How To Use Your Time Wisely By Prioritizing Your Goals?

Everybody have set their goals and have sought to achieve their goals. But are they spending their time wisely in their Goals or just blindly working through their days doing things that are not productive to their Goals?

In today sharing, we will like to address this by teaching you how to spend your time wisely.

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In his book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours, author Robert Pozen reveals his secrets and strategies for productivity and high performance, focusing on results produced rather than simply hours worked. In this edited excerpt, Pozen lays out six steps to analyze whether your efforts are supporting your most critical business goals and objectives.

Many executives race from meeting to meeting or crisis to crisis without giving much thought to the rationale for their hectic schedules. They spend too little time on activities that support their highest goals and often report a serious mismatch between priorities and time allocations.

Think carefully about why you are engaging in any activity and what you expect to get out of it. Establish your highest-ranking goals and determine whether your schedule is consistent with this ranking. This process has six steps:

1. Write everything down.

Include the routine tasks that you have to do daily or weekly and longer-term projects assigned to you.But you can only tread water if you spend all your time responding to crises and tasks assigned by others. To get ahead, you also must think about what you want to do.

These may be long-term goals, such as advancing your career, or short-term goals, like developing a new skill. Add these aspirations for your work to your list. Be as broad as possible; capture all your tasks and goals.

2. Organize by time horizon. 

Divide your list into three time categories:

Career aims: Long-term goals over at least five years.

Objectives: Professional goals over the next three months to two years.

Targets: Action steps that should guide your work on a weekly or daily basis–or example, finishing one part of a larger project.

Make sure that each objective has one or two associated targets. If any lacks a target, think hard about the next actionable step you can take to advance that objective, and then add it to your list of targets.

3. Rank your objectives.

Think about what you want to do, what you're good at, and what the world needs from you. These are distinctly different — and there may be some conflict among them.Determining what you want to do is critical to your ranking decisions. For instance, if you have a burning desire to invent your company's newest product, you should rank that objective higher.

Then, ask yourself, “What am I better at doing than others? Which objectives play to my strengths?” Rank an objective higher if you have a comparative advantage in accomplishing it because of your personality or skills.

Lastly, ask what the world needs from you. You can't be fully productive by looking only at the supply side. You must also consider the demand side — what the world, your organization, or your boss needs most from you.

Write down two or three top objectives for your organization and think about the metric used to evaluate performance. Ask yourself what one change you could make to help achieve success: more time visiting clients? Recruiting a talented professional to replace a retiring employee?

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