Guideline on personal effectiveness from CEO Changellenge >>: 5 principles and 35 techniques, collected from all sources in the world

It is a lot of work and productive, to set challenging goals and achieve them, to keep up with everything and at the same time to get maximum enjoyment from life - in general, it is not so easy to be a genius of personal effectiveness. But not very difficult - if you know what and how to do.

Our stunning analysts and incredibly productive CEO Andrei Alasov gathered and made a huge guide on how exactly the methods and techniques can and should be used to improve their own efficiency. Involved both personal experience Andrew, and the most respectable sources from around the world - and it turned out extremely interesting.
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First, we will tell you about the general principles that will help lay the foundation for your productivity, and then we will move on to the building blocks — specific tips and techniques. We could enumerate them even more, but first of all we wanted to convey to you one important thing: if one brick falls out, then nothing terrible will happen, but if you poorly lay the foundation, the whole building of your personal effectiveness will collapse.

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Principle 1. The basis of any productivity consists of four things: time, energy, attention and skill.
Your personal effectiveness depends on how you manage these four components. They are closely interrelated, but can not go into each other, so you need to develop all the components simultaneously. For example, if you have enough time, energy and you are well aware of what to do - but you cannot concentrate and constantly get distracted - the result will not be impressive. No energy, skill and concentration can cope with the task in an hour, if in reality it requires half a day of work. Well, if you do not have enough skill to complete the task, then you will spend the rest of your resources excessively - time, energy and attention, practically not approaching the goal.

Principle 2. There is no single “magic” secret of productivity, but you can use 35 tactics that allow you to do more.
Many factors affect what you manage to do in a day - and each of them refers to the ability to manage your time, energy, attention and skill. Below we present our list of 35 tactics of personal effectiveness, which we have collected for you from a variety of sources. Each of these tactics will help you manage one of the four main components with the greatest efficiency. Perhaps you already use some of the techniques, only learn about the others, and some still seem strange to you at first glance, but we still recommend them to try.

Principle 3. If you work too much or through force, it seriously undermines your productivity.
Chris Bailey investigated his personal effectiveness and conducted a special experiment. One month he alternated the 90-hour work week with the 20-hour one. When he compared the amount of work done, he was the same. The reason for this lies in the fact that a person makes more effort if he knows that the time limits are limited, and he can afford to waste time if he has a lot of it. According to the well-known Parkinson's law, the work fills the time allotted to it. In other words, writing a letter to a client can take one hour, but if you give a person four hours to do this, he will spend all four hours.
If you work through force, applying too much effort per unit of time, then burnout will occur very quickly. Energy is not an infinite resource, we all need to be replenished - sports, recreation, food (below we will tell about it in more detail).
In summary, hard work provides only a short-term effect of increasing productivity. You can do a lot in one or two days of hard work, but you will not be able to maintain such a regime constantly.

Principle 4. The following principle follows from this: the three most useful ways to increase their efficiency are very simple and accessible to all. This is sport, food and sleep.
This advice may seem trivial, but it works nonetheless. The same author was convinced of this on his own experience. During the day, he experimented with a variety of techniques to improve efficiency, but at the end of the day, only three always worked flawlessly: sports, sleep and food.

Principle 5. Productivity is not about how much you worked, it is about how much you did.
It makes no sense to measure your productivity in hours that you spent on work, or in the number of books that you read or the words that you wrote. Counting such things gives you a very limited picture, while creating the illusion of fruitful work. What matters is the result you achieved.
In any area (health, finances, work, relationships, personal life) there are several key tasks that determine your success in this area. Focus on such things that create maximum value and give the greatest return on your investment of time, energy and attention.

And now for the specific rules. We have gathered for you here the 35 most effective techniques.



Rule 1. Make plans and to-do lists

If you have never dealt with attempts to streamline your life, start with the simplest thing - making up your to-do lists. What are they needed for? First, we cannot keep 80% of the received information in RAM for more than two minutes; secondly, if we still try to do this, then our brain cannot work on several processes in parallel and will be very tired. Therefore, write down a task for yourself, set deadlines - and if the task is not urgent, calmly forget about it.

