

Happiness!

Think about it for a moment.  Why is it that when you can’t seem to drag yourself out of bed at 7:00 to get to work by 8:00, you will jump out of bed with great enthusiasm on a weekend at 5:00 to spend a day in your favorite hobby or pasttime?  Because the leisure activity brings you joy.  You are motivated to get out of bed because you know the day will bring you happiness, as opposed to the workday that brings misery.

So, in order motivate yourself to exercise effective time management, you must use the carrot of the Big Benefit of Time Management rather than the stick your boss likely uses–increased productivity.  Remember, the more time you can free up, the more time you will have for your favorite activities.

To develop effective time management skill, begin with what motivates you.  Don’t worry about mundane tasks or activities that increase productivity, but rather think about the things you love to do.  Think about the things that drive you to try and earn more money so you have more money to spend on them.  Then make those things your priority, schedule them first, and schedule other things around them.

There are many places on the internet you can download a daily planner template or a free printable daily planner.  Don’t get too caught up in what tool to use.  A legal pad or wall calendar is enough for now.  The important thing is you get into the practice of planning your time and writing it down.

Let’s say the activity that brings you the most enjoyment is camping.  First, decide how many days this year you want to spend camping.  Then decide what times of year you want to use those days.  Now that you have the number of days and the season, take a look at the calendar and begin planning which days specifically you want to spend camping.  Block those days out on a calendar.

Now you must evaluate what you need to accomplish to be able to spend that time camping.  If you’re going to be gone for a week, what must you do prior to being able to be gone for that week?  Consider the “must do” items only, write them down, and then schedule the necessary time for those activities.

This is a simplified example, but you will notice how much more motivated you are to schedule other tasks when you first schedule your favorite activities.  You are motivated because there is a reward of the Big Benefit of Time Management – Happiness!

Tags: Motivation, Effective Time Management

Tags: ,
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »