“Efficiency is doing things right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
~Zig Ziglar
“Problems are solved on the spot, as soon as they arise. No front-line employee has to wait for a supervisor’s permission.”
~Jan Carlzon
In order to enjoy life out of the office, you will need to learn to do work that you would normally do in a 40 hour week much faster. This might seem impossible at first, but once you identify all the things that you do that are not work related in a given work week, you will realize that this is a much easier task than you think. Here is a list of common time wasters that people use to fill the week when they are in the office:
- Checking Email
- Web surfing
- Chatting online
- Walking around the office
- Talking to co-workers
- Doing non-critical work tasks
- Just sitting around
- Talking on the phone
Determine your productivity benchmark during a given week and attempt to eliminate all the above time wasters for one week. List the top 3 critical tasks that you need to complete in that week and give yourself 2 days to complete them. Limiting the time you have to complete a given task is a good way to help you focus on only the important items that need to be done.
Initially when I tried to eliminate my distractions it was difficult because I kept telling myself that I had the entire week to finish them. To deal with this, I created time pressure by delaying all my work tasks for that week and only started working on Thursday. This gave me 2 days to complete one week worth of work and this forced me to eliminate all time wasters from my schedule.
While this proved difficult at first, over time I got used to it and I am now able to complete work that would normally take 10 days in just one.
To summarize, the following four steps are what you will need to do in order to increase your work speed and reduce your work time:
- Determine you weekly productivity benchmark
- Identify your critical tasks for the week that would achieve that benchmark
- Eliminate all time wasters from your schedule
- Attempt to complete all your critical tasks in one day or less
By doing this, you will train yourself to work faster and thus complete your work tasks in less time. The reason why you want to determine your weekly productivity benchmark is because if you attempt to work faster without doing this, you will be unable to measure how fast you are actually working.
The goal is to increase your in office productivity to just enough to be more impressive than everyone else and no more. You don’t want to do more work because you can; you want to do just enough and that is all. This allows you to exhibit superhuman productivity when you begin to work remotely which will help reinforce your position as a teleworker while still allowing you to spend most of the week not working (if you want to that is).
Exercise 1.1: Overviewing your current working process
Exercise 1.2: Isolating your most important work activities
Exercise 1.3: Improving the teleworking compatibility of work related activities
Exercise 1.4: Eliminating all unnecessary tasks
Exercise 1.5: Eliminating all unnecessary people
Exercise 1.6: Eliminating all unnecessary communication
Exercise 1.7: Creating systems to speed up work
Exercise 1.8: Creating plans to deal with persistent problems
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Yasuo Long believes that all employees should have the right to design their lifestyle according to their needs in order to maintain their health, their relationships and their happiness. In pursuit of this, he quit the 9-to-5 and became a telecommuter to give himself the time and mental freedom to discover what it really means to live with direction and purpose.
