A Counterintuitive Trick to Working Efficiently
The secret to working more efficiently is all in the timing.
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They say that work seems to expand to fill all available time. That sure seems true in my life! But after years of running Action Days (which I now call Do-It Days), I’ve noticed that this isn’t always the case. In the right circumstances, you can get things done in the minimum time it takes to do them, rather than the maximum.
One of the secrets is to schedule yourself fairly tightly. They say, “If you want something done, give it to a busy person.” That’s because when we’re busy, we know we have limited time to get the results we want. So our brains go into overdrive and really focus us. We quickly discard what isn’t important to pay attention to, we set our standards realistically (there’s no time to be a perfectionist when the report is due in an hour), and we get going.
If you want to get something done, reduce the time you have allocated to it and you just might find it kicks you into the focus you need to finish quickly and efficiently.
Timer image from Shutterstock
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
