Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 16. Top Ten Personal Productivity Strategies

Achieving work/life balance through increased personal productivity isn't simply a matter of developing new work habits. You also need to develop new approaches to your work and innovative tactics for dealing with the inevitable changes and uncertainties you're bound to meet along the way.

In this chapter, I cover my top ten tactics for developing and maintaining peak personal productivity. They necessarily begin with a frank assessment of where you're currently at and where you ultimately hope to be. They conclude with suggestions on the attitudes you'll want to develop and maintain in order to realize these aspirations.

Know Yourself When It Comes to Productivity

You can't expect to make much progress on achieving increased productivity if you don't know where you're at currently. Therefore, I suggest that you

begin this entire "personal productivity" endeavor with an assessment of where you're starting from. As part of this assessment, you need to acknowledge the areas where you could stand some definite improvement as well as those where you're naturally strong (be it the area of organization, prioritizing, planning, or time management). Doing this will indicate the areas you need to concentrate on, while at the same time preventing you from reinventing the wheel, so to speak.

As part of this productivity self-assessment, I also suggest you take a look at where you expect yourself to be after developing some new skills and habits ...