Last month, it was my goal to be more productive at work. How did I define success? I gave myself a number/grade, on a scale of 1-5 every day, based on how productive I felt I was. I hoped to reach a minimum average number for the month.
Along with my basic goal of a number, I gave myself strategies to help me focus every day. Those tips included:
1) Praying. I prayed every morning at work to help me with my goal. I found this helpful because when I pray for something, I know it's something that I really want. And to remember that I really want it helped me to work hard at that.
2) I used a spreadsheet and tracked my time usage at work, every day. This was also good motivation, as I didn't like reporting ill-spent time.
3) I had a goal for minimum time spent on productive tasks. This helped me not to go on over-drive and burn myself out. Once I reached my minimum, I could relax a little and feel accomplished, rather than over-stressing every minute of every day, and breaking under the pressure of having to be perfect.
4) I tried to use the 10 minute rule. If I ran into a task I didn't like and would normally procrastinate, I would try to do it for just 10 minutes.
5) I would also employ the like+don't like strategy. For example, if I have to be doing something mind-numbing and not so fun, I would let myself stream something while I worked, to make it kind of entertaining.
6) I tried to keep & update task lists, so I could easily refer back to the lists to find out what I should do next, after I finished something.
7) Stepping outside. A lot of my tasks at work seem ambiguous and it's hard to determine "next steps". To help me tackle them, I find it helps to imagine I am advising someone else about what THEY should do. Silly, and yet remarkably effective.
8) Breaking it down. Writing a publication is a big, generic task. When working on things like that and not knowing where to start or what the next steps are, I just try to think of one small action to do -- something that is "road-ready", like "skim reference articles and gather quotes", or "draft outline", etc. It's obvious, but not making a concerted effort to identify those specific things has really stalled me on projects in the past.
Of course, these tips and tricks only help me in as much as I remember to employ them. Some I remembered to do better than others.
Results are in: It WORKED! This actually worked. I am so satisfied from this experiment. Of course, every day was not a perfect day of productivity. But I liked the flow of this month's goal, because I was allowed bad days. I was allowed to fail once or twice in meeting my goal, because my achievement this month was not based on being perfect every day, or every week, but based on the average of all those days. And so bad days were just a blip that was cause for concern, rather than total defeat.
As for January's goal -- I was not perfect in keeping up with my January month goal to work out 3x/wk, but I did pretty well with keeping up with my exercise overall. The 2 weeks I didn't reach 3x/wk, I still worked out twice. And I'm back at keeping it up for March. Managing regular workouts is easier after having worked on that habit for a month. This month-long resolution thing is really just amazing.
The other thing I really like about the monthly resolutions is that rather than having a hyper-focus once a year on the fact you'd like to do better at something, you actually are directed to focus on your goals and personal improvement EVERY MONTH. And if you are too busy and miss a month, who cares? You have 11 other months that are still totally do-able.
My goal for March: To blog once a week. I don't know that this goal will be as life-enriching as being more productive and exercising, but I do like to blog. And I HAVE blogs. And I've thought before about having that goal. And if I don't think it adds much to my life -- it's only for a month. LOVE THIS!
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