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Improve Personal Productivity - Stop procrastination, focus on productivity

ronpass by ronpass

How to improve personal productivity, beat procrastination and overcome information overload

Personal productivity is the antidote to stop procrastination. This lens offers a range of strategies to improve personal productivity online. It includes stop procrastination tips. Like anything that is difficult in life, overcoming procrastination and improving personal productivity requires the use of multiple strategies. In this lens, I will share my experience and my strategies for improving online productivity.

The three cornerstones of personal productivity are - focus, personal discipline and leverage.

LISTEN TO HOW I USED A PRODUCTIVITY FOCUS TO BEAT PROCRASTINATION

Table of Contents

Click on the links to take you to a specific module

  1. Personal Productivity - 3 Building Blocks
  2. FOCUS
  3. Decide Your Goals
  4. Build Mastery
  5. DISCIPLINE
  6. Overcome the Tyranny of Email - focus on content creation
  7. Control Your Environment
  8. Work from your strengths
  9. LEVERAGE
  10. Leverage your writing
  11. Leverage your energy
  12. Leverage your social networks
  13. Leverage Your Technology
  14. Leverage through Synergy
  15. How to build leverage and synergy
  16. Resources: Productivity Improvement
  17. Social Media Training
  18. FREE E-Course - How to Be Productive
  19. Please comment and leave your favorite personal productivity tip

Personal Productivity - 3 Building Blocks

Strategies to beat procrastination, overcome information overload and improve productivity

The 3 Cornerstones for Personal Productivity
  1. Focus
  2. Discipline
  3. Leverage

FOCUS

Decide your goals and build mastery.

Expertise is the doorway to wealth.

Decide Your Goals

...and stick to them!

Focus - the bullseyeWhat two or three things are you going to achieve in the next 6 -12 months?

Make a decision now! While you have no goals, you are at the mercy of information overload - everything is relevant because nothing has a priority. When you set goals, you establish a priority.

Setting goals (like strategy) requires choice which involves taking on some things and giving up others - and this requires discipline, another cornerstone of personal productivity.

Build Mastery

Expertise is the doorway to a sustainable income

Building masteryYou need to develop expertise in two main areas - the focus of your goals (your main affiliate program, your small business, etc.) and a marketing strategy that is aligned with these goals.

It is difficult to sell what you don't know about - people are attracted to those who have expertise. That is one of the reasons that some people set a goal of establishing an authority site.

As part of your goal setting, decide what online marketing strategy you are going to master. Your area of mastery should be in line with your goals and should build expertise in a particular marketing strategy - Squidoo, email marketing, Facebook, WordPress blogging, article writing, video marketing, podcasting, image marketing.

Mastery in one area will be a springboard to other expertise and improved productivity. If you are a Jack-of-all-Marketing-Strategies, you will be master of none.

DISCIPLINE

Build in routines, do first what you don't enjoy and control your environment.

Overcome the Tyranny of Email - focus on content creation

Managing email by regaining personal control

Manage email- Decide that the first thing you are going to do each day is to create one piece of online content - a blog post, article, chapter for an e-book, a podcast, broadcast to your subscribers, a video, a Squidoo lens.

- Avoid starting with your email (unless you have to skim it for work reasons) - you will lose hours & focus and dissipate your energy.

- build routines progressively so that you are taking action and replacing old habits (e.g. upload three photos per day to Flickr, make two RedGage posts, write one article per day for your blog or website, etc)

- put the emphasis on output not input: replace busy activity (webinars, surfing, excessive/undirected networking) with a content creation focus

Control Your Environment

Get on top of your working environment and mental activity

Our environment impacts heavily on our personal productivity. Here's some hints for controlling your environment and facilitating clear and creative thinking.
  • Remove the clutter
    Clear your working environment and your desk of clutter. This is my major failing in this area - but I'm making progress. If you are a creative person, you will have multiple projects on the go and be collecting heaps of ideas so the tendency is to just keep adding to the pile(s). Take time out to go back and trash or file, so you can move forward - a major learning for me and still a work-in-progress.
  • Play some music that helps you to think (not music that distracts)
    There is a lot of research to show that the classical works of Mozart are good for the mind and can increase productivity.
  • Create a business journal
    This can take the form of an A4 ringed notebook or any other form of bound book. If you are like I was, you have scraps of paper everywhere from e-books you have read or videos you have watched or podcasts you have listened to. Try to get into the habit of taking the notes in some form of bound notebook so they are accessible later on when you need to work on something related.

