Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours Robert C. Pozen
20121002
About This Book
In Extreme Productivity, Pozen reveals the secrets to workplace productivity and high performance. His book is for anyone feeling overwhelmed by an existing workload–facing myriad competing demands and multiple time-sensitive projects. Offering antidotes to a calendar full of boring meetings and a backlog of e-mails, Extreme Productivity explains how to determine your highest priorities and match them with how you actually spend your time.
Pozen shows that in order to be truly productive, professionals must make a critical shift in their mindset: from hours worked to results produced. He helps people at all stages of their careers read, writes, and make presentations quicker and more effectively. He provides professionals with practical tips on how to efficiently use their time in the office–while leading full and productive personal lives as well.
To make productive choices in the working world, you need to learn how to embrace change at each step and take advantage of the opportunities change presents. At the same time, certain aspects of the working world have remained the same over the years. These include the fundamentals of profit and loss and the ethical values of honesty and integrity. To succeed in the working world, you need to recognize these constants and act consistently with them.
You can increase your probability of success by approaching your career with the right mind-set. Career planning isn’t a onetime event; it’s a continual process that has to be actively managed over a lifetime. At each step, you need to ask yourself: What can I do next that will maximize my options in the future?
Formulate a rough plan for the entire piece before you put pencil to paper. Here is Pozen’s approach to creating an outline:
Brainstorm: Take a blank piece of paper and jot down all thoughts on the relevant subject. The goal is to get down as many ideas as possible, not to put them into any particular order.
Categorize: Put the ideas into various categories and subcategories. This process helps to organize the ideas into groupings, which will become the building blocks of an outline.
Outline: Arrange and rearrange the groupings in various combinations. In the end, try to find a logical order for the groupings, which can serve as a writing outline.
To implement the general principle of active reading, you should follow a three-step process:
Grasp the structure of the reading.
Read the introduction and conclusion.
Skim the tops of the paragraphs.
Actively Remembering
As you read an article or memo, constantly ask yourself what you want to remember from it. Think about your purpose for reading before and during your review of the material. Think about what you want to remember during and after you review the material.
Distill what you want to remember into a few key points relevant to your purpose for reading this particular piece.
Though attention to detail is usually considered a positive attribute, your time commitment should vary according to the importance of a project and the needs of your audience. It may take you one day to do B+ work, but it may take the rest of the work to bump it up to an A. For your highest-ranked Objectives and Targets, it is usually worth spending that extra time and effort. But for most of your low-priority tasks, B+ is quite often “good enough.”
