The 3 Biggest Lessons I’ve Learnt About Productivity This Week

My wife has been away on holiday this week, so as well as all my usual things including a days work, I’ve been doing the school pick up and drop off. I’ve been entertaining the children after school, and all the household chores too. I also decided that instead of going into the office, I’d work from our home office where my wife usually works from.

Now it has got to Friday evening I’ve looked back and realised just how productive I’ve been this week. Having had a good think about it, I think there are 3 main reasons for this:

Something I’ve done over the past couple of years, is have regular trips abroad to work away in inspiring and lovely locations. I find that this boosts my productivity, especially with creative type work. I thought the location was the only reason, but after this week I actually think just a change of workplace may be a factor. It’s certainly something I’m going to experiment with further.

Secondly, knowing that I had a fairly strict schedule this week, I planned my days even more so than usual. I’d have a list of things I had to achieve each day, and had a plan to do so based on how longs things would take. I did however, make sure that I left some downtime in there for things that may crop up. Sure enough that happened (a last minute meeting) but it wasn’t an issue as I’d pre-planned some spare bandwidth.

Finally, my work days were much shorter than usual. I knew that I could only really work properly between 9:30 and 15:00 each day. Because that was always in the back of my mind, I didn’t waste much time on anything I wasn’t supposed to be doing. I genuinely think I was more productive (and effective which is the really important thing) this week than last when I worked about 20 hours more. Having a set deadline (I HAD to leave the house to collect the children at 15:00) meant I really buckled down to achieve it.

So it’s been an interesting as well as productive week. It’s certainly given me lots more to think about when it comes to my location, planning, and working hours…

Thanks

Richard