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In 2009, Resolve To Do Less But Achieve More

December 30, 2008 | Author: Jessica Howard | Filed under: Career Change, Moving Up, Setting Goals

Whether or not we make official New Year’s Resolutions, many of us will start 2009 by dusting off our goals. Whatever those goals are, the challenge is fitting them into our schedules. Where will we find the time to make them happen? Between 4 a.m. and 7 a.m.? Between working and working out?

The good news here is that many experts and authors find that “less is more” is the key to higher productivity. A research firm called Basex recently announced that information overload - the distractions of email, instant messages and web searches - ended up costing $900 million in lost productivity this year in the U.S.

Cutting through mental clutter is central to a new book called The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential in Business and in Life, by Leo Babauta. The book pulls together the philosophies and habits that Babauta (a father of six!) writes about on his blog, Zen Habits. It’s all about zapping the distractions of modern life and zooming in on your goals. (By the way, for anyone who orders the book before the end of Jan. 1, 2009, there are some free ebook giveaways on the website).

Are you working? Or Getting Worked? Timothy Ferriss, author of the Four-Hour Workweek (not four day, four hour) offers many tips on eliminating pointless tasks and focusing on productive ones.  He talks about discovering economist Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule: the idea that 80 percent of the income in society is produced and owned by 20 percent of the population.

Ferriss believes the idea can be applied by individuals in their jobs or businesses. Imagine how you would shift priorities if you focused on the 20 per cent that makes a huge difference, rather than the 80 per cent that just eats time. Ferriss dramatically changed the way he ran his business based on this principle. WorkStyle Design does a nice job of summarizing some of Ferriss’s ideas in a post about four productivity resources.

Ferriss is also a proponent of Parkinson’s Law, which is the idea that work expands to fill the time that we give it. So, when you find yourself sweating the small stuff, it’s a good idea to set a deadline and move on.

Speaking of moving on, here are a few more resources on time management:

The Simple Dollar recently reviewed Mark Forster’s book Getting Everything Done, a time-management guide that suggests re-evaluating whether our daily habits are helping or hindering our goals.

Gina Trapani, editor at Lifehacker.com, writes a funny post about How to find the perfect productivity tools for 2009. While she suggests everyone has to find the (hi-tech or low tech) tools that work best for them, she confesses that, along with Yahoo! Calendar, she relies daily on a notebook (made of actual paper) and a pen. “It’s lo-fi, plain, simple and not very exciting. It simply works.”

Mike Elgan’s article Hard Work is Dead: Call it Work Ethic 2.0 supports the idea that in today’s world, our ability to control own attention is part of the new work ethic. “The need for ‘attention,’ rather than ‘hard work,’ as the centerpiece of the new work ethic has arisen along with the rise of distractions carried on the wings of Internet protocol. In one generation, we’ve gone from a total separation of ‘work’ from ‘non-work’ to one in which both work and play are always sitting right in front of us.”

Well said.

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