5 Simple Steps to Avoid the Huge Danger to Your Productivity

There a many things that can negatively impact your efficiency and effectiveness but one thing is worse than all the others combined!

It never stops. No matter how hard you try…it just never stops!

There’s a word, inexorable, that best describes it. IT is time and it is inexorable because there is no way to stop it or prevent it from happening!

So what, you ask?

How about this…

If you can’t stop time or prevent it from happening, there is only one thing to create a sense of control over it. The thing with time is to use each minute in the best possible way you can. In other words, you CAN control the quality of its use!

It takes focusing on two aspects of how you can control your productivity during each minute of your time.

Your degree of productivity is directly related to your efficiency: 

do right things; in the right way; and at the right time.

Your productivity is also directly related to the other aspect of how you can control it…effectiveness.

Your effectiveness is nothing more than achieving the right result in everything you do during every minute you have.

So…pay attention! At all times be efficient and effective and you avoid the greatest danger to your productivity.

As I said, being efficient requires you do the right things. How do you know what those things are?

You can’t, if you don’t have a plan with clearly defined goals. I ask you…if you don’t know what you need to do how can you do it right?

Furthermore, as to your effectiveness, you can’t possibly achieve the right result if you don’t know what that result is supposed to look like. Good goal statements always clearly tell you what you want to achieve and by when.

There is no way you are going to get the right result regarding some goal, if you don’t work at achieving it in the right way.

The plan you build to achieve your desired goal should be specific enough, so you know exactly how you are going to get there. This aspect of being efficient is directly tied to the third aspect of it: at the right time.

You can’t achieve something at the right time if you haven’t planned the detailed steps to get you from point A to point B (Your Goal).

Consider this—if you need to arrive at some geographical location for some social event that requires you arrive on time, you don’t guess how you’re going to get there, do you?

You want to assure the right result which is to get to the event at exactly the right time. To do that you look at a map and determine the exact turn-by-turn steps you will take to get there.

Again, that’s called being efficient and effective and to summarize there are 5 steps embodied in how.

Define your goals

Build a plan to achieve them

Be specific enough to clearly define the steps to your goals

Define when you want to achieve each goal

Take timely action

All the above information is wonderful except it excludes a discussion about the huge danger that can destroy your efficiency and effectiveness.

The danger is clearly identified in the lyrics of a song written by Peggy Lee. The key lyrical phrase for illustrating the huge danger to your productivity is: 

“mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me.”

In general, the term, mañana, means in the indefinite future.

Procrastination would be an English synonym for mañana. Procrastination is more about what you fail to do.

You can’t be your most productive (efficient and effective) if your mindset is: “mañana, mañana, mañana is soon enough for me.”

Use the 5 steps noted above to eliminate that danger!


When was the last time you had a mindset of mañana and what did you do to overcome it?



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