Shawn’s Friday Five: Five Ways To Improve Your Performance

Five tips to help you improve your personal productivity.

1. Start your day with the most difficult task first. Getting this out of the way will ease your mind and reduce you tendency to procrastinate.

2. Use music to keep you focused. Believe it or not, many find that background music helps to increase their productivity. Studies have found that music can help to keep us focused on the task at hand, while making it enjoyable to boot!

3. Set small rewards for big tasks. That’s right, Pavlov’s theory works on every species. Setting rewards for accomplishing big (or difficult) tasks is one of the best ways to motivate yourself to get the job done. If the job doesn’t get done, no reward. You can’t have your cake and eat it to.

4. Focus on three things at a time. Keep your top three priorities for the day in front of you until they are done. If you are a list maker at heart, knock yourself out by writing a big list, then selecting your three priorities and tucking the list away. Once the three things are done, you can call it a day and give yourself a reward.

5. Force yourself to focus. We are a society of diminishing attention spans thanks to technology. To be productive you have to break the habit. Force yourself to sit and finish a task (or at least a good portion of it) without doing anything else. It is challenging, but only by forcing ourselves to do this can we break the habit.

© Shawn Casemore 2013. All rights reserved.