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Double the productivity in half the time
By Jeff Zbar | January 10, 2008
Around the holidays, I made some purchases that would come back to nag me. First, I bought a TomTom One PGS device. Very cool. A highly recommended concept. Except my device kept needing to be reset (you know, where you straighten a paperclip and shove it in that tiny hole in the bottom). I also bought for my drum set a bracket — sight unseen – that I hoped would replace a bracket that had broken a month or three earlier. Guess what? It didn’t fit (Mr. Murphy apparently was billing overtime this season). So I had two returns to make. But the stores were miles apart — in different directions from my home. What did I do? I sat and pondered for a moment…
Productivity isn’t just about doing more with less. It’s about maximizing your available time, opportunities, supplies, whatever, to capitalize on what might otherwise not be obvious opportunities to come to the same end with less effort. Those two returns, for example. The GPS was from an electronics retailer with locations in almost every strip mall. The music store, though, has much fewer locations — but the one I bought the bracket at has the electronics retailer four doors down.
Viola! Before I left for a meeting (coincidentally in the same direction away from my home as the retailers), I put the GPS and the bracket — and both receipts, beside my keys near the front door, and budgeted an extra 20 minutes for the returns. On my way out, I grabbed the lot, made my returns - and arrived at my meeting 10 minutes early.
If, as Aristotle said, excellence is not an act but a habit, then apparently so, too, is the effort to maximize productivity. All it took was thinking about my situation for a moment, and planning my path. In the end, it sure felt good to have those errands out of my way, so I could get on with more important things. Like playing my drums…
Topics: Time Management |