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10 Productivity Myths That Hold You Back
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"No System Can Fix Me"
No system can fix fundamental problems in your life. What they can do is help you make time in your life for real personal growth and help you highlight the sources of those problems, by simplifying parts of your life.
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241 READS
Being Organized Is Boring
Some crave the excitement that always being about to screw up brings. But being organized isn’t boring – being boring is boring. Make your own excitement and you’ll stop being boring – and then you can stop using your disorganization as a crutch for a life not fully realized.
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Inspiration To Work
What you need is a system to capture those flashes of inspiration so that, when inspiration is on holiday, you’ve got plenty to work with.
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187 READS
Lack Of A System As A System
The mess of habits, practices, and beliefs you have right now are, in fact, a system. But that doesn’t mean it is an efficient system, there’s always room for growth.
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Working Better Under Pressure
Keeping yourself in a high-stress mindset means that you’re hard to work with, likely to eventually burnout and sooner or later you’ll miss some important detail that you were too frantic to recognize, damaging your job, your reputation, and your career.
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Creativity And Systems
Creative work is still work, and just as susceptible to procrastination, poor planning, and shoddy work practices as any other work. Besides, artists can become more efficient by adopting a system to deal with other noncreative tasks often needed to keep their business going, like administrating, publicizing, planning, and others.
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Productivity And More Work
If you become more productive and start finishing work earlier people may expect you to find more stuff to do to fill in the remaining hours. You can leverage that extra work into a promotion or raise – or convince your boss to adopt a telecommuting plan so you can work from home.
But productivity goes beyond work. Being more productive in your life means having more time to do the things you like.
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Rigid And Unflexible Systems
If your life is really chaotic and unpredictable, it’s likely so because you’ve resisted adopting some kind of system rather than because no system is good enough for your life.
Adopting a system means spending some time to find out what’s important to you and how to get rid of the less important stuff.
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No Time For A System
Most systems take some time to set up, but once you start using it, the time you use in “maintenance” is made up for by the time you save not having to think about what to do – or making up for the things you didn’t remember to do.
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Organized and Clean
Organization has to meet your needs, not some imposed notion of cleanliness. An organized space is one in which the things you need the most are close at hand, the things you need often are easily found, and the things you need rarely are out of the way but easily retrieved when needed.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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Copying successful people
Putting highly successful people on a pedestal can unknowingly hinder our own efforts. We get caught in comparisons and it’s easy to forget that they’ve had and still have their own set of struggle...
Maximize every moment
Working well is not about maximizing every waking moment of the day, in order to get more done. And the focus on maximizing time may actually diminish our creativity.
Instead, try identifying and focusing on the few hours of the day you are most productive.
Setting Big Goals
To achieve sustainable productivity habits, it’s best to build up with easily achievable tasks.
Small chunks of accomplishment will amount to something big eventually.
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Key Ideas
Write It Down
Uncompleted commitments take up psychic energy, each one making you just the tiniest bit more tired, more distracted, and therefore less productive.
The first step to managing your life an...
Get a Head Start
Before leaving your workspace, or before going to bed, take 10 minutes to look over the next day’s commitments.
Decide what you’ll do first. Look at that to-do list and decide whether any tasks on it can be delegated to someone else or crossed off the list altogether.
Do Your Most Dreaded Task First
Every one of us has one or more tasks on our to-do list that we dread doing.
Do it first thing. Writer Michael Hyatt talks about slaying your dragons before breakfast—there’s nothing more motivating for the rest of your day than crossing that monster off your list first thing in the morning.
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Automate Decisions
- Transfer money to your savings account every time you receive a paycheck
- Choose all your outfits for your week on Sunday and hang them in the closet in order
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Single Task
Switching between tasks can have damaging costs to our work and productivity.
Develop the habit of single-tasking by forcing your brain to concentrate on one task and one task only. Put your phone away, close all the browser windows and apps that you don’t need. Immerse yourself in this task. Only move to the next one when you’re done.
Brian Tracy
“Time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.”