Quit Being Busy and Start Getting Productive: A Guide.

Everyone at some point in their life experiences a period when they have a whole lot of things to get done, deadlines to meet, and projects to deliver. You might work long hours daily yet at the end of each day you’ll feel stressed without being able to point out any accomplished goal. This is a frequent occurrence and you don’t have to feel alone.

In our line of business, we work closely with our clients and sometimes when we need them to give us certain information, they are nowhere to be found. After a couple of days, they’ll reach out to us with apologizes for zoning out, with the same old story of them being busy. We believe that this habit would most likely extend to other aspects of their life, hence the need to address and guide business owners on how to quit being busy and start getting productive. Don’t get me wrong, living a productive life doesn’t just happen, it is a practice that you imbibe consciously and intentionally.

After reading through this post, we expect you to have a changed mindset and start getting involved with only activities that matter.

Steps to Start Getting Productive

Take Out Time to Know Yourself.

Sometimes you get too occupied with several things and give little or no time to take note of important things about yourself. For example, I was at a social event and met a new friend, while we exchanged personal details and got to know each other, he said, “you seem to be talking a lot about your job, so when you aren’t working what do you do?” I froze. Before then, I had never stopped for a moment to identify what I like doing apart from attending to all the tasks on my to-do-list. I felt embarrassed and made it a point of duty to embrace other activities and learn to schedule my time in order to accommodate other things I love and have a balanced lifestyle.

Don’t Feel Guilty For Saying No

Stop making people feel that you are very accessible else they’ll get to spend your time as if it belongs to them. Give people boundaries and don’t feel bad for declining an offer that is not in line with your goals and priorities. Anything worth doing at all indeed is what doing well but not all activity requires 100% of your attention so you don’t always have to chase perfection or try to make a bunch of people happy at the expense of your happiness.

Here at Big Field Digital, there are times we get contacted for really attractive projects but we have to decline them because our hands are full.  We believe that it is not about how many projects we work on but how well we can deliver to the taste of our client. We are more particular about our reputation and never want to disappoint those who trust us. As much as every company is in the market to make profit, your customer’s satisfaction should also be paramount to you because a happy customer will always be excited to talk about your business which makes referral marketing possible.

Focus and Put Away Multitasking

It sounds quite unrealistic when I hear people boast of their ability to multitask like it’s an attribute that wins them an award. Only busy people can effectively multitask because they jump from one activity to the other and at the end of the day are not able to identify results from any. In an attempt to start getting productive, you need to do away with getting engaged in various things at a time and be more focused on individual activities that matter to you.

Here is how it works, while you move from getting one thing done to fixing another, you keep losing concentration and each time, you are going to require a few more minutes to put your feet down and pick up from where you left off. For example, if while writing a blog post I get called by a colleague to take a look at a new project, I would lose some time while trying to read through the brief and get acquainted with the new project. At the point of return to the blog post, I will need to read over what I’ve written earlier and find out where I stopped. It could be tiring, so start focusing and stop multitasking.

Do The Most Difficult Task First

If you try to attend to every minor thing before handling the most difficult ones, you will still end up feeling unproductive because the main burden hasn’t been cleared. Brian Tracy logically explains the concept of eating the ugliest frog first in his book titled, ‘Eat That Frog’. Stop giving priority to little things like making a phone call, or clearing your inbox, start working on writing your business plan, creating your blog content or filling that application. You need to priorities your life. If you have 3 priorities, you have priorities. If you have 25 priorities, you have a mess. Live a productive life and don’t get it all messed up.