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1. Use Tools
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These are the essential tools you need this year to take you from good to great!
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Introducing a seismic shift in personal planning and organizing |
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Productivity Chrome plugin for your browser |
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2. Time Blocking
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Instead of working by the clock, focus on finishing big and small tasks one at a time. This will help you limit distractions, get things done faster, and leave you less overwhelmed. |
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Why highly productive people use Time Blocking |
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3. Prioritize
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Prioritizing allows you to identify the most important tasks at any moment and give those tasks more of your attention, energy, and time. It allows you to spend more time on the right things. |
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What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important |
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Are you time-rich or time-poor? It depends on if you feel in control of your time |
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How to discover your priorities |
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4. Weekly Planning
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Think of your weekly calendar as an Attack Plan for Life: it’s where you hash out the tactics and logistics to make your long-term vision a reality. |
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This weekend could be the turning point of your life |
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How to rock your week by weekly planning! |
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Weekly planning: how to predict the future |
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5. Task List
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Organizing your tasks with a list can make everything much more manageable and make you feel grounded. Seeing a clear outline of your completed and uncompleted tasks will help you feel organized and stay mentally focused. |
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Making the most of your PlanPlus Task List |
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Don’t stop with just a task list! |
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Why two task lists are better than one |
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6. Develop Good Habits
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Habits run our daily life. Pretty much everything you do is based on a habit you’ve developed at some point in your life. Some habits are helpful, while others can also work against you. Even worse – there are a few “bad habits” that can have a negative, long-term impact on your capacity to live a productive, fulfilling life. |
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What’s a habit and why should I care? |
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Time-wasting habits and how to break them |
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7. Effective Meetings
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Effective meetings leave you energized and feeling that you’ve really accomplished something. They achieve an objective, they take up a minimum amount of time, and they leave participants feeling that a sensible process has been followed. |
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Daily Huddle: the one indispensable meeting you should never go without |
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Oh grate! Another boring meeting? You knead to know the two pizza rule! |
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How to hold effective meetings |
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8. Single-task
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Frequently switching between tasks overloads the brain and makes you less efficient. It’s a formula for failure in which your thoughts remain on the surface level and errors occur more frequently. |
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To be more productive, don’t fall into the trap of multitasking |
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9. Delegate
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Effective managers know what responsibilities to delegate to allow themselves time to plan, to collaborate with others in the organization, and to monitor the performance of their employees, making sure to give them adequate feedback and development opportunities. |
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How to Delegate: The secret to working less and doing more |
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10. Just Start
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Getting started is about understanding and overcoming the obstacles—be they mental, emotional, or physical—that hold us back from diving right in. |
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One action step can make all the difference |
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For a successful day tomorrow, start tonight! |
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Nothing happens until you decide |
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11. Use Deadlines
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If you want to achieve your goals, writing them down is only the first step. The next step is to set deadlines and meet them. The reason deadlines are so effective is because they make large projects or goals more manageable. Breaking up projects into a series of smaller tasks makes them easier to complete and prevents you from waiting until the last minute to finish your work. |
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If it wasn’t for deadlines, nothing would get done |
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12. Use the Planning Process
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Planning helps reduce stress. You’ll virtually always get a better final result when you’ve planned. Taking the time to plan intentionally gives your brain more time to think and make well-informed decisions. |
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The Planner’s Manifesto |
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Why plan at all? |
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