10 Ways to Maximize Your Workday
Successful entrepreneurs maximize their time to make each day as productive as possible. To maximize your potential success you must learn to make the most of every hour of every day. The hours in a day are limited.
Every minute not utilized efficiently is wasted when your competitors are striving and getting better. Follow this list of 10 tips to make each workday productive.
1. Plan your next day.
The night before your next business day write an agenda of the tasks that need to be accomplished. By creating a plan you are prepared with direction and intention. Without a plan you risk being time-challenged, rushing about wasting time and energy. This makes you ineffective and disorganized causing you to operate with a lack of foresight, resulting in lost time and frazzled nerves.
To be a great success don’t just plan for each day; plan for every week, every year, every five years and every ten years. Planning automatically generates a progressive mindset as you envision the future you are setting out to achieve. Further, plans act as blueprints allowing you to actively gauge and measure your progress.
2. Prioritize tasks.
You all have full plates and may feel as if you do not have the time and/or energy to complete all your tasks. Prioritizing solves and bring peace to feelings of overwhelm. When prioritizing utilize the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule states that 80 percent of your typical activities contribute less than 20 percent to the value of your work. When you focus on the important 20 percent of your daily tasks you still get the higher reward on your time investment. Therefore, focus most of your efforts on your more urgent or top value tasks and you will achieve more than you did before and still have time left to spend with loved ones.
3. Optimize your commute time.
Many of you deal with traffic and traveling, so you may as well make good use of the time you spend commuting to the fullest. If you travel often by car or train, conduct mobile meetings while on the road or use that time to clear the clutter of your less important tasks. If you fly maximize your time in airports and while flying by completing responsibilities and clearing any unfinished business.
Another great use of time while commuting is to listen to audiobooks or programs enhancing your self-development. Personal education inspires you to stay motivated and goal driven. These types of “mini-trainings” engrain a mindset of prosperity, fulfillment and success into your psyche which can only enhance your forward moving progress in life and business.
4. Take breaks.
If you push yourself for too long without giving your mind a break you will suffer from irritability, distraction, confusion, nervousness, anxiety and fatigue. You cannot maximize your day with a low frustration tolerance. The brain can only process efficiently for so long before you need to relax your mind.
Make sure to get outside for some fresh air, have a snack and refuel. Breaks help alleviate stress and also serve to give you a fresh start upon returning to complete the rest of the tasks on your agenda. Take at least two breaks each day. It will increase your productivity and help you to maximize your work potential.
5. Avoid conflicts.
There are going to be aspects of your career which annoy you. There will be people you don’t like, bosses, demands, coworkers, timelines, team members, commuting, among others distractions. To maximize your day do not sweat the small stuff.
Adopt a mindset to accept things the way they are. Do not complain unnecessarily about deadlines, slow computers and strict bosses etc. Do not lament about the problems of the world. There is nothing significant you can produce from your workday while involving yourself in petty dramas. Shut up and do your work. Your performance is what speaks and what matters.
6. Acknowledge others.
Being boastful about your success is unappealing. Always give yourself credit when the credit is due, but humble yourself to the wisdom that success is rarely a one man show. Make sure to acknowledge the people you know who have worked hard to contribute the latest achievement for your team.
Each person must be treated as a valuable asset to the whole. Never leave anyone out. Acknowledging others motivates them to be more successful in the future and it motivates them to want to work harder for you and with you. Most importantly, acknowledgement brings a sense of cohesion between people. Successful empires are built upon cohesion.
7. Positive mental attitude.
Your attitude shapes the perception of your day. Your attitude is great predictor of achievement. Start each day prepared and ready to face challenges and daily struggles. Don’t run from or avoid any obstacle. Take each challenge head on. Focus on bringing great value to the table of everything you touch.
Approach each workday with the courageous heart of lion rather than functioning as a mouse. Be confident. Keep your focus on solutions, not problems. Cultivating this type of positive outlook creates the energy for great things to happen. Wake up each day expecting miracles.
8. Eliminate time wasters.
While at work focus on work. Avoid getting caught up in office politics, gossip, personal phone calls, social media distractions or emails. Constant engagement in these types of diversions or dramas not only can tarnish your reputation, but people will begin associating you with being unproductive and inefficient.
When you are at work focus on being productive. All “work friendships” should be based in utility; what each person can utilize from the other for a greater gain. Focus on putting your personal socializing off until you are done with your day, or leave it to your weekend. You cannot maximize your day wasting precious time.
9. Be open to learning.
Each day offers opportunities to learn something new. Search for these opportunities to improve upon yourself, your skills and your talents. Learn how to work smarter not harder. When you work smarter you maximize everything you touch with efficiency.
Never be know-it-all. Approach each workday with the mindset of a humble student. If you know-it-all you become close minded and cannot maximize anything further than shortage of your own knowledge. Be open to increasing your knowledge through training and education and your success will grow exponentially.
10. Create benchmarks.
Having a vision is important, but you must actively pave your way toward its realization. Creating small achievement-based benchmarks slowly build you toward your ultimate goals. Small goals create motivation as the success of each goal achieved is celebrated. With each goal achieved your business grows and your thoughts become more innovative. Innovation is imperative to keeping you a cut of above the rest. View each successful and productive day as a building block paving your road to success.
There is no better way to maximize your workday then to follow each of these ten steps with commitment and consistency. If there is one thing that will help you out succeed the others, it is persistence. Persistence, never giving up and continuing to organize, plan, prepare and grow gives you that deliberate and unwavering mindset to bring the most value that you can to any and all of your business endeavors.
