If you want to accomplish your goals, you must be sure that everything you do is taking you in that direction. This decision alone will dramatically increase the quality and quantity of what you get done each day.
Four Steps to High Productivity
There are four main steps to high productivity, and they cannot be repeated too often:
First, set clear goals and objectives in writing. Think through what you are trying to accomplish before you begin. Ask, “What am I trying to do? How am I trying to do it?” Whenever you experience frustration of any kind, go back and repeat these questions.
Second, develop a detailed plan of work and action for achieving your goal.
Setting clear goals answers the question: “What am I trying to do” and making detailed plans of action answers the question: “How am I trying to do it?”
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Third, set clear priorities with each of your work tasks organized in a hierarchy of value and importance to the desired result.
Apply the 80/20 Rule over and over, day by day and hour by hour, before you embark on any task or activity. Discipline yourself to work on your highest priority before you do anything else.
Fourth, concentrate single-mindedly, without diversion or distraction, on the most important thing you can do to achieve the goal. This is the real key to getting things done.
The Benefits of Concentration
There are several benefits from learning how to concentrate. First, important task completion is a source of energy, enthusiasm and self-esteem. On the other hand, incompletion of important tasks, or only partial completion, is not only a major source of stress but it depletes your enthusiasm and self-esteem.
When you complete an important task, you experience a surge of energy and well-being. But when you work on an unimportant task, even if you complete it in a timely fashion, you get no feeling of satisfaction or personal reward at all.
Disciplining yourself to concentrate on a job until it is finished gives you confidence, competence and feeling of mastery. It gives you an experience 137
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of self-control, and makes you feel that you are in charge of your own destiny.
The Habit of Task Completion
The habit of completing your tasks, finishing what you start, is an essential part of character building. You cannot imagine a fully mature, fully functioning person who is unable to finish what he or she begins. The development of this habit is the key to long-term success.
You can accelerate the process of becoming a highly productive person by visualizing yourself over and over as focused and channeled toward high achievement. See yourself as a highly productive, efficient person. Feed your subconscious mind with this picture until it is accepted as a command.
Remember, the person you “see” is the person you will “be.”
Your subconscious mind cannot tell the difference between a real experience and one that you vividly imagine. If you create an imaginary picture of yourself performing in an efficient and effective way, your subconscious mind reacts exactly as if that is what you were actually doing at the moment.
Each time you replay this image of yourself performing at your best, your subconscious mind records it exactly as if it were happening again. It then adjusts your words, actions and behavior so that your actions on the outside are consistent with the picture you have created on the inside.
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Each time you remember a time when you were performing at your best with pleasure, your subconscious mind records it, just like a new photograph and imprints it into your self-concept. The more often you see yourself as the very best that you could possibly be, the more rapidly this becomes your automatic behavior. You program yourself for success by feeding your mind with positive pictures, either imaginary images that you create or repeat pictures of previous peak performance experiences.
Combine Thoughts with Feelings
The principle of emotionalization is very powerful when you use it in conjunction with visualization. There is a formula that says, “Thought times emotion equals result (T x E = R).” What this means is that, if you create a clear mental picture of yourself working efficiently and well, and you combine that with the emotion of enthusiasm and enjoyment, this picture is more rapidly accepted as a command by your subconscious mind, and the faster it becomes your current behavior.
A powerful method for reprogramming your subconscious mind with the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of highly productive people is for you to
“act as if” you were already the efficient, effective person that you desire to be.
Assume the Position
It turns out that there is a physical position for almost every mental or emotional state. There is a body language for good work habits as well. For 139
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example, if you work at a desk and you sit up straight, erect and lean forward, you actually trigger a feeling of being more productive. If you walk briskly, with your head up, your shoulders back and your chin held high, you tend to feel like a more confident and productive person.
The Law of Reversibility says that if you feel a particular way, on the inside, you will act that way on the outside. It also says that, if you act as if you already felt the way you desire, the actions, which are under your direct control, will create the feelings, which are not.
If you want to be confident, act confidently. If you want to be courageous, act courageously, if you want to be efficient, behave as if you already were an efficient person. Your actions generate your feelings and beliefs, just as your feelings and beliefs determine your actions.
Sit Up Straight
On the other hand, if you slouch in a chair or walk slowly with your head down, you will feel lethargic and unproductive. If you put your feet up or lean back and relax, your energy levels will drop and you will lose your enthusiasm for any kind of productive work.
Throughout the workday, you should stop regularly and observe how you are sitting and doing your work. Ask yourself, “Would a highly effective person sit and look like this?” If the answer is no, then change your posture and your position so that it is more consistent with the way you think a highly productive person would sit and work.
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Perform Like a Genius
Some years ago, the Readers Digest reported on a study of geniuses. The story examined the life and habits of many geniuses over the ages in an attempt to determine what characteristics geniuses had in common. They finally concluded that all geniuses seemed to behave the same in three ways.
Fortunately, an ordinary person with average intelligence can develop these three qualities or behaviors, and dramatically increase their mental productivity as a result.
The first quality they found was that all geniuses seemed to take a systematic and orderly approach to problem solving. Whenever something went wrong, they would stop and analyze it carefully, step by step, before jumping to a conclusion or taking action to resolve it. As a result, when they finally did make a decision, it was better than those of ordinary people who simply reacted to a problem rather than thinking it through.
Maintain a Sense of Wonder
The second quality that the geniuses in the study seemed to have in common was a sense of wonder, the ability to look at situations in a fresh, almost childlike way.
Geniuses keep an open mind, and a flexible attitude toward all subjects.
They allow their minds to “float freely” and examine all the possible ways of approaching a situation or solving a problem before they come to a conclusion. They continually ask, “What else might be the solution?”
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The third quality of geniuses is that they seem to have the ability to concentrate with greater depth and intensity than the average person.
Thomas Carlisle once said, “Genius is simply an infinite capacity for taking pains.” Almost anyone who can discipline himself or herself to concentrate single mindedly on a single subject until he or she completes that task or masters that subject, will begin to perform vastly better in that area.
This ability to concentrate single-mindedly applies to sales, management, parenting, negotiating or anything else. All great achievements are the results of long periods of single-minded concentration, focused on a single task or objective, until the job is complete.
Six Steps to Better Concentration
There are six ways to develop the qualities of concentration common to exceptional men and women. These are all business skills that can be learned by anyone who is determined enough to practice them repeatedly until they become habits.
First, before you start work, clear your workspace of everything except exactly what you need to complete your highest priority task. Simplicity and order tend to be more conducive to highly productive work, for average people as well as for geniuses.