Depending on who you are, an owl or a lark, set aside time every morning or evening and assign yourself tasks. If you spend 10 minutes planning your work time, you can save up to two hours per day.

You can use mobile phone apps to assign tasks. The advice from our CEO, Andrei Alyasov, who does not like to write on paper and at one time studied all the offers on the market:

“The coolest app is Omni Focus. It works perfectly, best thought out and intuitive, the only negative is quite expensive, the price starts from $ 20 (for the iPhone). In the extreme case, the GoodTask application can replace it - almost the same in function, only cheaper. In second place - Things. This application is slightly worse than Omni Focus (for example, there is no integration with the calendar), but cheaper - the price starts from $ 10 (for iPhone). Analogous to Things from a lower price category can be TickTick. In third place, you can put several applications at once, which, although inferior in convenience and functionality to the two previous ones, are conditionally free. For lovers of functional and complex task managers, there is Producteev and Wunderlist. For those who need something simpler - Clear and Any.Do. Finally, there is a special anti-procrastination application - Procraster. ”

Rule 2. Do not try to fill with all your free time

When planning, be sure to consider that about 40% of the time should remain free. That is, 60% of the time is devoted to planned tasks, 20% to unforeseen tasks, and another 20% to small and spontaneously arising in the course of work.
Time management specialists identify three types of tasks around which your schedule should be built:
• Tightly bound to the date, for example, "meeting with investors at 12.00";
• Budgeted tasks that are not important when to start, but they take strictly certain time, for example, “read the article - 1 hour”;
• Flexible tasks - the rest.

Rule 3. Record the time you spend (timekeeping)

It is impossible to control that which cannot be measured. Can you tell us what you spent your time on yesterday? A couple of hours on social networks, an hour on food, eight hours on work ... Most likely, you will be greatly mistaken in your calculations, since the perception of time is very subjective. Try to record all the cases and the exact time spent on them within one week. So you get a clear picture of real time, identify “time eaters,” and in general most likely learn a lot of new things about yourself. Timing is the most accurate answer to the question of how to learn to plan your time.

The Soviet scientist Lyubishchev, for example, every day meticulously counted how long it took him to do this or that activity, with an accuracy of 10 minutes. Each month, he compiled a summary on which it was possible to trace what matters took how much time and predict his employment for the future. Time accounting Lyubishchev kept 56 years, and really was able to achieve high productivity of labor.

There are also special applications for keeping time records, for example, the Rescuetime service. It takes into account how much time you spent at the computer. And as a result, it forms statistics of your activity in programs, in certain applications, on websites, downtime and the most busy hours of work.

Rule 4. Combine matters

Some things can be done simultaneously, without the slightest damage to productivity. Think about what points in your schedule tomorrow could be combined? For example, agree to discuss a joint project with colleagues from a neighboring department during lunch or invite a client to have lunch (and for this you do not need to read the book “Never Eat Alone”). What can you do in a car or public transport while you get to work?

Advice from Andrey Alyasov: “I always try to set off the morning of every day and evening for meetings for breakfast or dinner. So you do not just combine the meal with a useful thing, but also save on the road. In the afternoon you would have to travel back and forth, and in the morning or in the evening you do everything along the way. ”

Or create in advance a special list of tasks that do not require your mental involvement (for example, washing, cleaning, running, etc.), take the time and do them all at once, listening to something useful at this time (audiobooks, TED Talks and .d.)

Rule 5. Do not turn into a robot - do not paint your day to the smallest detail

Do not try to plan your day by the minute. In addition to the danger of breaking out of the schedule at the slightest problem, you may face another danger. For example, your schedule includes such tasks as “make coffee”, “brush your teeth”, “read mail”, “get to work” and so on. After you have noted their fulfillment in your list, you may have a pleasant feeling that the day was full of business, and you yourself have worked productively and have already completed several tasks. This is actually an illusion, so avoid putting a routine into the plan.

As a rule, do not do more than 8-10 tasks per day - you just do not follow them. In addition, the three tasks should be the most important, and first of all all your attention and efforts should be directed at them.

Rule 6. Rule of two minutes

When planning, use the rule of two minutes. If you can do this thing in two minutes - answer the letter, call, place an order - do it immediately and don’t add to the list today.

