How To Stop Wasting Time and Improve Your Personal Effectiveness

stop wasting time

The reason I research productivity is simple. I think that a productive life equals happy life. But we insist on wasting time, which makes it hard to live a productive life.

Also, if you’re more productive than average people, you’ll advance faster in your career. You learn more. You do more. And eventually are rewarded more.

And when I talk about productivity, I talk about being effective. Because productivity doesn’t suggest that you get the right things done. It just means you get a lot of stuff done. But that’s not what matters.

Effectiveness, however, refers to getting the right things done.

And if you want to do your job well, earn money, live a meaningful life, or learn skills, that is what matters the most. Otherwise, you just run around in circles. You might appear busy, but you won’t achieve anything meaningful.

In other words: It’s easy to do useless work. Work that doesn’t bring you closer to the outcomes you desire. That’s a pure waste of time.

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How To Beat Procrastination (backed by science)

the slope of procrastination

Do you want to beat procrastination? Join the club. Procrastination has been around since the start of modern civilization.

Historical figures like Herodotus, Leonardo Da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and hundreds of others have talked about how procrastination is the enemy of results.

One of my favorite quotes about procrastination is from Abraham Lincoln:

“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.”

The funny thing about procrastination is that we all know that it’s harmful. Who actually likes to procrastinate? No one enjoys doing that. Me neither.And yet, procrastination was the story of my life. When I was in college, every semester, this would happen:

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Don’t Compete. Create!

abudant thinking

If you think that you have to compete for better jobs or more market share, you’re as wrong as I was.

The idea of competition is engraved in our minds. We believe that we have to compete for the same jobs as others. If someone has a job, that means you can’t have the same job. And if a company has a certain market share, that means you have to compete with that company to “win” a piece of their share.

At least, that’s what conventional advice says. It’s also what I learned in business school. My entire education was based on competing with other businesses. And almost every business book that I’ve read, also assumes that business is competition.

They couldn’t be more wrong. When you assume that you have to compete with other businesses or people for money, jobs or attention, you’re engaged in limited thinking.

Instead, we must adopt an abundance mindset. Wallace D. Wattles, one of the first famed personal development authors, said it best:

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Don’t Know What You Want? Improve These 7 Universal Skills

dont know what i want

What does success look like? What do you want from life? What career do you want?

Most of us answer “I don’t know.”

And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that. And yet, we think it’s the worst thing in the world if you don’t know what you want to do in life.

We say: “OMG! I don’t know what I want!” And then we have a full-on panic attack. Be honest — it happens to all of us.

Especially, when you see that your old college friend just got married. Or that your co-worker, who started at the same time as you, just got promoted.

It’s at those moments of weakness when we shine a spotlight on our own uncertainty about life.

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