The Three Things You Must Know To Being Highly Effective

Many leaders, workers, mums and dads, students etc struggle with finding balance in their lives because they are not effective in managing their time.

As many productivity experts say, time is money, and if you are wasting time, you are wasting your money – let alone not achieving your purpose or dreams as effectively as you can – if at all.

When we waste time in any area of life, perhaps importantly at work, we potentially sabotage our goals and success failing to create fulfillment in the important areas of our lives.

But it doesn’t have to be that way if we learn the skill and art of productivity.

This week we spoke with Colin Boyd, a leadership coach who works in organizations such as Hewlett-Packard, Alliance and Fuji/Xerox.

One of his main areas of focus is empowering people who aren’t naturally productive to be more effective and cost efficient with their time.

Colin shared with us he considers himself to be naturally disorganized and made the decision to learn how to be more effective after finding he was not creating the results he wanted. And as he did, he discovered the people who were productivity experts really didn’t understand the challenges that a less disciplined person faced on this topic.

Colin shares, “All the people who were running these productivity programs were naturally organized and I wasn’t. They were trying to teach me to be them and I wasn’t them.”

Colin also discovered so many of his clients were like him and also struggled using some of the typical productivity strategies. So he decided to discover how to be more productive in different creative ways.

At Empower World we believe productivity is a mindset and leadership skill – when mastered – can support leaders to be the best version of themselves and leaders of others.

Colin goes on to explain, “How you use your time impacts everything. The quality of your life is the quality of how you use your time,” This is because the results we achieve will also influence our emotions.

“It’s not about just being efficient or faster for faster’s sake. It’s actually for quality of life,” says Colin. 

Decide on empowering beliefs

If you want to be more effective and productive it is essential to look at your beliefs and habits about the tasks you are performing.

If you believe you can multitask, yet you fail to get things done then it could mean replacing those old beliefs with new ones, such as ‘I’m more effective when I focus on doing one thing at time.’

Colin says “I think we need to stop lying to ourselves. So, what I mean by that is so often I’ll run a productivity program and I’ll say, ‘What’s one of the hardest parts about managing your time?’”

“Most people, will say, ‘Well, there’s not enough time.’ They are kind of lying to themselves that they’re going to get more time.”

“So, at a belief level, I think we need to come to a place of believing that it’s not about time. It’s actually about priorities. We are never going to get any more time.”

“Having a core belief of ‘it’s not about time, it’s about priorities’ is helpful,” says Colin. 

Create boundaries

Learning to say ‘no’ is a powerful approach that creates the space to say ‘yes’ to the things that will propel us forward the most.

If we say ‘yes’ to everything or attempt to do 10 things at once we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Colin agrees with this and explains, “Boundaries are huge. That’s definitely a major challenge that I find with a lot of major leaders in organizations is that ability to say ‘no.’”

We believe we all have to personally take responsibility for our own boundaries and work out what works for us. 

Focus

Recognising what’s important and focus for set periods of time on those essential tasks can have the biggest impact.

If you know you have an important task to complete, yet you are responding to emails, answering the phone, or constantly on social media, then your attention is consistently being taken away from the task and you will absolutely not be effective nor productive.

“One of the biggest distinctions that I’ve made in this area of productivity is how we actually become focused,” says Colin.

“There are basically three limitations that align with this area of focus. Firstly, our brain is designed to be distracted. Secondly, we’ve only got limited resources. And thirdly, we can only do one complex task at a time.”

To counteract the three limitations, and create the space to achieve our desired outcomes, Colin uses what he called the Focus Block method, which is: 

1. Decide on a specific outcome
2. Create a distraction free environment
3. Set a specific time frame 

“We need a specific outcome that we’re trying to achieve. That could be completing a marketing project or, calling someone about a particular issue. This is the specific task,” said Colin.

“We need a distraction free environment. So, to reduce our distractions that could mean turning off our phone, turning off our pop-ups etc.”

“And finally, we need a set time-frame. For example, I use my phone and put a countdown timer of like thirty-five minutes or fifty minutes where it counts down and it gives me a set time frame to get focused for, rather than just work for long periods of time.” 

Using these tips can be empowering and we encourage you to ‘try them on’ for at least a week – if you are not doing this already – to improve your productivity and results.

In addition to this, we would also encourage seeking out a coach who can support you to prioritize and become clearer about what’s most important to you, such as your values and top priorities, which can be incredibly effective. In fact they can change the quality of your life significantly by freeing up your time and space to focus on other things that are important to you. 

Be empowered.

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