Protocol 80 Productivity Blog

There are no shortage of ways you can constantly tweak your personal time management, and if you’re trying for that 2% more productivity per week, every little can count.

So these three things put forward by Work Place Life aren’t anything amazing on their own, but they can still have an impact when you add them all together, or perhaps give some inspiration as to how else you might shave off some lost time, even if just by a little.
Here’s three more you might try

1. Stockpile Stationary
   Keeping a collection of various bits of stationary you need in a draw can save you a fair amount of time. If you suddenly find yourself in need of something you don’t want to have to get up mid-flow and trek of to find a stapler or something.  For items in limited supply like staplers, keep two - one in common use that you don’t mind lending out. One you keep hold of no matter what, that you only ever use if the common one is AWOL.
2. Send Your Personal Mail Via The Company “Out Box”
   Firstly I’m not saying the company should pay for your personal mail, but my company is fine with accepting people’s personal mail, stamped as normal and dropping it in the Out Box for collection by the Post Office directly. Which saves me 10 or so minutes each time I want to post something because I don’t need to go out of my way to the postbox.
3. Buy Your Lunch
   Sure, it costs more to buy lunch if you look at the just the costs of material. But for me, it’s easier to buy a sandwich from the guy who delivers to the office, then it is to make my own. To make a basic sandwich is fairly quick, but the end result isn’t very interesting, and as soon as you start to make it interesting, the cost raises pretty close to what I’m paying anyway, only I have to spend the time putting it together. In other words, as with any money saving exercise don’t forget how much your time is worth.

You’ve probably heard the quote by Albert Einstein that “The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.” and you can’t ignore the figures over the long term when it comes to saving your money. But compound increases apply to anything. Including productivity.

I never really though about this before, but I was listening to a Brian Tracy audio book this morning, and it’s mentioned there, and when it was it stuck me as such a simple approach to improvement: If you improve your productivity by just 2% each week, in three months your total productivity will have increased by nearly 27%. And in about eight months, you will have doubled your total productivity. By year end, you’ll be operating at 280% of your current productivity. That’s with just a 2% increase per week.

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I’ve dug about half way into the first of the “Seven Habits” now, I’m not sure how I’m feeling about it right now, for a start I keep getting told there are no “Quick Fix” solutions. Damn.

Oh well, the first habit is “Be Proactive“. I was a little mistaken in what I though this meant at first, I sort of looked at it in lines of the Next Actions and the art of actually getting down to doing the things that need to be done. But it goes a lot deeper then that, suggesting that you should not just do all you need to do, but all you can do. Continue Reading »

Yesterday I had the pleasure of looking around the end of year showcases of Huddersfield Universities Degree students, where they put on display ready for marking all their final year work. Obviously, the work is of varying quality, but even the ones that didn’t grab my eye were better then I could have done, so I can’t fault them on ability, and some of them were stunning.

However, every single student had put out a pile of business cards for you to take, a practice I wasn’t aware of, but it seems to be the done thing. Not one of them however struck me as been fully professional.

The single biggest problem jumped out at me time and time again, to the point it got me really angry: The all used free email accounts as they primary email address. At best, it was the just about acceptable firstname.lastname@isp.com - but far too many of them were nickname123@hotmail.com and the like. Even the students who had gone to the effort of getting their own domain name and website didn’t have their email address at that domain - which in my eyes was criminal.

I’m sure most of the students didn’t care, to them their degree was just something to do for 3 years and keep them busy before going to work in a call centre. But for the better ones, the ones who were going to be looking for jobs as professional designers, then just a little bit more attention to how they market themselves would go a long way.

My only lasting impression of the displays was the collection of cards I have, and should I have need of a designer, I would give the websites listed a look over - but as a graduating student, they should be acting like professionals in every way, if their card looks good to me, I’ll look at their site, if their site is professional, then I might use them. When you get down to heart of the matter, if someone presents themselves as a professional, they are a professional, and if you act like a student and don’t go that extra mile, you wont stand out from the crowd.