Unfortunately, many people are poor workers. They are unorganized, unfocused, and easily distracted. They work at about 40 percent of capacity. Sadly enough, they don’t even seem to know how to do it any differently. Much of the blame for poor work habits goes back to their school system, to the attitudes of teachers toward academic excellence and the attitudes of parents toward homework.
If people go through 10 or 12 or even 15 years of schooling and never have to learn how to settle down and produce good-quality work, it’s not surprising that they will have a hard time producing high-quality work when they enter the workforce. Here, I’ll show you how to develop the habits of highly productive people.
The foundations of good work habits can be summarized in two words: Focus and Concentration. Focus means clarity concerning the desired results and the relative priority of each step toward the results. When I think of focus, I think of a photographer adjusting his or her lens to keep the subject in sharp focus. In order to be truly effective at work, you have to be continually adjusting your lens to be sure that what you’re working on is the most important thing you could be doing toward achieving your most important goals. The very worst waste of time is doing something very well that need not be done at all.
Concentration, on the other hand, means the ability to stay with the task until it is 100 percent complete. Concentration means to work in a straight line from where you are to where you want to go without diversion or distraction, without getting sidetracked into doing things of lesser importance.
If you want to accomplish your goals, then just make sure that everything you do is taking you in that direction.
Here are the big four steps to high productivity, and they cannot be repeated too often. First, set clear goals and objectives in writing. Think them through carefully before you begin. What are you trying to do? How are you trying to do it? Whenever you experience frustration of any kind, go back to these questions. What are you trying to do? How are you trying to do it?
The second step to high productivity is a detailed plan of action for achieving the goal. This answers the question, How are you trying to do it? When you have done this, you will have the answers to what and how, something that very few people ever take the time to think through.
The third step to high productivity is clear priorities with activities organized in a hierarchy of value and importance to the desired result, with the 80/20 rule applied over and over again, day by day, hour by hour, before you embark on any task or activity.
And finally, the fourth step, single-minded concentration on the highest-paid-off task leading to the goal. This is the key to getting things done. There are real benefits from learning how to concentrate. For one, important task completion is a source of energy and enthusiasm and self-esteem. Incompletion or only partial completion of major tasks is not only a major source of stress, but it also has no motivational power. When you complete a task that’s important to you, you feel a burst of energy and well-being. But when you work on something that is unimportant, even if you complete it in a timely fashion, you get no feeling of satisfaction at all.
Another benefit of concentrating on the job until it is finished is that task completion gives you confidence, competence, and a feeling of mastery. It gives you a feeling of self-control, that you are in charge of your own destiny. The habit of completing your transactions, of finishing what you start, is an essential part of character building. You cannot imagine a fully mature human being who is unable to finish what he or she begins.
The Power of Positive Thinking Tags: lesser importance, school system, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, straight line, Complete metric space, sharp focus, Goals And Objectives, high-quality work, poor work habits
