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All the successful people have many common peak performance secrets. These secrets make them Elite Performers. It isn’t how they show up when everything is going well. It’s the way they deliver when their best-laid plans are falling apart. Peak productivity is not about luck. It’s about dedication and awareness.
Below insightful content is inspired from the book ‘6 Months to 6 Figures’ by Peter Voogd.
It’s your job to figure out how to work at your personal best. In a time of constant movement, constant communication, and continual achievement, the long list of to-dos and completed tasks at the end of the day makes us feel like we will never get ahead. It seems like our days are controlling us versus us taking control of our days.
The behavior of constant busyness and lack of rituals can actually take you off course from your high-value goals, hurt your physical, psychological and emotional systems, and can even damage or destroy relationships.
Here are some ‘Perspective Changers’ for you to focus on your peak performance. Changing your perspective can change your life.
80/20 Everything
This is called Pareto’s Law and can be summarized as follows: 80% of the outputs result from 20% of the inputs. If you take 10 of your tasks and activities you want to get done, two of them will produce more results than the other eight combined. This is a proven fact. Sometimes, when we get busy, we feel we must get a ton of tasks done versus the few important ones that create the greatest results.
You should often challenge yourself to think intelligently about which 20% of your tasks to do with absolute focus will yield huge results. Remember, it’s not the hours you work, but the work you put into those hours.
Most Things Don’t Matter
Most things make no difference and aren’t moving your life or business forward. In fact, most of the things you do in your business don’t accelerate growth—they just ‘maintain’ at best. Being busy is a form of laziness. Being selective and taking more intelligent action is the path to being highly productive. Focus on the important few and ignore or delegate the rest. If somebody can perform tasks almost as well as you, delegate those tasks and stick to what you do best. Your time is more valuable doing the things no one else can do.
What activities can you either delegate or stop doing right now?
This is called the List to Freedom and can save you years of headache and frustration:
- Don’t like doing -Figure out the things you don’t like doing and either delegate, delete, or pay somebody else to do them.
- Can’t do -Find other people who are the best at what you can’t do. Everybody has specific strengths.
- Shouldn’t be doing -If your time is worth $50 an hour, you shouldn’t be doing anything less than that.
Don’t Do Unimportant Things Well
Doing something unimportant well doesn’t make it any more important. Activities that are not connected to an outcome or purpose are the drain of all fortune. Understand what you do is a lot more important than how you do it. Effectiveness is still important, but it is useless unless applied to the right things. There are a handful of things you could be focusing on that will create exceptional outcomes for your goals. It’s easy to get caught in a flood of trivial matters. Take time to stop and re-focus your priorities as often as needed. Intelligent thinking combined with the right action will get your productivity to a level few attain.
Remember what Jim Collins said in his best-seller, Good To Great, “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any.”
Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s Law dictates that a task will become bigger in importance and complexity in relation to the time allotted for its completion. I have personally found magic and high value in deadlines. If I give you 12 hours to complete a project, the time pressure forces you to focus on execution, and you have no choice but to do only the essentials that actually matter. If I give you a week to complete the same task, then you have six days of validation, excuses, and procrastination and one day of rushed work. Even if I give you a month, it becomes a mental monster. The end results of deadlines are always of equal or higher quality due to greater, more intense focus.
Identify the few critical tasks that contribute most to your business results and schedule them with very clear deadlines. If you haven’t identified your critical tasks and set aggressive start and end times for them, the unimportant becomes the important. Even if you know what’s critical, without deadlines that create focus, the minor tasks forced upon you will consume time until another minuscule task jumps in to replace it, leaving you at the end of the day with nothing accomplished.
Start As early as possible
When the task at hand is difficult, we generally try to drag it to START. This strategy work against us. Mental pressure starts building up and we feel uneasy. The best strategy which works well here is, just start that work without any delay & finish just 1 % or 2 % of that task. This small percentage of finished work will align your mind especially your subconscious mind to build up further on that. All the related concepts and ideas will emerge to finish that task. In very little time your draft work will be ready and you can further fine-tune this in balance time.
Just understand this concept with the following example, if you need to prepare one business document for one of your high potential clients in one week time. On day one, you simply select the document format as a Word file or PowerPoint presentation, or any other. Once you select that, give it a name. You can stop here. This is a good beginning.
After few hours, on the same day, you can put key bullet points or topics to cover in that document. Now after this assign further work to your subconscious mind to develop further on each bullet point or topic. Then later you can put related content on each bullet point or topic. You can add or delete some of the bullet points or topics during this process. Within 3-4 days, your business document will be in good shape.
I am using this process, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life as well.
“The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”- Chinese proverb
