by Glenn Magas

Created on: February 04, 2010

Being more productive and doing tasks with a sense of purpose can mean a big difference in how fast and how efficient you are at work. Your productivity is also directly related to the level of success you want to achieve. The key to being more productive at work is proper planning.

If you plan better, you will achieve more, and if you achieve more, then your rate of success and the level of it will increase! The bottom line: you will be highly productive at work!

Planning better means better time management: understanding time, utilizing it better, and achieving more with greater results. Here are 3 tips on being more productive at work:

1. 6P Formula
2. Develop your strengths
3. Pareto Principle

There is no secret to high productivity. There are goal setting, prioritizing, and working on each in order to be a highly productive worker. These 3 tips will help you do each.

1. 6P Formula

The 6P Rule or Formula is: Proper-Prior-Planning-Prevents-Poor-Performance.  Time management suggests that taking 10-12 minutes to plan out a workday can save at least two hours in wasted time and effort throughout the day. This is an incredible ratio – a small investment of time every day can save a quarter of your workday!

It only takes doing this once to discover how much more productive you will become with proper planning.
 
By focusing on a particular task with proper planning could mean finishing the task 50% faster!  Every single minute you spend in planning can save up to ten minutes in execution! If you focus on proper planning, your productivity at work will already be high!

2. Develop your strengths

You are only as good as your limitations. By ‘sharpening the saw’ or improving your skills, you become better at what you do. Your strengths get stronger and your weakness become strengths.

If you are always getting better at doing your job, you will become more productive and highly efficient at doing your job. By going beyond the call of duty, and by doing more for yourself in order to improve, it will lead to a more productive ‘you’ and a more efficient work day.

7. Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle suggests that 20% of your activities will account for 80% of your results. By proper planning you can identify the most important activities related to achieving the highest levels of success. Working on this activities and tasks are 20% of what you need to do to attain high levels of productivity and attribute to 80% of your results!

Put aside the low level tasks and focus immediately on the hardest, most important tasks that you have to do at work. Through proper planning, you will be able to prioritize the high level tasks and recognize them immediately!

In its simplest form, being more productive at work means to never let the most important things you need to do at work be at the mercy of the trivial things that you do not need to do.  This takes proper planning on a daily basis, improving your skills, and focusing on the most important tasks and getting them done first before anything else.

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