Time Management Tips - Touch It Once - Increase Productivity



Posted: Saturday, March 14, 2009

by Ron Finkelstein
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How often has the following time management fiasco happened to you? You consider working on generating web traffic or finally pounding out an article. You begin the task, but jump ship at the first distraction! Dropping the first task, you dig into the distraction with enthusiasm; attempting to prove you are following the right track.

The distraction is probably more fun and less important than your original priority. You'll finish the distracting task, but your time management has suffered a major blow. Your efficiency and productivity could not be worse. You can achieve so much more. The longer you avoid your priorities the more difficult they will be to accomplish when you finally pick them up. This causes many of us to start looking for other distractions right away.

Does this describe your work habits? If it does and you work in a traditional office environment you probably have a boss showing you the error of your ways. If this is how you handle tasks in your home-office-style business you are likely to lose dollars quickly. NOBODY will take you to the right path. Your family & friends are the biggest source of distractions! They are prime distractions, whispering comforting words: "Spend time with us, work can wait," or "We're important too." These distractions can pull you away from legitimate priorities that will build your success. YOU need to make the change towards efficiency yourself.

Time management rules are common-sense and work everywhere. For the home-office business person to the manager responsible to an owner for results. Both have distraction sources: family and friends for the home business person, co-workers / employees for the manager.

Two rules to start you on the path to productivity: * Touch It Once * Important Tasks First

You have read blogs, web sites, time management books by organizational gurus. Did you implement the system? How long did you keep the system in place? If distracting tasks describe your work habits, the answer must be "No." You have read about the delegation of tasks, organizing your To-Do List, and setting priorities but…

Just a bit more reading plus some practice will result in the development of tools and habits that will better leverage your time. For this intro to my time management article series I chose two commonsense starting points you can implement today.

Simple, isn't it? Once a task has been touched, follow through. Place distractions onto the To-Do List and keep the priority in front of you until it is finished. When the first distraction arrives you have already invested at least five minutes into your priority. If you allow the distraction to have your attention you will need the five minutes AGAIN to reach the point you are already at. That should be enough logic for Touch it Once.

Part 2 of Touch it Once: Do not begin any task that will take longer than the time you have to devote to it. This is especially true for important non-urgent tasks. Take the time to do them right. If they arrive at the end of the day, slot them for the top of your To-Do List the next morning because important items have priority!

Email aside: Use email subjects that are to the point! Ensure that your partners and employees follow your lead. Everybody involved will have a better understanding of what to expect in the message. I see a lot of correspondence carrying the same subject forward even though the topic under discussion has changed greatly. Write two or three emails if necessary so that your associates can sort them out for appropriate action.

Ron Finkelstein is a small business owner who has spent a fortune and lifetime improving his Time Management Strategies. If you liked this time management tip, you might also like to learn about the Eisenhower method of time management or the Pareto principle.
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» left by jothi from india 3 years 59 days ago.
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ex c= a+b
 
Successful learning is often contingent on feedback. In instrumental conditioning, an animal or human learns to perform specific responses to obtain reward. Instrumental conditioning is often used by behavioral psychologists to train an animal (or human) to produce a desired behavior. Shaping involves reinforcing those behaviors, which in a stepwise manner are successively closer to the desired behavior until the desired behavior is reached. Here, we aimed to extend this traditional approach to directly shape neural activity instead of overt behavior. To achieve this, we scanned 22 human subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging and performed image processing in parallel with acquisition. We delineated regions of interest (ROIs) in finger and toe motor/somatosensory regions and used an instrumental shaping procedure to induce a regionally specific increase in activity by providing an explicit monetary reward to reinforce neural activity in the target areas. After training, we found a significant and regionally specific increase in activity in the ROI being rewarded (finger or toe) and a decrease in activity in the nonrewarded region. This demonstrates that instrumental conditioning procedures can be used to directly shape neural activity, even without the production of an overt behavioral response. This procedure offers an important alternative to traditional biofeedback-based approaches and may be useful in the development of future therapies for stroke and other brain disorders.
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