7-Day Productivity Plan: Day Two

Estimated reading time: 3 mins, 40 secs

QUICK-WIN: Stop rushing! This is something I still struggle with even today. I know that when I rush, I almost always end up going back and redoing bits of work again (this isn't effective or efficient). Combine this with the quick-win from yesterday (saying “NO) and you'll find you become far more productive as you do a few things really well instead of lots of things not so well.

“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible” – Tony Robbins

Hi [urlparam param=”FirstName” default=”friend”/]!

Yesterday your job was to choose a goal or project to focus on during the next 7-days. Hopefully, you've got something in mind because today we're going to get ultra-specific and clearly define what it is that you're trying to achieve. You're going to use your goal to measure your productivity. Without a specific goal that defines what you're trying to achieve, how would you know if the work you're doing is worthwhile?

The importance of goals

Goals are extremely important when it comes to productivity:

Goals provide direction and define what you're going to spend your time on.
Goals keep you motivated towards some desired outcome.
Goals help you prioritise what to work on and when.

Creating a vision

A vision is a picture of what you want your life to look like and helps you to define your short-term goals and daily tasks. Follow these steps to create a specific and actionable vision for your chosen project:

1) Define your short-term goal and time frame.
“I want to build a photography website and be earning $1,000 a month in 3 months time.”

2) Define your time budget.
“I’ll spend 15 hours a week on this project.”

3) Define your long-term goal that will be the result of your short-term goal.
“I want to quit my job and travel more.”

4) Put it all together.
“My goal is to build a photography website, work 15 hours a week and be earning $1,000 a month in 3 months time. I’ll continue like this until I can increase my website revenue until I can cover my living expenses. I’ll then quit my job and take my side project full-time and start traveling within the next 6 months.”

Notice how this goal has very little to do with being more productive. Your goal is your motivation and defines why you do what you do. Productivity is how you're going to achieve this.

Daily & weekly tasks

Once you have a vision for what you want to achieve in the long-run, this can be used to plan and prioritise your monthly, weekly and daily tasks.

I recommend people focus on 2 or 3 main tasks per week (of course this is going to depend on the type of work you're doing and you don't have to stick to this). Things you do on a daily basis will often contribute to weekly goals or tasks.

For example, one of my weekly goals is to write a blog post and the daily tasks that contribute towards this are things like 1) writing the first draft, 2) creating a header image, 3) publishing the post and 4) promoting the post on social media.

Use your vision to remind yourself of what you're trying to achieve and use this to prioritise your daily and weekly tasks. For example, in the case of our photography business above, daily or weekly tasks could be:

Create 5 concepts for the layout of my website homepage.
Write 3 blog posts and 1 guest post this month.
Create photography “packages” to sell and advertise these on my website.

Mistakes to avoid

Not setting clear and actionable goals. With no goals, you have no way of measuring your progress. That's when you end up being “busy”, doing lots of “stuff”, but not really making any progress.
Don't try and do too much. When deciding what you’re going to do on a weekly and daily basis, don’t try and do too much. You need to budget time for inevitable setbacks and distractions. Remember what I said above – don't rush and don't over-commit. Instead of doing 10 things badly, do 2 or 3 things really well.

Action step: Write & share your vision

Go through the steps above to define your vision. Right now you probably just have an idea in your head, but if you don't have a clear and specific goal written down, it won't happen. Once you've written down your goal leave me a commet below and share share it with me. I find that sharing your goal publicly helps you to stay accountable to yourself.

Feel free to write more than one goal; you might have a goal you're trying to achieve in your professional life, and you may have a completely separate goal for your personal life.

Tomorrow we'll start to organise all of your daily and weekly tasks into a task-management app. This is where the rubbers meets the road so to speak…

Have a great day!
Paul