The last pillar that I am going to cover is the professional productivity. Just like the case with personal optimization, here the idea is to do the things you do right. This is achieved by usually doing them faster, better, with fewer resources or higher quality. One of the definitions of productivity is “the effectiveness of productive effort as measured in terms of the rate of output per unit of input”. Or in other terms how to achieve better results with the same amount of effort.
Your life
Just like your life, your job becomes more and more demanding. More and more jobs will be obsolete or automated in the future. The myth of the irreplaceable specialist has long been busted.
Essence of professional productivity
Professional productivity teaches you techniques and give you tools and tips for maximizing the results and minimizing your efforts.
Benefits of professional productivity
But why and where you need better productivity:
- First of all, your work week is usually constraint to 40 hours or less and in most countries working overtime is not tolerated.
- Nowadays you are connected all the time and you receive new tasks by email, phone, text message, instant messenger and the social networks. These tasks need to be managed.
- Then you have to also learn to prioritize your tasks, goals and all other stimuli if you ever what to get hold of your live. There is a great deal of decision-making involved in the process.
- Social skills in the workplace is also a huge topic. More and more people have to prepare and present information via slides to audience of great variety and size. You should be able to summarize information and present it in such a way, that it would be as digestible as possible to your audience
- As in your personal life, education will be an ongoing topic. There is hardly an industry that does not call for a constant learning process. You have to keep your core skill, but you also have to acquire new skills and knowledge. That would keep you competitive.
- And last, but not least, comes the amount of information you have access to. Emails, corporate knowledge base, documents, tasks, to-dos, memos all have to be organized and sorted in accessible ways, so that you can get that information as soon as possible and use them
All these requirements force you to search for help in terms of productivity. There is no better employee for any company than the one who is able to retrieve the required information faster than the others and who is able to provide the answers needed better or more complete than the others.
Topics
The following topics are part of that pillar:
Time management
How to manage your time better and more efficient, with focus on the following subtopics:
- Pomodoro method
- Plans and summaries
- Agendas
- Schedules
Organization skills
- Email organization
- File organization
- Tidy your desk
Task management
How to manage and track your tasks better
- Task Prioritization
- Documentation
- Summaries
- Lessons learned
Social and presentation skills
- Agendas
- Meeting minutes
- Target audience
- Presentation content
- The elevator speech
Education
- Keep reading
- Keep studying
- Fast reading
Summary
Mastering the professional productivity pillar will give you the upper hand in comparison to your colleagues or competitors. It is safe to assume that to a certain degree everybody outside your family and maybe outside your inner circle of friends is a competitor.
Along with competition, however, comes cooperation. Big rivals in markets with only two competitors could cooperate in order to penetrate a new country or continent. By mixing competition and cooperation you could grow as a professional, but you could also help your community to grow.