Work from your strengths

What you know and what you do well

Perosnal productivity - work from your strengthsIt took me a long time to wake up to this very obvious principle. In fact, I have just started accessing and using one of my key areas of knowledge in the last month as a result of a JV activity...and I have been on the Internet for 5 years now.

It is really hard work acquiring knowledge in a new area for the purpose of Internet marketing. One way to increase your personal productivity is to work from what you know (and are passionate about) and work outwards from there.

Also if your strengths are in writing, use these skills for Internet marketing by blogging, creating squidoo lenses, Hub Pages, articles or e-books. Alternatively, if you are terrible at writing, but good orally, start making podcasts or videos or both. Work out from your strengths and this will build both your competence and confidence and encourage you to expand beyond your comfort zone.

Photography may be your forte so you could use image marketing and video marketing.

LEVERAGE

Learn to build leverage and synergy - to maximize the impact of your content creation.

Leverage your writing

Make the most of your writing output

You can make your writing go further by re-purposing it to create other online content.

Here are two articles I have written on this topic:
Leveraging Your Writing to Increase Your Affiliate Income
Use Squidoo to Leverage Your Writing
  • Turn forum posts into blog posts
  • Turn blog posts into articles
  • Make articles into an e-book
  • Convert articles to podcasts
  • Create videos from your articles or a series of videos from your e-book.
  • Create Squidoo lenses from your blog posts, articles, podcasts and/or videos
  • Turn your responses to subscriber's inquiries into blog posts - the more thorough you respond, the easier it will be to achieve this re-purposing.
  • Create a Squidoo lens to help you present a topic on a webinar or online training conference and draw on previous writings. The original purpose for this lens was to present one of my regular online training conferences for members of 12 Second Commute. I use these online conferences to train people about Squidoo, social media marketing and online productivity. Here's another lens I developed for my 12SC training conferences:
    Squidooroo Training Program

Leverage your energy

Work with your natural energy flow

Chakra energyThere are two important considerations here - whether you are a night or morning person and how well you use your Chakra energies.

I'm a morning person, so I do all my creative work in the early morning. As my energy wanes throughout the day (starting after lunch!), I begin concentrating on more maintenance-type tasks that involve little in the way of mental activity. If you are a night person, you could possibly reverse this work flow for maximum benefit. This is very much about going with the tidal energy flow.

Working with the Chakra energies involves using focused activity, interaction with others, mind mapping and reflection to move through to the higher energy planes.

I have discussed strategies for utlising your seven Chakra energies in some detail in the following article:
Activate Your Chakra Energy to Improve Your Article Writing

Leverage your social networks

Build learning partnerships or joint ventures

Leverage your social networksAs you build your expertise and mastery and become visible on social networks, you will find that people will approach you to become a guest blogger. Alternatively, you can be proactive and build a learning partnership with someone in your network - it may be a person with common interests or complementary skills or your sponsor/ mentor in an affiliate program.

As you become better known, people will approach you to joint venture on projects. This is a special place to be as your learning will accelerate, you will build deep relationships and you will be collaborating on creating a joint product or service. Nothing breeds increased personal productivity like a sense of being productive!!

Here's a related articles that I wrote some time ago:
Action Learn Your Affiliate Business

