Reinventing productivity
Dare to Learn
Potenciamos al talento de las organizaciones desarrollando las capabilities humanas más relevantes para el futuro.
Written by: Diego Lainez
Puedes leer este artículo en espa?ol aquí.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines productivity as the quality or state of being productive (a: yielding results, benefits, or profits; b: yielding or devoted to the satisfaction of wants or the creation of utilities).
Nowadays, work (and success) cannot being measure in utilities’ terms.
We need a new type of productivity.
In 1791, Benjamin Franklin created one of the first and most known tools, the "to-do" list, and since then, there has been a continuous emerge of books, methods, and recently, apps that promise to “enhance” people’s productivity. ?
Today, doing more things in less time can be left to?robots?or software; human beings need a different approach.
Productivity, as work units, is a commodity?(think about China). What we truly need is a new kind of productivity that allow us to do better things, not only more things.?
Our proposal.
We do not need to do things faster. We need to do the most important things better.
On the market there are a lot of trainings called Time Management that promise to teach people how to manage their time to be more productive. We believe that approach is not enough for the world we are living in and its challenges, tough.
At the beginning of 2018, as a solution by the need requested from one of our clients, from CEMEX, we designed a program called Time Ownership. It was (and still is) our counteroffer to the typical Time Management training, as we are certain that we should seek to “own” our time and what we do with it, instead of only “managing” it.?
With Time Ownership, we aim to boost people’s productivity potential not on “work units”, but on goals reached.
Obviously, we adapted some of the most efficient tools to manage our time, as the Getting Things Done?system or the Eisenhower Matrix, but we don’t stop there.
I will share with you some of the most important elements we need when we want to boost our productivity:
1. Purpose.
Every action, every task, every project, must have a purpose. And it must be aligned with our personal purpose. That’s the first step towards becoming a more productive person: make sure that everything we do has a purpose that aligns with our personal one.
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2. Goals.
The best way to assure we are working aligned with our personal purpose is to set goals we can achieve. Most people fail at this step, because they set unrealistic goals or goals that feel like an imposition from others (because they do not align with our personal purpose).
3. Priorities.
You can do anything, but you can’t do everything. Once we have clarity in our goals, we must choose those that have the biggest impact, as we will focus our energy and time on them.
4. Fight your “unproductive self”.
At this stage, we must know that sleeping and eating are “nonnegotiable”. The sooner we know ourselves, the better we will act to mitigate our weak points.
5. Enhance your “productive self”.
We all have had those moments when we feel “hyper productive”. The mistake is to let those moments happen by chance. To achieve our goals with quality and on time, we must have tactics that help us enhance our productivity and eliminate the eternal enemy: distractions.
It’s at this stage that most of the known tips about productivity focus about. However, without “overcoming” the previous stages, we can fall into one of the most serious mistakes: being productive in the wrong things.
Conclusion.
In a world where automation and new technologies have set a record for speed and efficiency, it's time to step back and rethink how we aspire to be productive.
We need to exploit our capacity to the maximum, but not by wanting to do more things in less time, but in doing better things that help us achieve our goals.
To design Time Ownership, we took on the task of finding the best productivity and time management tools and tactics. We blended them to adapt them to a fast-paced, changing world, with more and more distractions fighting for our attention and our time.
The result: a workshop that seeks to reinvent the way in which individuals, leaders and organizations achieve their goals by being more productive in the right things.
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Who is Diego Lainez?
Diego Lainez is CEO and founder of Dare to Learn, a learning consulting firm that helps organizations empower their talent through memorable learning strategies and experiences.
Among its courses and workshops is Time Ownership, a workshop that seeks to reinvent the way in which individuals, leaders, and organizations achieve their goals by being more productive in the right things.