Gain & Maintain Productive Processes

Being productive and keeping momentum go hand in hand as you work through your tasks and goals each day. You can’t have one without the other as your productivity depends on your momentum and determination to get things done. The problem is how to we gain or maintain productivity in order to keep the momentum going as it should. Let’s take a look as some solutions to this problem.

Beginning

As with anything else you’re trying to accomplish, you must start at the beginning. To start you must review what you are doing, adjust, and plan for the next steps. It’s very important to keeping your momentum and productivity that you create manageable goals and have a plan.

Productive Goals

Without goals how do you know where you’ve been and where you are trying to get too? Even if they’re small, you should always have something you’re shooting to achieve. Otherwise, you have no idea where you are trying to get too.

So, create goals for you to accomplish, work through action steps to achieve them, and the beginning of your journey is underway.

Be Clear

You want to be clear on what your goals are and how you’re going to achieve them. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help you organize your thoughts and goals to stay productive.

• What do you want to really accomplish in your life (Your main goal)?
• Why is this something you want to achieve?
• What are you really good at?
• What are you really passionate about?
• List your strengths.
• List you weaknesses.
• When money and deadlines are involved, would your target goal still be enjoyable?
• What steps could you take right now to get to your desired destination (goal)?

If your main goal is something you love to do, you need to think about how you would feel when money and deadlines are involved. You may think that getting paid for doing something you love would be great, but you also have to think about how you would feel down the road. You don’t want it to feel as if it’s become a chore and no longer pleasurable.

List your strengths and weakness so you know what benefits you have and what you need to work on right off the bat. You already know what you need to improve on and can schedule that in to gain the talents you need for the future.

You also want to know your why. Why do you want to achieve this goal? What is the purpose behind creating this goal? This is something you should think about for all the goals you set.

Plan

Planning for your goals and achievements will go along way to making them reality and keeping you productive.

Goal Breakdown

When you’ve thought of your goal(s), you must now break them down into manageable action steps. For this exercise, you should think about what you want to achieve in one year pertaining to your main goal. Once you have your one year goal, break that down into steps you can complete each quarter, then each month.

Then break that down even further into steps you can achieve each week and then each day. So when you complete tasks each day, they are progressing to completing your weekly, monthly, quarterly and then your year goal.

Note: Don’t try to do too much at one time, make realistic goals and choices. Create an even flow of activities/tasks to make the progress of your work easier.

Schedule

When scheduling your tasks, be sure to create a balance of difficult tasks and easy tasks. Or if you’re the ambitious type, the difficult tasks before the easy ones.

I would advise against complete the easy tasks before the difficult ones as this could build dread, frustration, and a very unpleasant mood for you as you work toward your goals. You also don’t want to build the habit of procrastinating those difficult tasks.

If it’s necessary, break down those difficult tasks into even more manageable tasks if it’s possible and work through them that way.

Create deadlines for each task, though you may have done that some when breaking down your goals, you want to make sure those things end up on your schedule, calendar, or planner. Use those deadlines to keep you motivated, accountable, and productive toward your goals.

Routines

Routines can help you to keep with your goals because it’s something done daily or perhaps weekly depending how your routine is.

Think of how your day is run and whether there is something that could be added or slightly changed to help you better achieve your goals. Perhaps that is getting up a bit earlier, adding in some self-care activities to relieve new stress, or adding time in the evening or the end of the week to review your tasks and see what was accomplished and what needs work.

If you decide to add multiple items to any of your routines, start by adding things in slowly, one by one so you’re not overwhelmed. You don’t want to hinder your progress in any way.

Preparing Your Atmospheric Areas

The area in which you work needs to work for you, not against you. Yes, there are some who have a disorganized system of doing things and they insist they know where everything is. While others need a spotless space to work and function.

Creating the right atmosphere is your primary goal in this section. Organize and stage your work areas, whether those are in a home office, traveling outdoors, or any other area you choose to be functional, welcoming and comfortable for your creative mind to achieve the difficult and breeze the simple.

For more information on creating your work, home, or outdoor atmosphere, check out this page!

Limit Distractions

Distractions can come in all shapes, sizes, human, animal, and electronic. This can massively obstruct your progress. The last thing you want to happen, is to get to the end of the day and realize you spent more time chasing kids, on your phone, or procrastinating than completing any tasks.

Turn off notifications, distract the children with a movie, game or other fun project and be sure to get your butt in your creative atmosphere and get some work done. You want to be productive, so don’t let yourself get in the way!

Organize

To keep productive and moving forward, staying organized with your tasks, workspace, email, and other areas will help your achieve those goals even if it’s just unsubscribing from unneeded emails or creating a checklist of to-dos for the day. As long as you are doing something related to your goals, no matter how small, you are on the right path.

Managing Tasks

You need to manage your tasks as you journey on your path to success and productive days. Finding systems, programs, and a little organization can go a long way to keep you where you need to be.

Programs and Tracking

Decide on how you want to keep track of things as you work through your tasks and activities. This could be Trello, Asana, a planner, a bullet journal, a checklist, etc. These programs can help you organize your tasks and to dos to fit you and your work/schedule.

If you haven’t used one of these programs, there may be a slight learning curve so keep that in mind as you work forward. Give yourself time to become familiar with the program you choose and don’t get frustrated if it’s just not working out and you have to switch to something else. It happens and you need to learn to roll with the punches.

Sort and Prioritize

Although you’ve created goals, written them down, broken them into smaller, more manageable tasks, sometimes you realize they could be broken even further or there are more to be added. When that happens, you need to sort and prioritize them as they are added.

Don’t jump in right away. As tasks are added, write them down. Don’t try to complete it right away, come back to it when you have time to review your list. During that review organize and schedule them in where needed.

Delegate

There are times when you need some help with tasks and delegating those tasks to someone else can free up time and release stress for you. Don’t try to do it all. It may seem like you should just do it all yourself because you know how to do it and teaching someone else to do it would take time. Another fear is that you feel you would do a better job of the task than someone else.

Here is where providing a learning experience comes in handy. Use the delegation to teach your helper how you want the task to be done. If they complete it exactly the way you would, then you have nothing to worry about and you have the time to get ahead or work on the more difficult items that need your attention or focus on the new things you want to implement.

The benefits of delegating tasks is amazing when you are able to let go and allow someone else to help.

Batch Tasks

One way to get things going on the right track and keep the productive mindset is to batch your tasks with other like tasks. When you schedule your tasks, find ones that match or are similar to each other and plan those at the same time.

This works well for errands you need to run, posts you need to write, and more. Create lists of your tasks and put similar ones together to complete. This will help you keep up and get ahead with your schedule, not to mention keep you productive.

Continue

You want to keep up with your productivity and progress, one way to do that is to complete reviews.

Review

You’ve spent a lot of time and work on being productive and you should want to continue to stay that way. In order to do that, you should review your progress each week, month, quarter, and year.

Doing this will give you an overview of what you’ve done, what you achieved, how you’re doing overall, where you need to go from the point you’re at along with what you need to work on.

Want some more information on completing a review? I have just the post for you!

Something to Help

Keep your productivity up with a great mug!