Leverage Your Technology

Employ assistive technology that helps to improve your personal productivity

The range of software and technological products to improve personal productivity is endless and increases daily. Here are a couple of technology aids that I use.
  • AudioBoo for podcasting
    This comes as a free application for the iPhone and can also be accessed from the AudioBoo website. For instance, with the iPhone you can interview someone using the AudioBoo voice capture application on your iPhone, add a photo of them taken with the iPhone and upload to AudioBoo which then facilitates distribution of your podcast to social bookmarking sites. Podcasts are limited to 5 minutes.
  • NoteBooks for the iPhone
    This is a paid application (under $10) which enables you (among other things) to create multiple books, articles and notes to capture your ideas. For example, I set up a notebook on my iPhone a few days before I created this lens. As I got an idea I would add it to my Procrastination Notebook on the iPhone. When I came to create this lens, I had about 25 ideas to talk about which makes it very easy to create original modules. I use the iPhone Notebooks to jot down ideas to go into an article, create checklists of marketing strategies for my business or develop lists of article topics. You could also use it for a "to-do" list.
  • Posterous for email blogging and screen capture blogging
    Posterous.com enables you to create blog posts from your email program whether on your computer or your iPhone. You can add pictures and attachments. It also has a fantastic bookmarklet facility which you add to your browser toolbar. With this you can capture any portion of a website/Squidoo lens and very easily create a blog post. It will capture the highlighted information (including videos) as well as the originating URL. You can add hyperlinked comments as well before you press the button to post to your Posterous blog. Here's my Posterous blog by way of example:
    Ronpass Posterous blog

Leverage through Synergy

Synergy - Internet Marketing SuccessSynergy occurs where different activities are so aligned and interlinked that the resulting outcome is greater than the sum of the individual activities undertaken individually. In other words, by aligning and interlinking activities you achieve leverage of your own efforts. In a joint venture context, it means that the JV team can achieve a greater result than if each person involved worked individually towards the same goal.

Often we might pursue goals online that actually pull us in different directions and dissipate our energy. The benefits of synergy occur where we are able to achieve an alignment amongst our goals...and related activities. For example, two of my goals for 2010 are (1) to market my offline small business (Human Resource Consultancy) and (2) progress a JV that involves helping small business use social media for marketing online. Thus my own small business becomes a learning laboratory for the JV and also, ultimately, a case study. Another JV involves creating a blog for managers where I draw on my knowledge and experience gained from running manager development workshops with different groups on a weekly basis. So,a synergy is achieved between my offline consultancy activity and my online social media marketing via a Wordpress blog.

Sometimes a potential synergy is staring us in the face and we don't see it because we are too busy with diverse activities (we haven't "got our act together") or we are not focused on achieving leverage to improve personal productivity. I often find that a potential synergy "leaps out at me" when I am on my morning walk. I suddenly wake up to how I can achieve synergy amongst some of my activities. This occurrence of meaningful insight is the subject of my article:
Walk on the Bright Side to Grow Your Internet Business

How to build leverage and synergy

Ways to develop a "leverage mindset"

How to build leverageSometimes you have to work consciously at achieving leverage and synergy. This involves developing a "leverage mindset" by asking yourself, "How can I best integrate this activity with my current focus and goals?" If you ask yourself this question often enough, you will automatically develop a leverage mindset and start seeing incredible potential for leverage and synergy in what you are already doing.

Here's an example of how this leverage mindset works. I recently received a free 12SC blog as part of the online marketing tools package provided by 12 Second Commute. I already had an affiliate marketing blog and my first thought was to make affiliate marketing the focus of my new blog and create some synergy this way. But then I asked myself, "How can I best integrate this blog with my efforts to market 12SC and my new membership site on social media marketing?" I was already running training conferences on social media marketing for 12SC members and I wanted to maximize this effort.

After I had slept on this problem, I came up with the idea of focusing my new blog on Social Media Marketing (rather than "affiliate marketing"). I could see so much more leverage and synergy emerging from this focus as it is more in line with my current goals. Here's some of the leverage that I have thought of so far:

  • the blog can provide a record of the social media training that I provide for 12SC members

  • the regular online training conferences will provide content for the blog

  • the blog will make the training conferences accessible to a wider number of 12SC members (the blogs are linked in a network)

  • the RSS feed from the blog can provide updates to my social media membership site

  • the blog itself can be used to promote 12SC, my affiliate marketing blog, my membership site, my Squidoo lenses, my Squidoo e-course and Squidoo e-book

  • the 12SC blog will contribute to my JV endeavor focused on social media marketing for small business


So taking time to employ a "leverage mindset" has enabled me to make the most of this blog opportunity and to maximize the return for my efforts. All kinds of synergies will occur through this focus.

Resources: Productivity Improvement

Here's some help to overcome procrastination and information overload

Two resources I have found to be particularly helpful for improving my personal productivity are:
Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge Plus Masterclass
and
Lance Tamashiro's IM Productivity Secrets

Social Media Training

Training in Social Media Marketing

Are you frequently spending too much time on Facebook, Twitter, Squidoo or other social media marketing sites for no results? Are you becoming increasingly frustrated with your online marketing efforts and rapidly losing confidence?

