Personal Productivity
By Sally Foley-Lewis www.sallyfoleylewis.com

What is Personal Productivity? One way to define personal productivity is completing tasks that move you closer to achieving your goals. Those tasks must move you toward ease and balance, and not only achievement. What Does Personal Productivity Include? Understanding how you spend time is critical for assessing your personal productivity effectiveness. Key elements of your personal productivity include: ? Calendar Management ? Email Management ? Habits ? Procrastination Triggers ? Time Wasters ? Focus and Attention ? Expectation Management ? Boundaries ? Goal Setting and GoalGetting™ Time, context, resources, energy and expected outcomes all play a significant role in defining how productive you may be from one day to the next.

Common Personal Productivity Challenges:

• Over-scheduling: "There aren't enough hours in the day!"

• Constantly connected: "I check emails first thing so I don't feel like I'm falling behind as soon as I get to work."

• Ever increasing top priorities: "Everyday there's a new number one priority, the workload piles up and nothing is taken off!"

• Delegating seems impossible: "Everyone is already pushed to capacity."

• Difficult conversations are avoided: "If I bring up the issue, I don't want to then deal with the drama, tears, or being accused of bullying."

• Broken record: "I feel like I keep repeating myself. Why don't my team just get it, and then get on with it?!"

Here are 12 Tips to Boost Your Personal Productivity

1. Schedule You
Self-care is not selfish! Allocating time in your calendar for your own self-care means you ensure you are at your best to deliver your best. Cars don't run on empty, neither can you.

2. Schedule Everything
One the most accessible yet under-utlised tools is your calendar. Shift your ToDo List into your calendar so you make appointments with yourself and others can't fill your calendar quite so quickly. Schedule your self-care, family time and holidays first, then personal goals, then professional goals and work activities.

3. Schedule Emails
Schedule 2 or 3 time slots in your day to batch your email activity. If an email can be opened, read, actioned or deleted within a few minutes, then do it. Opening, scanning and then delaying what would be a 2 minute action only adds to your list of things to do later. This pushes your day out. Use an auto responder to encourage people to call if the issue is important AND urgent. Manage expectations by letting people know when you'll review emails. An email is never urgent!

4. Schedule Meetings Better / Schedule Better Meetings!
Staff spend anywhere up to 50% of their week attending meetings! (Senior leaders spend up to 75%.) Meetings need a purpose so be sure every meeting you attend has a clear purpose: use and follow an agenda with timings. Help your Exec stay the course with the agenda: before the meeting, agree how you’ll work as a team to stay the course.

Encourage people to turn up on time and come prepared, including you. If you or your Exec arrive late or unprepared consider what message that sends to others: no respect for others or your own time. If you're invited to a meeting, it's best practice to ask for the agenda: let the meeting planner/setter know you want to come prepared.

5. Schedule Work
According to research by Prof. Dan Ariely, the first 2 hours of the day are the most productive. This might not be you so when are you at your best, your most alert? It’s in this time period when you need to be doing your most important work. Any work that requires high level thinking, focus and attention has a much better chance of being done faster with better quality outcomes when done during your most alert time of the day.

6. Schedule Planning
So often the day is half over before you've had a chance to catch your breath. Scheduling planning, even 15 minutes, to give you that moment to pause, think and prioritise will lead to getting more done, quicker. And this is not your lunch break: planning is a work activity!

7. Self-Awareness
The more you understand about yourself - your habits, procrastination triggers, conflict hot buttons, etc. - the faster and more easily and confidently you can handle different and difficult situations. Coaching and using self-assessments and profiles are excellent ways to self- assess so you can make better informed decisions.

8. Self-Regulation
Being able to calm yourself during challenging times helps you be more resilient and it means you can make better decisions for yourself and your team. Being seen as the calm one while stresses run high or during ambiguous times, like change, builds your credibility. A simple 3/6 breathing exercise can help self-regulation: breath in for a count of 3 and out for a count of 6, repeat a few times.

9. Self-Mastery
Best summed up with this quote (attributed to many):
Watch your thoughts, they become words;
Watch your words, they become actions;
Watch your actions, they become habits;
Watch your habits, they become character;
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

10. Self-Assess
When you gift yourself small pockets of time regularly to reflect and assess you may be surprised at how much you have achieved. You become even more aware of what's important to you so you can set the right goals and make the right plans. Some objective self-assessment compliments a regular ritual of gratitude.

11. Self-Acceptance
Do you compare yourself to others? If you do, does it inspire or intimidate you? We often can get caught comparing our inner reality to others public persona. Learning to accept all of you is not being conceited, it's knowing you have strengths and weaknesses, like everyone. The term flawsome [flaws + awesome] is a great way to think about self-acceptance.

12. Self-Leadership
According to Bryant and Kazan, "self-leadership is having a developed sense of who you are, what you can do, where you are going coupled with the ability to influence your communication, emotions and behaviors on the way to getting there." Improving your interpersonal communication skills helps you be assertive, clearly articulate your boundaries, have influence and help others resolve conflict and be resilient during times of change.

Sally Foley-Lewis
Named as one of the 25 LinkedIn Top Voices for Australia for 2018, Sally positively impact results, leadership and team performance. Obsessed with productivity and self-leadership, she’s presented to, coached and worked with 10,000+ managers and leaders from medium sized to global organisations in Germany, across the Middle East, Asia and Australia. She is an international and multiple award winner, author and global speaker who brings a unique blend of experiences, extensive qualifications and a desire to help people develop.