The most important component of your productivity

While working on improving your productivity there is one essential component. A component that, at the end of the day, decides whether your planning, optimizing, priority selection, and prospect building will be a success or not.

This component is courage. At crucial times, courage decides whether you act productively or let others plan your time, business and life.

In what situations does courage affect your productivity? Here are some examples:

Refusing to participate in a meeting

Participating in too many meetings can disable efficiency. Refusal to participate in a meeting, asking for the agenda and requesting the meeting’s planned result are all actions that require courage.

Limiting reading e-mail to two times a day

Reducing frequency of reading e-mail requires facing our fear that in the meantime we will miss an incredibly important, critical message.

Giving feedback to your manager

If your boss systematically gives you tasks at the last minute while at the same time ruining your work plan, the only solution is to undergo a serious talk about your collaboration and find more efficient ways to delegate responsibilities. Are you brave enough to present your point of view?

Standing up for your priorities

You often know which action, at a given moment, is the most important and will bring the best results. Unfortunately, it is often an action that is not important to your co-workers who want you to be working on their projects. This is another situation where, without courage, you cannot fight for yourself.

Leaving work on time

If staying at your desk after-hours is an unwritten rule at your company and leaving on time is seen as a lack of commitment, what will motivate you to leave the office on time?

Challenging the status quo

Sticking to ancient, hackneyed ways of doing things decreases productivity. Will you challenge the company’s routine procedures to become a more efficient professional?

Sticking to plans despite colleague objections

Sometimes sticking to your agenda is extremely difficult. Especially, when the final result is remote, and colleagues expect that instead of doing petty things you planned, you will get more involved in the meetings they arrange.

Proposing improvements

In organizations where the unofficial commandment is “don’t stick your neck out ”, optimizing your own productivity is extremely difficult. Will you risk your career to implement an innovation?

Making difficult decisions

Sometimes small steps are not enough to improve the situation. If, despite having tried everything, you still don’t feel you are following your own prospects, then high-caliber decisions must be made. Consider changing your position, boss, team, profession… Changing your lifestyle. What’s the one thing needed to make that final decision?

So if you really want to be productive, ask yourself a fundamental question: “Will I demonstrate courage and push forward my business and life?”

Photo: Flickr / Zanthia CC BY-NC-SA 2.0