Do Less To Increase Your Productivity

That’s right, do less if you want to do more. This seems to be a popular topic on personal development blogs, yet the majority of people are still looking for ways to do compress and do a lot of things at the same time, so I want to give you my perspective on this.

Doing less is a powerful technique that can dramatically change the way you live and the results you have. It can literally change all about yourself in in the next 3-5 years but it requires a shift in your thoughts to get rid of all the clutter your mind have. Doing less is absolutely not an excuse to procrastinate instead of doing work, but an opportunity to focus on what’s really important and deliberately let everything else go. This concept can be applied to various tasks like reading emails, checking rss feeds and basically everything else that is requiring a lot of your time without providing high quality results.

The area where I enjoy the most applying this principle is on habit change. Applying the do less theory here, means changing your view from the short term to the long term. It is here that you can have drastic changes in your life. I know this concept is hard to grasp without some examples, so the following is a 12 months plan that demonstrate what you can do by following this technique:

Month 1: learn to collect and process
Month 2: learn to plan
Month 3: learn to do
Month 4: learn to organize
Month 5: learn to review
Month 6: learn to simplify
Month 7: learn to automate
Month 8: learn to delegate
Month 9: learn the Pareto rule
Month 10: brainstorm business ideas
Month 11: plan a new business
Month 12: start a new business

Note that this is just an example, but it is useful to demonstrate a few things. First, the whole process takes 12 months to complete, because you are spending one full month for each task (or habit). This is actually the key (someone would call it the secret) to your success. By spending time each day to work on improving on an habit, you’ll become very good at it after 30 days, but better yet, it will become automatic for you to do it.

I want to stress that you can’t learn everything in that list in only one or two months. You can try it if you want, but you’ll inevitably come back here after a while.

It is important that during that month you focus on practicing the habit, so on month 7 for example, you try to automate everything you can every day, and in month 10 you write tens of business ideas every day.

This principle apply to every activity or area of life. Especially when you are just starting out a new project, you would like to see it finished as soon as possible. I know this because I used (and still use sometimes) to want everything now. If you are like me, try to focus in the long run. Remember that time is going to pass anyway, make it your best friend and enjoy the journey. Make a plan and make it easy. Seriously, if you want to start a blog and you know you can publish one article per day, make a goal to write one every three instead.

If you don’t believe in this, ask yourself how many projects you started in the last year that are still open? Can you estimate how much time you lost in unfinished projects? And What about the frustration you got? Nobody is going to give you’re time back. This is a tremendous gain in productivity in my opinion.

Now, by applying what you just learnt here you can already accomplish great things, but there’s a trick you can use to get a lot more done while still keeping things simple. You can create a plan of action for every major area of your life where you want to improve, and do something in each every day.

The only catch here is that if you are already working full time most of your day, you can’t pretend to have results in more than one different area in your free time. That’s ok, just don’t try to overdo.

As a general rule, start by having one plan like the one I gave you before, and once you feel comfortable with it, add another one if you have time. One year from now you’ll be glad you started today.

Posted on August 06 2009

You should subscribe to the RSS feed here.

Sharing is sexy!