Have you ever stopped to think about how much time you spend brushing your teeth over a lifetime? How about driving in your car? How about holding conversations with people you don’t want to be holding conversations with because you are unable to interrupt them? How about checking emails? Organizing your house?
Through my college career, and especially as of late, I’ve looked for ways to get more meaningful tasks done – and at a quicker pace.
In this Productivity article series, I’ll provide (3) Strategies that can be combined to massively increase what you “get done.”
• Cultivate Swift Effectiveness:
I personally find this to be a fascinating and never-ending endeavor. How can we do things very well and very quickly? How can we achieve our objectives as soon as possible and now to held up by other tasks?
Though we can strive for swift effectiveness in any area of our lives, it may be easiest to begin to apply these ideas to things like washing the car, doing the dishes, or preparing and eating food. These tasks might sometimes have a value in themselves, while other times they simply serve as logistics that you certainly might enjoy – but you’re still looking to get onto working on your bigger projects or other activities (wether that’s building a shed, writing a book, or picking up a friend from the airport).
World renouned speaker Brian Tracy calls this “fast tempo” – bringing about a general diligence or briskness in your actions.
By understanding the dynamics of the activities involved, you can find ways to limit your time involved drastically, and provide yourself with far more time on your higher priority tasks.
Here’s some ideas that you can apply at home tonight:
– Preparing and Eating Food: How can you make, eat, and clean up as quickly as possible and reach your objective to supply your body with the proper balance of nutrients and calories? The ideal in this category would be a food that takes the least time to prepare, eat and clean up, and serves our body well nutritionally.
One idea is to cook up a pot of rice (whatever variety you like), and mix it with some black beans and whatever vegetables you like (I like cucumbers and peppers myself). Throw in some olive oil and vinegar and BAM throw it in the fridge. Now you have something that you can eat whenever you want without preparation. In addition, you won’t get your hands dirty or anything else dirty eating it (unlike pizza or spaghetti), and cleanup is as simple as one bowl and one fork.
By taking away time cooking, time preparing before every meal (or having to spend money on take-out), and by making the food easy to eat while working, we can provide ourselves with far more productive time in one small behavior change that will likely also benefit us in terms of money and nutrition (if we play our cards right).
- Car Wash / Wax: You want your car to look good and you’d like to keep the rust off of it. You might listen to some audio programs while washing or waxing, and you might have fun out there with the hose and squeegee. However, its not an activity you’d like to spend the day doing – it doesn’t more you forward on other important projects and objectives.
You might determine the best spot to park the car where you can easily hit it with the hose from all sides, and you might find a specific pattern you use for the washing and waxing so that you can accomplish this objective as soon as physically possible. Maybe you keep all the towels, sponges, buckets and soaps in the garage. With a clean “workflow” on this objective, your wash and wax times might drop significantly, and if you add that up over the course of a lifetime, thats a lot of time that you were able to reallocate yourself to other, higher priority goals.
Those are just two little examples, but you might apply this same idea to finding the best strategy for vacuuming the house, finishing an article you’re writing, or getting in your workout. All of these activities have too to be tightened, and some semblance of strategy and understanding can allow you to develop a better “workflow” in these activities and meet your quality / creative goals while being swiftly effective.
Let it be known that I don’t believe we should live our lives for the sake of seeing how much we can “get done.” I do believe, however, that actively striving towards meaningful objectives that we set for ourselves is an integral component of fulfillment and active engagement with our own lives. Brian Tracy says “Time management is life management.” Agreed.
Hence, the purpose here is not simply to “do more,” but to eliminate time floundered on activities that could be shortened with little additional effort – and at the same time develop the skill of effectiveness (and cultivate the habit of seeking new ways to strive for effectiveness).
- Of course in many instances in our lives, speed may not be a priority or objective whatsoever. This might include a dinner with the family, where your objective is to have exciting and interesting conversation and share warm human contact. Maybe its a walk on the beach, where your objective is to find a few unique stones and enjoy a sunset. If you’re objective is something other than speed, thats great! I’d say go for it and really make of it what you want. With the family, maybe structure some fun things to do before people arrive and entropy sets in, or at the beach, apply some of your meditation ideas or choose to let your mind go while you’re there.
- It should also be stated that swiftness and “done”-ness is only in reference to our own standards. For instance, getting dressed quickly might take one person 5 seconds, and another person 5 minutes. The first person may have no concern for dress, and so the nearest items will be thrown on. The second person might value their attire and their image (possibly for professional reasons), and might iron their shirt and pick out a pair of pants and shoes that fit perfectly. All of these ideas are just continuations of living in accordance with our values and purpose. “Productivity” and “doing things in the shortest possible time” just happen to be one little aspect of that life equation that we’re isolating and looking at here.
On to the next article: “Combining Tasks“
