Staying productive is not easy, especially when considering the potential for technology to repeatedly distract us. Even a single notification on one’s smartphone can cause us to stay distracted for 10-30 minutes. By the time we realize that we are distracted, we have already wasted a lot of time. Luckily, most people don’t face these issues due to a lack of skills, so all they need is a productivity plan.
Such a plan can help you timely achieve all your goals, boosting motivation and happiness. According to SoftwareReport.org, happy employees have 20% higher productivity than sad or stressed ones. Below are some thoughts as to why you must have a productivity plan…and how you can do it yourself.
What is a productivity plan?
A productivity plan is a structured schedule that organizes your day around all the important and less important tasks. It also includes all the long terms and short-term goals you are working on. This plan aims to make you more productive for a specific goal you are planning to achieve.
As you create a plan, you will clearly know which tasks need what amount of attention and when to provide it. Thus, wasting time because of confusion about what to do will decrease. A productivity plan is good for individuals, team members, managers, and others who want to make the most of their time.
Top 5 Reasons You Need to Create a Productivity Plan
You must create this plan for yourself for many reasons, especially since there are so many distractions. Below are the top five reasons and their application in real-world activities.
1. Operational Planning
Operational planning is essential to keep track of the tasks assigned and their progress for individuals.
A well-designed plan can help you track different roles within a team and their impact on the productivity of other team members. Following a plan can also help uncover any inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the system.
2. Strategic Planning
Strategic planning focuses on short-term daily goals. Scheduling these tasks helps you build policies to become efficient with the tasks.
For strategic planning, a SWOT analysis is essential. By identifying all the key points of this analysis, you can improve a lot of factors in your team by addressing the weaknesses and weak links.
3. Tactical Planning
Tactical planning is about determining the role of team leaders in increasing the team’s productivity.
This type of planning can assign the best leaders and managers to teams after assessing the tasks and their strengths. The goal here remains to increase the team’s productivity with the influence of a well-performing leader.
4. Training
Creating a plan for different steps when instructing a trainee will help you track progress and become efficient at training them.
Through planning, different aspects of the training material can be prioritized to start from the easier ones and move towards the harder ones. It will result in efficiently increasing their skill level. At the same time, it allows them to learn more.
5. Productivity Goals
You can create such a plan for your personal productivity goals.
As there are no restrictions, you can schedule your long-term or short-term goals and plan smaller tasks to keep yourself productive. Thus, you will have more control over your boosted productivity with independence.
How do you create a productivity plan?
Creating this plan is not a hard job. All you need to do is an organization of your activities. Here’s our step-by-step guide for creating your plan yourself.
Start with identifying your focus areas.
You will start by focusing on your main goal and listing all the tasks you need to complete to achieve that goal.
Along with the main goal, there can be your daily tasks that may or may not be helpful for that goal, but you need to enlist them too. So, you will have a list of all the activities you will schedule.
Identify the obstacles that you may face.
After all the tasks within your focus area, you need to enlist the challenges. You can think of any challenges you may face while working on your goals.
Some examples include workplace distractions, conflicting responsibilities, lack of motivation, urgent tasks, lack of time, and bad time management.
Track your time strategically to stay productive.
Now that you have traced out all your tasks and challenges, it is time to work on time management. You need to determine the most productive times and when you will be working on your main goal.
Efficient time management is one of the most important aspects of the productivity plan. When working on time management, you must focus on productivity and plan accordingly. So, adding pauses between work hours with strategic time management will not be ideal.
Analyze and then prioritize tasks.
Every task will have some value. While some will be highly valuable for your main goal, some might not be that valuable.
So, you need to analyze everything and prioritize those tasks so that you are not wasting time on unimportant things.
Try different strategies for productivity.
Now you have all the information that you need to create your plan. Choose an online productivity planner and implement all this information in it.
You can also use different strategies, including:
- the Pomodoro technique;
- the Ivy Lee method;
- the Eisenhower matrix; and
- the 80/20 rule.
See which productivity plan works after experimentation.
The last thing you need to do is implement your plan and see if it works.
Working according to your plan for a few days or weeks will give you an idea of whether it is working. If it does not work, you can try another strategy from the previous step.
Conclusion
Creating a productivity plan can help increase productivity in many direct and indirect ways (completing tasks) (happiness, and motivation).
According to GoRemotely, an average employee is productive only for 2 hours 53 minutes on a good day. So, by creating this plan, you can also work on your productivity, which will help you achieve all your goals by not wasting time.
