How To Stop Wasting Time and Improve Your Personal Effectiveness

Book Review for DO IT TODAY by DARIUS FOROUX

Chapter 4 – How to stop wasting time and improve your personal effectiveness

TIME IS MONEY, TIME IS WEALTH YET…

🛑 Do you know that the more productive you are, the more happy you are? You may not have tested this theory but I concur with the first paragraph of this book about how the more effective you are and the more rewards you receive, the higher the likelihood of you to be merry and content.

All the times I’ve been content has been the time when my productivity was top notch and I’m not saying this to agree with the author but that’s the truth.

I am a happy being but life happens too! Sometimes we find ourselves in that low time but hey, have you also played attention to when your effectiveness is high, there is always a content feeling that at least something is going on for you, right?

🛑 The productivity the author emphasize here is not just the one about getting things and I mean a lot of things done which doesn’t matter but his emphasis is on effectiveness.

🛑 Effectiveness from this book means getting the right things done. For getting all the right things done equals the most important matters.

🛑 When your work doesn’t include effectiveness, you find yourself going around in circles, doing useless works that is not aligned with your desired outcome. While doing these useless work, you might appear busy yet you are not achieving anything.

My experience with importance of Effectiveness is this; I have a desire to become an OAP and just getting interns can be hard. I know I have to skill up and be productive in that area, so I did the best work that align with my purpose; podcasting. It has helped me discover how to pitch, write script for my presentation and even master the art of radio humor… I am not just busy but effective.

🛑 Results matter the most. There is no point working for so much hours without growing personally, emotionally, financially etc.

🛑 This book also claim that Peter Drucker has helped knowledge workers and even produced productivity tools and apps you see about. He eventually coined the term personal effectiveness.

The author made slight changes to the exercise from Drucker’s The Effective Executive for easy application and I’ll be sharing it below;

🛑1. Know your time
It’s sad how often I hear people say they don’t know why they keep postponing and procrastinating and the right question from this book they could have asked themselves is: “Do I know my time?”

It sound like an absurd question and it is simply is for you to be able to measure your time – to manage time, you have to know what you spend your time on.

How do you know that?

~ Keep an activity log: how you keep the log doesn’t matter, Al that matters is that you write down what you do per time. You can do it hourly and keep your pad and pen visible during the time. You can even use mobile pad or sectograph to keep tabs.

🛑2. Identify the non- productive work
The author has helped simplify this step and it’s on one question: “In your activity log, if you stop doing all of them, what would happen?
If it means ‘hell will break loose’ don’t change anything.
If your response is ‘nothing will change’ then it’s time to eliminate!

🛑 3. Eliminate the non productive activities and time wasters
Filter the important activities from the trivia ones and cut out the trivia tasks that are time wasters.

🛑 The benefits of the steps above
1. It helps you note the start of new time waster behaviour that can turn into bad habits.

2. It helps set your daily routine and help you track and manage your time better.

You can get the book if you still don’t have it.