Improving Personal Productivity

With life getting busier and busier each day, it’s more important than ever that we have ways to manage our time and information. We have to become more efficient and increase our personal productivity. This is not always easy. New habits have to be developed. Sometimes this requires the use of a helpful tool, something to help us keep up with news, friends, family, and all the things we have to do.

Using ndxCards™ is a great way to deal with all this. In addition to helping you store and retain information, it can help you to improve your personal productivity. There are many aspects to becoming more efficient, but an extremely important one is time management. ndxCards™ offers an effective method for improving in this area.

You can also get ndxCards on a portable 1 GB USB so that you can use the software at any Windows computer. You can have all your notes with you wherever you go and add to them whenever you need.

Time management:

Time management is about deciding how you use your time, whether these decisions be active or passive. Here are some basic steps in getting better control of how you spend your time.

Set goals

Goals give you direction and focus. Include goals in personal, social and professional aspects of your life. Make goals for office behaviors or to lose weight or anything else that's important to you.

Understand how you spend your time

Record your daily activities to get a sense of how you use your time. Include time spent on classes, study, travel, meals, laundry, sleep, work, errands, etc. Once you have data for one week, ask questions: Is this how I want to spend my time? Which activities would I like to spend more time on? Spend less time on? It is important to "trim the fat" from your routine in order to maximize your time.

Plan your schedule

Once you understand how you spend your time, you can plan better. Organize your time to keep yourself on track using a method that fits your style (calendar, weekly planner, to-do lists). And once you start this, keep to it. Persistence and consistency are extremely important for developing new habits.

Using a Calendar: A desk or pocket calendar is a convenient way of making and keeping track of time commitments.

• Mark the dates of all of everything that is time sensitive, such as project due dates, assignments, etc.
• Write down must do activities (meetings, appointments, events, classes) and their times.
• Include time for study and preparation (reviewing, reading, research, discussions, etc).
• Add personal / social activities that you plan for the week.
• Leave some free time for leisure and relaxation.

Using a To-do list: Making a to-do list everyday is a great way of ensuring that you do what needs to be done. Crossing items off your list as you complete them will motivate you to complete the list. When you make this list:

• Write down all the things that you want to get done.
• Write them down as items to accomplish, not as items to spend time on. (e.g. 'read chapter 5 and take notes', rather than 'read the book'). Estimate time to complete the item & write it down.
• Cross off each item as it is completed, and write down actual time taken.
• Prepare the list at the same time each day, and review previous day's list as a guide for improvement.
• Prioritize the items on your list.
• Be realistic. If you overestimate how many tasks you can complete and do not complete them all, it's easy to get discouraged.

Some general advice:

• Start immediately. Make a list of things you should do now and schedule time to work on it.
• Work to finish early. Break larger assignments / projects into smaller chunks of work, and cross them off the list as you complete them. This helps you start projects because they do not have to be large, daunting tasks.
• Determine your most productive time of day. Note down results at different times and build study habits around the most productive times.
• Allot chunks of time for each task based on how long you usually take to complete it.
• Deal with difficult tasks first, while you are fresh. You can process information better and are more efficient this way.