Extreme Productivity summary

Planning ahead, whether it’s for next year, next month or even next week, can be a daunting task when you’re drowning in work. But looking down the line will pay off big time in the long run.

To get yourself thinking more long-term, begin organizing your work. Split up tasks into aims, objectives and targets so that you can begin to prioritize. A good strategy is to divide tasks according to how long they take to accomplish.

For instance, career aims take five years or more. These are things like expanding your business network or landing an executive-level promotion.

Objectives take between three and 24 months. For example, if you work for a shoe company, an objective might be to re-brand a sneaker line.

And finally, targets are anything that will take three months or less, such as writing progress reports or finishing part of a major project. Objectives and targets are both essential. After all, if you don’t focus on these baseline endeavors, you’ll never reach your larger career aims.

But it’s also important to prioritize aims, objectives and targets that both you and your employer are on board with. You should first focus on the things that both you and your boss want to achieve; once that’s done, you can address the tasks that concern only you.

For example, say you want to meet more people in your industry and also want to re-brand your firm’s sneaker line to boost profits. Since your employer also wants the second thing to happen, you would do best to focus on the re-branding first.

Then, once you’ve parsed out your tasks, it’s time to set some top priorities, that is, the projects on which you’ll spend the majority of your time. To ensure you’re doing this effectively, you should track your work days, monitoring how you allocate your time.

You might discover that you spend lots of time on activities that don’t have much to do with your objectives or targets. Maybe you’re going to too many internal meetings and failing to prioritize the important ones.

How you allocate your time is crucial to your productivity, which leads us to another issue: procrastination.