10 important lessons that I learned during my project A Year of Productivity (year of productivity)

Today we will share with you the 10 most important lessons that Chris Bailey learned during the project - “a Year of Productivity” . Our previous article caused an ambiguous reaction from the audience, if you have not read it, we recommend that you look at it and other articles from Chris Bailey in our blog .

Let's start!

Last year in May, I graduated from the university in a business specialty and received two lucrative offers of cooperation, but I rejected both of them because I had my own plan.
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During the year, from May 1, 2013 to May 1, 2014, I studied all the information on productivity that was available to me and wrote down daily the conclusions that I made in the framework of the A Year of Productivity project.

During these 12 months, I put on myself countless experiments on increasing the level of productivity, communicated with the most successful people in this regard, read many books and scientific literature - in general, did everything I could to figure out how to get the maximum performance from myself, and then describe your experience for others.

During this year 197 articles were written, which collected more than one million views. I came to the end of my path, it only remained to summarize it as vividly as possible.

To complete the year of increasing personal productivity, I created a compilation of the most important lessons that I learned on my way to my intended goal. Below are 10 key findings from my project.

So, leaving extra words, let's move on to the most important lessons of improving personal efficiency, which I learned and formulated during the year.

10. One of the best ways to increase your productivity is to focus on those tasks that bring maximum benefit.

In every component of our life, be it mind, body, emotions, relationships, career, finances or entertainment, there are only a few such tasks. For example, at work you perform only a few functions, which account for 80-90% of your total efficiency.

One of the easiest ways to achieve more is to identify the most relevant and important things in every area of ​​your life and execute them. Remember, there are a limited number of activities that give maximum return, in exchange for the resources of time, effort and attention.

9. The three most faithful ways to become more productive are part of the three most boring tips that everyone probably received.

It seems to me that in every cliché lies the truth, so powerful that people feel the need to repeat it again and again. The same applies to trivial tips to improve personal effectiveness.

Over the past year, I have conducted countless experiments on the introduction of various habits and techniques to improve efficiency in my life, but as a result, the most relevant was the observance of three rules:

1. Eat well.
2. Get enough sleep.
3. Doing sports.

These tips are so beaten that sometimes they lose all their meaning. But hear me, as a person who has tried on himself for the last ten years hundreds of different tactics of managing time, energy and attentiveness: nothing made me more effective than good nutrition, sleep and exercise. [one]

8. Question all the tips for improving personal effectiveness.

There are tips that are ideal for most people, such as “eat well”, “get enough sleep” and “exercise”, and also “meditate”, but there are exceptions to any rule.

Sometimes it is useful to reject generally accepted truths, especially if something else works better in your case. You understand that you become much more effective if you do not have to get up at 5:30 in the morning? Then sleep longer! It became obvious that you are more confused if you don’t do important things in the morning, but just answer emails? So this is exactly what you need to do in the morning!

There is a grain of truth in every council for increasing personal effectiveness and in any worldly wisdom, but a lot of them may be useless in your case. Everyone thinks in his own way and has his own life priorities; therefore, not even the most universal advice is suitable for everyone and always.

Sometimes it is useful to question established stereotypes , especially if in your case something else works better. So go ahead!

7. Formation of good habits automatically increases your productivity.

I believe that one of the best ways to become more effective is to turn new, most productive behaviors into habits , so that everything is done on the machine.

According to the theory of Charles Dahigg, the author of The Power of Habit, 40–45% of our daily activity is accounted for by habits. Forming new habits is not an easy task. It sometimes takes several months to incorporate a new habit into your life, but if it succeeds, a person automatically increases his level of productivity.

For example, it took me more than one month to form the habit of getting up at 5:30 in the morning, but after I did it, this habit became a key one for me, and I got up early already automatically. It took me a few weeks to get used to the new diet, but as soon as I managed, my new eating habits became part of my life, becoming one of the other automatic actions.

Again, the formation of new habits is not an easy task, especially if at first you have to use will power to change your behavioral patterns, but remember that the process becomes easier with time until, as a result, you automatically become more productive.

6. There are three components of productivity that need to be combined on a daily basis: time, energy and attentiveness

Toward the end of my project, I began to realize that each article I wrote could be classified into one of three categories: 1. how best to manage time ; 2. how best to manage energy ; 3. how best to manage concentration .

In my opinion, all these components are crucial if you want to maintain your productivity at a high level. Some people have an incredible amount of energy and a high level of concentration, but they do not know how to manage their time, and therefore do not perform the main work and have low efficiency. Others, on the contrary, know how to properly distribute their time, and are quite energetic, but not attentive, which also cannot be productive. Still others ideally concentrate on their business and know how to manage their time resources, but they do not understand how to properly expend their strength and energy, which is why they get tired quickly and do not achieve their goal.

People with high productivity skillfully manage all three components.

5. There is no single secret way to increase personal productivity, but there are hundreds of strategies that you could use to achieve your goal.

