One the most important lesson that I learnt about productivity is: It’s less about managing TIME and more about managing ENERGY. I voluntarily took a month and a half of vacation from blogging and wanted to really understand what is productivity and how should I improve my productivity levels, increase energy levels, motivation and all other leadership jargons possible. In the end of it, my initial assumption that my time management skill was costing my productivity turned out to be completely wrong. Why? It’s because time is still relative or flexible but energy is always dissipating and is not flexible. Most of us always get this concept backwards. We try to cram our daily routine with tasks thinking that if we manage time we can get all the things done. Instead we end up totally dried at the end of day and still 80% of the task list is in pending state. This explains that more and more hours we use up, the lesser and lesser we are effective. According to a study done by NASSCOM, the average hours of an Indian software resource is close to 70 hours a week and sometime more. Another study done by Gallup in the US reveals the same data. Alexandra Michel is a former banker who teaches at University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. She conducted a twelve-year study of investment bankers who regularly worked between—get this—100 and 120 hours a week. You may know that there are only 168 hours in a week which leaves these people sleep deprived. The banks provided these people with round-the-clock services and help, along with meals, laundry services, domestic servants, body messages and everything which we think are great. Initially the bank found that the bankers were doing great – highly productive. This was for the first few years but the trend did not last long. Slowly the people started experiencing physical and psychological breakdown. The typical list of problems included chronic exhaustion, insomnia, back and body pain, autoimmune diseases, heart arrhythmias, addictions, and compulsions, such as eating disorders. [This is an edited list, it’s really huge] Not only that, this problem slowly started percolating to the other employees also. This process yielded to total financial ruin. So this will not only affect bankers – but everyone. What is then needed to solve this problem?
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AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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