On Productivity

As a good friend and I used to muse, it is totally possible and often found that people do things the right way without doing the right things. The problem with this scenario is that gives the "doer" of said tasks the unearned satisfaction of having done a good job while from a meta-perspective the question remains if the good job done was the one that most needed to be done. In other words is the person doing what needs to be done or just doing what they can most easily do. What we find in studies of productivity is that people are always doing something; even quiet moments of reflection hold great value. In such a constant go mode, there surely must be some guidelines to help direct one's task flow, specifically in workplace scenarios.

Fortunately, Brian Tracy has shared some guidelines of this very nature. For those that do not know, Mr Tracy is a top shelf business strategist, success coach, and prolific author. In his book Eat That Frog, Brian shares among other strategies that on each day you go to work, you should identify all of the relevant tasks you have to accomplish on that day. Then, he advises picking the most difficult and least liked task from the list to accomplish first. The metaphor is that if the first thing you do each day is eat a live frog, the rest of your day has to get better from there. Similarly, by accomplishing your most difficult duties first, you

1. Put them behind you
2. Build upon the momentum of success
3. Deliver great value to your organization early.

#3 is particularly helpful in safeguarding against the dreaded unproductive day eminating from useless distractions, unproductive meetings, and fire after endless fires. When approached from the big-picture thinking of a VP or C-suite level position, this aids you in accomplishing high value-added tasks more often and becoming a person that both does things right AND does the right things.