Stop This Activity
Much of the time, the biggest boosts to your productivity won't come from starting some radically new time management technique; you're actually more likely to see significant improvement from stopping one or two activities.
Here's how it works. Tens of thousands of employees and leaders have taken the online test "How Do Your Time Management Skills Stack Up?" and the data reveals that 41% of people say that less than half of their time is spent on truly value-adding work. Put more simply, a shocking number of people are spending hours every day doing work that isn't important or adding value.
These wasteful, unimportant, redundant, and non-essential activities are as varied as the people performing them. They run the gamut from rework to inefficient meetings to writing reports that never get read to constant interruptions and everything in between. The key to boosting our productivity, then, is to find one or two of those non-value-adding activities and eliminate them (or at least postpone or deprioritize them).
Here's how to take action. First, you'll want to track your time for a few days. You don't have to get too complicated; in a notebook or spreadsheet, just write down every time you start a new task or activity, recording the specific activity and the time you started.
By the end of the first day, you'll be able to glance through your list of activities and spy a few timewasters.
Those timewasters comprise your "Stop Doing List." It's highly unlikely that every single activity you perform in a day is of equal importance. There will almost always be some activities that, even if they're not utterly wasteful, aren't truly mission-critical. The goal of making a "Stop Doing List" is to find one or two activities that, if they were eliminated, or even postponed, would improve your productivity, focus and energy.
High achievers have a tendency to take on more work without ever eliminating less-important activities. Taking on new and cool projects is generally a good thing, but it's important to measure the new work you're taking on against the existing work currently filling your to-do list. Many high achievers suffer burnout because they add on too many new activities without recognizing that the hours in the day are finite; if you're going to start something new, you had better be prepared to stop doing something else.
Just the act of tracking your time can boost your productivity and overall well-being. The data from the time management test reveals that only 31% of people are actively tracking their time, but those folks are significantly more likely to feel like their days are spent on truly value-adding and important work.
One final thought: Occasionally, people tracking their time will find that every activity they perform is required by their boss, a customer, or the company. But even in those cases where activities cannot be truly eliminated, there's still the potential to postpone or deprioritize them. For instance, imagine you produce a report that, while generally ignored, is still required. You can't eliminate it entirely, but you could work on it during a time of day when you're not at your most alert or creative, saving your best energy for your most important tasks. If mornings are your most productive time, use those hours for the projects that will advance your career, saving your less productive afternoons for the report nobody reads.