Rule 7. Set priorities

Start the day with the most important things. It is at this time that your attention and performance are at their peak. Try to get rid of low-priority tasks. If their execution takes only a few minutes, then deal with them quickly. If not, delegate them to someone, if there is such an opportunity, or postpone them for the future. If you postpone the task more than three times, you can safely delete it from your list altogether - most likely, you will do well without it.



Rule 8. Rule of one-task

Direct all your attention only to the task that you are performing at a given time. Multitasking does not increase, but only reduces your personal effectiveness. It is exhausting, not allowing to see the result of your work. It reduces the quality of work - when you can not concentrate, increases the likelihood of making a mistake. In addition, the habit of doing several things at the same time can negatively affect relationships with people: for example, your interlocutors experience discomfort when you talk to them, having buried in a mobile phone.

Rule 9. "If it does not work" - be prepared for this state.

Sometimes it happens that you do not want to work, that's all. Willpower is also the ultimate resource. Do not force yourself. In this case it is better either

a) "Eat a frog." “Eating frogs” is the name of a popular time management technique (from the book of a time management expert, Gleb Arkhangelsky). Do some simple work that for some reason was postponed for a long time. This will allow you to simply start, and perhaps get involved in the work.

b) Exercise 10 minutes of physical motor work (wash the dishes, make coffee, do the cleaning). Such monotonous work is also very good if you need to “reboot” or catch inspiration (monotony helps to tune in to a creative mood, because the brain tries to avoid dullness and ordinariness). The same effect will have a short walk or exercise.

c) restore order to the desktop. Many studies prove that confusion makes it difficult to concentrate. Therefore, if you still decide to postpone work tasks for later, it's time to tidy up on your desk or disassemble files in your computer. Perhaps some kind of document or note will push you to the thought and activate work activities.

Rule 10. Do “infopause” if you need to do something really important.

If you are going to take on an important task, then focus only on it and get rid of distractions - pause your email and turn off the phone. Gmail has an Inbox Pause feature that allows you to choose the time at which you will receive new emails. If this is possible, turn off the Internet or at least close the browser. No matter how passionate you are about the task you are performing, the Internet will always provoke you to be distracted.

Rule 11. Know how to stop on time.

Do not forget about the Pareto rule - 20% of the efforts give 80% of the result. Do not waste your strength and do not be a perfectionist. Remember the law of marginal diminishing utility - at some point the results cease to pay for the efforts spent on them. Details matter only when they really influence the result. Focus your attention on the things and factors that give the maximum effect.

Rule 12. Control the focus of your attention.

As soon as you get down to business - focus on its implementation, do not think about the final result, do not worry about quality - just do your job as well as possible. Time to correct mistakes will come later. Sometimes, if we think about the result and relate it to the huge amount of work to be done, we can lose motivation and constantly postpone the start of work. This process can be compared with walking on a rope - if you start looking up or down, you will certainly lose balance and fall. Look only forward.

Rule 13. Immerse yourself in the working atmosphere.

If you have such an opportunity, design your workplace to your liking. Remove from it all unnecessary, leaving only office supplies and things that inspire you and motivate you to work. Studies show that even the color of the walls affects your body in different ways: blue stimulates brain activity, yellow - emotions, red - physical activity, green calms and creates a feeling of comfort.

Experiment and try another way to create the right working atmosphere: install the Coffitivity application on your phone or computer, which recreates the ambient noise of a regular coffee shop. For some people, this noise background has a positive effect on productivity and creativity.

Rule 14. Work a little on Sunday evening.

On weekends, you should certainly relax and gain strength, but on Sunday evening it is useful to start thinking about the work week, so that Monday morning does not catch you by surprise. Put your papers in order, draw up a plan for the week, check the status of the projects. In addition, this is the right time to finish what you did not have time last week - at this time no one will distract you with requests and calls.

Rule 15. Relate the near and far perspective

What is the difference between strategic and tactical goals? Tactics are what you are doing directly, what allows you to get closer to your goal. Strategy is a global perspective, how your life is generally organized and for what you ultimately work and live. Constantly relate what you do to your long-term goals. Crossing out the lines in the to-do list is good, but it is useless to make an effort if it does not bring you closer to your final goal.

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