Enhancing Your Productivity

- Are you getting maximum results from your time? Are you focused in your attention? Your answer to these questions, how productive and focused you are, will have a significant effect on your career. In my book Invaluable, I explored how to help individuals increase the value of their time and quality of work life. In other words, how to become invaluable. This course, enhancing your productivity, is part of a five-course series on helping you become invaluable and get the most from your career.

In my coaching, two factors in becoming invaluable are irreplaceability and focus. These two factors go hand-in-hand and are the key to enhancing your productivity. Although they serve different purposes, they both affect how you spend your time at work. Irreplaceability is an indicator of how difficult it would be to replace you with someone else. It considers the next best alternative to you and your services.

To make yourself irreplaceable, you want to understand which of your activities are most valuable. I call these, your most valuable activities, or your MVAs. When you spend the majority of your time on activities that bring the most to the business's bottom line, you're making yourself irreplaceable. In this course, we'll take you through the process of identifying your most valuable activities. Then you'll compare your results with the most valuable activities of your co-workers, including your boss and any people that you may manage.

Why, well by understanding your MVAs and those of the people around you, you'll begin to see how you can fit yourself into the company in a way that makes you irreplaceable. And that will lead us to the invaluable factor of focus. This factor means that once you've identified what makes you valuable, then you need to focus your time, as much as possible, on those most valuable activities. I'll give you some strategies to help you maintain focus, both in scheduling your activities and in eliminating the little distractions that happen throughout your day.

When you combine the identification of your most valuable activities with the strategy of focus, you'll take significant steps toward enhancing your productivity.