5 Tips How to Improve Productivity (and Start the New Year on the Right Foot)

It happens all too often - we ring in the New Year with the best of intentions and make all sorts of promises to ourselves. Then little by little, we let those good intentions slip away and our goals fall by the wayside. A very frustrating and discouraging situation indeed, but it doesn't have to be that way. If we apply some of the techniques how to improve productivity, we can keep our goals and resolutions within sight and make progress toward their realization.


So here are 5 tips how to improve productivity (and start the new year on the right foot)
1. Make yourself accountable for your goals. By telling others about your goals, you are committing yourself to them publicly. This creates a deeper level of commitment and will motivate you to keep working at them so you don't disappoint others. While this may not necessarily be true, our minds work this way so take advantage of it! On the other hand, don't commit publicly to a goal you cannot realistically achieve.
2. Make your goals realistic. A realistic goal is one that can be achieved within the desired time-frame and using the available resources. You have to be able to influence the outcome. While ending world hunger might be an honorable goal, it is not likely any one person could succeed if this was their New Year's resolution.
3. Break your goals down into smaller, more manageable chunks. If your goals (or resolutions) are not sub-divided into more "digestible" morsels, you expose yourself to discouragement because the end seems so far out of reach. On the other hand, by breaking it down into milestones, you can celebrate your progress, set your mind to succeed, and ride the momentum along the way.
4. Be wary of the desire to multitask. We easily fall into the trap of having so many goals that we want to work on them simultaneously. The reality is that, you aren't making any real progress on any of them. Eli Goldratt, author of the Critical Chain, illustrates this multitasking mistake and points out that in an environment of limited resources (you), it is much more productive to focus our efforts to progress on one project at a time because of the inherent inefficiencies from hopping from one priority to another.
5. Make goal-setting a habit. By regularly setting specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bounded goals in all aspects of our lives, we condition our minds to become mission-driven and it becomes easier to achieve them. The key of course is to commit these goals to paper. The goal statement has to have each of these 5 dimensions to be effective, otherwise you are leaving an opening for problems getting it done.
So take advantage of your new year's resolutions and implement these 5 tips so you can stick to your desired goals and at the same time you will be learning how to improve productivity in everything you do.

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