If there is such a secret, I could not reveal it in a year of experiments and studying effectiveness.

If I learned something for certain, it is that there are so many different tactics that can be used to manage time, energy and attention. In fact, by the end of the year I had collected a collection of 100 of my favorite tricks.

Productivity is a complex concept that can be characterized only by understanding its interconnected parts. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of factors affecting your daily productivity. Each of them is necessarily associated with the management of time, strength and attentiveness.

4. Overly hard work has a negative impact on productivity.

In the course of my project, I found out that too hard work dramatically reduces my productivity .

As part of my experiment, I worked 90 months a week for a month, and then 20 hours a month. As a result, I found out that my coefficient of productivity in both cases was approximately the same. This happened for one simple reason - by limiting the time allotted for a particular task, I forced myself to expend more energy, filling up the lack of time. If I allocated more time for work, I delayed, paid attention to secondary tasks, simply losing time.

What happens if a person works too hard, spending a lot of effort on the task? It just burns. It is noteworthy that I did not describe the harmful effects of excessive concentration of attention at work, although I realized that concentration of attention and energy expenditure are always interrelated. In my view, energy is a kind of fuel that a person burns in a day, doing his job. If you throw all your strength into the task, and do not give yourself the opportunity to recover through sports training, for example, or just pauses in work, eating and do not pay enough attention to relaxing techniques, you will quickly burn your fuel and start burning yourself.

Working too long or too hard, you are actually destroying your effectiveness, because this rhythm drains your two most valuable resources: time and energy.



3. The best way to get interested is to understand what work will give you.

The most motivated (and productive) people regularly ask themselves: why do they do what they do?
If you try to take the number of completed tasks, instead of doing something that correlates with your values ​​and beliefs, then you certainly will raise the bar of your productivity, but only in the short term, and in the long term you will surely encounter dissatisfaction, and therefore , with low efficiency. A key task in this regard is to clearly define your values ​​and the factors that best motivate you. To take on work and responsibility is, above all, on the basis of its principles.

The fact that you are constantly busy and do a lot does not necessarily mean that you are productivity. I would say that even the opposite. Productivity is not directly related to the amount of work done, the main thing is whether you have achieved the main and most important goal for yourself.

2. The desire for a high level of productivity loses meaning if in the process you become merciless to yourself

The reason why I pay so much attention to a humane attitude towards myself in the framework of the A Year of Productivity project is simple - this factor is one of those productivity components with which I had a particularly difficult time.

At the very beginning of my experiment, I rushed into the pool with my head, because nothing fascinates me more than work on the level of productivity. At first, serious workloads were easy, and I liked everything. I just didn't have to force myself to work hard.

But as the project progressed, when the number of visits to this site went from a few thousand per month to hundreds of thousands, I had to find it harder and harder to write and conduct experiments. As a result, I began to like the process much less. To admit this is not easy, especially given the number of people who dream, like me, to do what they love and achieve success. On the other hand, it is just necessary to show how important it is to take care of yourself in the process of increasing personal effectiveness.

You will not achieve this goal without making an effort, you will have to force yourself to work more, but in the process of making positive changes in life, it is very easy to overreact and begin to make excessive demands on yourself.

Forcing yourself to work more, constantly monitor the level of their demands. Since 80% of what you mentally say to yourself is initially negative, it is very important to show a little softness to yourself, especially at those moments when you are trying to become better.

A few techniques helped me to be kinder to myself during the annual productivity experiment: meditation, organizing more breaks, completely disconnecting from it several times a day and cultivating habits that bring happiness to my life.

1. Efficiency is not how much you have done, but what you have achieved

At the very beginning of a project to improve efficiency, I created a page for keeping statistics in order to share relevant information about my daily productivity. Every day I published data on the number of articles I wrote, pages read and hours spent in work. I assumed that these were the ideal parameters for determining my personal effectiveness.

I could not be wrong more.

Unless you control the plant, performance data based on the number of units produced will give you a scant, limited picture of the performance factor. In fact, if you try to tackle the problem with intelligence and ingenuity and write articles so that instead of 500 words you get only 100, then by measuring your productivity in the way described above, you will be unpleasantly surprised by its low level.

It is very easy to succumb to the desire to apply measurements and statistics, but when it comes to a person’s personal effectiveness, statistics are secondary. Productivity is not how much you do, but what you end up with.

It is important to carry out the primary and most urgent tasks. It is also necessary to know how to properly allocate your resources, such as time, energy and attentiveness in order to do more. But at the end of the day, when your time, strength and attentiveness are exhausted, you have only one thing left - the result of your activity and the understanding that you changed the world a little by the work you did during the day.

This is the meaning of productivity.

Note: 1. I was going to include meditation in this list, but I realized that this exercise is not as acceptable for the overwhelming majority of people as proper nutrition, exercise and healthy sleep.

PS Some time ago we published one of the most interesting articles from Chris Bailey - an article about great achievements .