The SquidooRoo Social Media Training Program is for you. The 6 month program covers content creation, social networking and promotion including social bookmarking. The training program explores ways to leverage your social media marketing and the best ways to use social networking on sites such as Facebook, Twitter, RedGage, Hub Pages, Squidoo, YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn.

Learn how to maintain your focus and improve your productivity. Discover ways to leverage your efforts to boost your targeted traffic and income.

The SquidooRoo Training Program in social media is very much the Yellow Brick Road - join us on this learning journey and discover your creativity, your heart and your courage.

Here's my welcome audio message:

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO MY WELCOME MESSAGE

FREE E-Course - How to Be Productive

Please comment and leave your favorite personal productivity tip

  • libgrl Apr 25, 2012 @ 7:45 pm | delete
    great article - thanks!
  • SoundsOfBliss Mar 5, 2012 @ 10:34 am | delete
    What a great site - thanks! The part about leverage is really good. Very useful and lots of food for thought. The eBook was a real surprise. I wasn't expecting that. Thanks again. I naturally tend to do things I like the least first. That was once pointed out to me as a failing on my part and a kind of delayed gratification - pah, psychologists, what do they know? Glad I'm not so far off the mark.
  • cyan2828 Feb 5, 2012 @ 11:09 am | delete
    Love this lens!
    You've got all of the top tips here - My first step I took was to Control my Environment!
  • MiddleSister Aug 20, 2011 @ 1:26 pm | delete
    Thanks for the practical tips as well as encouragement here. Fun to hear your (to my ears) accent.
  • Jon Aug 19, 2011 @ 3:02 pm | delete
    These are fantastic tips. I believe personal productivity is all about getting things done.

    here is an article that conveys my point:

    http://wayneharrel.zielix.com/10-ways-to-increase-your-personal-productivity/

    I like Focus, Discipline, Leverage
  • GreenfireWiseWoman Jul 23, 2011 @ 8:46 am | delete
    I aim for at least 15 minutes a day towards my goal. I often do more than that but if I can just do 15 minutes I am closer to my goal. Sometimes I put a colored star on my calendar on days when I am unmotivated after I have worked on my goals. Informative lens. Thank you.
  • ronpass Aug 10, 2011 @ 7:54 pm | delete
    What a great discipline - if you start on your goal, it is easier to stay focused. As you say even fifteen minutes a day adds up if you decide in advance how you are going to spend the time. Success on the Internet is built through multiple small steps, each adding value o the other.
  • Mujjen Dec 7, 2010 @ 1:38 am | delete
    I have tried many of your tips, like defining your goals and structuring your day and efforts. Very good information. Well presented, as well!
  • MervynGoh Dec 3, 2010 @ 9:24 am | delete
    nice and useful sharing, another thing to share is that good time management also play a part in the solution.
  • JaneSheeba Nov 25, 2010 @ 12:24 pm | delete
    Very useful tips, the article is concrete and provides lots of valuable information. Thanks.
  • Nick Nov 23, 2010 @ 6:32 pm | delete
    So many people try to master everything at once and end up wasting time and energy. If you want to
  • hdkeulenaer Nov 7, 2010 @ 8:59 pm | delete
    I've been looking into information overload with my team last year. We kind of came to the same conclusion that IO results from a failure to filter. And to filter effectively, you need to clearly define focus. Thanks for putting this lens together.
  • vallain Nov 1, 2010 @ 9:47 pm | delete
    This is a message I really need to heed. I get distracted too easily and scatter my efforts without always thinking what should take priority.
  • WindyWinters Mar 10, 2010 @ 1:36 pm | delete
    Congratulations on your Purple Star, Ron. I can appreciate all of your great tips. :)
  • ronpass Mar 6, 2010 @ 1:04 pm | delete
    Thanks for the congrats, folks. I'm delighted with the Purple Star and more so that readers find the lens useful. By the way, this lens created on 1 March was in the top 10 search results on Google by 5 March. Good-on ya Squidoo, yet again!
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This UpMarket page written by

ronpass

Ron here from Brisbane, Australia. I am the author of Small Business Odyssey, a blog about .

I am also Marketing Director and... more »

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