Increasing Your Productivity- How to Get Started

The fact that you are here is a good start. The fact that you are here indicates that there is a search on, from you, to explore and find a way to better yourself and to get better results. My position in this area has always been a two-pronged approach, to start with.

Get Control of Your Time, and then make the best use of that time.

Getting control of your time deals with proper Time Management (T.M.). Without a good handle on managing your time, increasing your productivity is simply not going to happen. There are just too many factors that relate to Time Management that directly effect your productivity that ignoring the Time Management factor in trying to increase your productivity will result in you spinning your wheels. It’s the classic putting the horse before the cart scenario.

For this discussion, we want to give you a few pointers on how best to get started on the road to increasing your productivity. For now, we will leave the issue of Time Management as one that you should explore fully before you look at Productivity issues. I will proceed on that understanding.

Step One

Get use to wearing two hats. You will have two hats to wear, one hat deals with T.M. and your new hat deals with Productivity Maximization (P.M.). I personally stress this separate and different approach to how you will be planning, organizing and working through your day. There is no question in my mind, and the minds of the thousands of clients I have had over the years that this approach works best. There are two separate and distinct thought processes that go into getting better results and when those processes are blurred or joined together, your results will suffer.

How do I know which hat to wear and when? The short answer here is this:

Your Time Management hat deals with what to do and when to do it.

Your put your Productivity Maximization hat on once the decision has been made to do something. Your P.M. hat goes on once an activity has been Time Activated in you Day Planner. The P.M. hat deals with the how part of the process. The Productivity Maximization hat deals with the physical execution part of the process, hence the name production. Obviously many, many times the execution part is mental, in this case it’s physical.

Let’s use this example to show the separation. Most facilities that make something have offices in the front, and production facilities in the back. In the front offices, this is where the decisions are made in regards to what will be made in the back, and when they will be made. Sound familiar? This where the T.M. hats are worn.

The next step for this example is for one of the T.M. hat wearers to physically walk through the door separating the front office with the production facility and walk up to the boss of the production crew and pass over the instructions for the day. The production crew boss is going to be wearing his production hat. What else would he be wearing, right? You know have two people standing there, each wearing their respective hats, one T.M. and the other P.M. Once the T.M. hat has conveyed the decisions of the front office, the "what and when issues", he leaves. Now the P.M. hat takes over, he will now deal with the execution part of the process.

This scenario plays itself out over thousands if not millions of manufacturing and production facilities, all over the world. What separates the successful companies from the less successful ones is how the two hat wearing components of the respective companies do their jobs individually and more importantly, how well they can work together for the common good. There are just way too many factors to deal with here that pertain to what I just said in the last sentence. Books have been written on just single words; let alone what the whole sentence conveys. Let’s just deal with one.

Chaos

Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if the process were reversed? What would happen if the P.M. hat wearer decided to just start making things in the back? No consultation with the T.M. hat wearer; just started to grind out product. What would happen if half way through the day the T.M. hat walks out and says, here is the production we want done today based on the orders we just got in. Oops, just a little problem; the P.M. hat wearer guessed wrong and just made 20,000 of the wrong kind of widgets for this order. This kind of problem happens thousands of times a day, all over the world, and that’s in facilities where there is supposed to be a chain of command. Can you imagine what happens in facilities where they do not even attempt to try to organize themselves properly?

The title of this article, Increasing your Production- How to get Started. Just one point to reinforce here; If you want to increase your Production, start by dealing with your Time Management issues, and yes YOU do have T.M. issues, and then separate your T.M. issues from your production issues. This separation, this wearing two hats may seem to be redundant or unnecessary but it is crucial to your success. Work with me on this issue, you will be surprised how effective this simple concept is.