Secrets of Productive People

50 Techniques To Get Things Done

Mark Forster

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781473608856
• eBook ISBN: 9781473608863
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Discover the 50 secrets that productive people know - complete with strategies for putting them into practice. What do productive people know that the rest of us don't? Do they have a secret recipe for success? Is there a special alchemy to being productive? The Secrets of Productive People reveals the 50 things you need to know to get things done. Each chapter outlines one of the 50 ideas and gives three strategies for putting it into practice. Some ideas will surprise you, all will inspire you. Put these simple strategies together and you have a recipe for a better life, a formula that will unlock a more productive you. Whether you want to improve your efficiency, clear your desk, or be on top of your work, this book provides the tools and techniques you need to be more productive. With dedicated sections on having a productive attitude, managing specific projects, aids to productivity and productivity in action, it gives you everything you need to know.

THE PRODUCTIVE ATTITUDE

There are certain mental attitudes that the most productive people tend to have. In this part of the book you learn what they are and how to get them.

FAILURE IS YOUR FRIEND

I cannot prevent the wind from blowing, but I can adjust my sails to make it work for me.

Code of the Order of Isshin-Ryu

If a man is to lose his fortune, it is a good thing if he were poor before he acquired it, for poverty requires aptitude.

Geraldine Brooks

I’ve come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy.

Tony Robbins

You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don’t try to forget the mistakes, but you don’t dwell on it. You don’t let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.

Johnny Cash

There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.

Colin Powell

The title of this chapter is ‘Failure is your friend’. This is a double-edged title because, as in any other form of friendship, failure can be a good friend or it can be a bad friend.

A good friend is someone we learn from and who helps us grow. It refers to someone who encourages us to do our best and keeps us going. A bad friend is the type our parents warned us against – someone who leads us astray and gets us into bad habits. Someone who prevents us from even trying to do well.

Which type of friend is failure for you?

Whether failure is a good friend or a bad friend depends entirely on your own attitude towards failure.

First of all let’s look at how failure can be a bad friend to you. There are two equal and opposite ways this can happen.

The first is to be so afraid of failing that you avoid putting yourself in any position where you think you might fail. You never take risks and never venture into the unknown. Yet in spite of all your attempts to avoid failing, it could be said that this restricted way of living is a failure in itself. Your life is circumscribed by your fear of failure and you spend your entire time sticking to well-worn safe paths.

The second way failure can be a bad friend to you is the opposite of the previous one. It happens when you disregard the possibility of failure. This is sometimes the result of misapplied ‘positive thinking’. This manifests itself in a completely unrealistic optimism which may prevent you from taking the most elementary steps to prevent failure. This lack of realism can also happen after a string of successes when the person starts to think that they are infallible. Often it results in a hard awakening.

That is failure as a bad friend. How about failure as a good friend? Just as there are two ways in which failure can be a bad friend, so there are two ways in which it can be a good friend.

The possibility that you might fail should encourage you to take a realistic attitude to what you are intending to do. This entails doing proper research and preparation. You need to ensure that you guard against failure not by avoiding doing anything new but by taking sensible precautions and making sure that you are properly equipped, both mentally and physically.

The fact of failure, when you have actually experienced some degree of failure, should encourage you to examine your mistakes and learn from them. This is the most important way in which failure can become a positive influence in the life of a productive person. The first unavoidable step is to admit that you have failed. It may not be a failure of the entire project, but simply some part of it which wasn’t as good as it should have been. What could I/we have done better? is an essential question for productive people to ask after any sort of endeavour.

1 DON’T BE AFRAID OF FAILURE

The biggest failure in life is to avoid ever going out of one’s comfort zone because of a fear of failure. Failure is a necessary part of success. How did you learn to ride a bicycle? By repeatedly failing at it until you succeeded. How does a child learn its mother tongue? By repeatedly failing to speak ‘properly’. Avoiding the possibility of failure is a way of cutting yourself off from a huge variety of learning experiences.

In adults fear of failure is closely linked with perfectionism. Both relate more to the way we want to be perceived by others and by ourselves than about the actual consequences of failing. We feel the need to be seen as perfect. To fail at something is to lose face. However understandable this attitude is, we need to get rid of it.

Many instructional courses have a special prize for ‘most improved student’, which is in addition to the usual awards for the best student and the like. The winner is someone who made a difficult start on the course but by sheer determination and hard work pulled themselves up to a good standard. It’s often the people who win this prize who are the most highly thought of by the instructors and judges. They are the ones who have shown qualities of courage and persistence against obstacles – the very qualities which point to success in the future.

A good aim in life is to forget about being the best, but instead aim to be the ‘most improved’. This is basically what productive people do. They are not put off by early difficulties but know that hard work and practice will produce the results that they want. What’s more you may well surprise yourself by finding out how often in real life the ‘most improved’ also turns out in the end to be the best.

2 FACE UP TO THE POSSIBILITY OF FAILURE

Once you have made sure that your attitude to failure is a healthy one, then you can approach the possibility of failure in a constructive way.

What is not constructive is to take the opposite attitude to being afraid of failure by persuading yourself that you can’t possibly fail. That only serves to encourage reckless behaviour and a lack of sensible precautions. Unfortunately no one is immune from this sort of thinking. In almost everyone’s life there are areas in which they are quite unfoundedly optimistic about the consequences of their actions, their capabilities or perhaps just their own ‘luck’. This is not helped by the culture of ‘self-esteem’, which encourages children to feel good about talents which they don’t actually possess and which they never will possess unless they take the time and effort to acquire them.

The idea that one can’t fail can strike at any time. Sometimes it affects people who don’t have much experience and have little idea of what they are letting themselves in for. On the other hand it can also affect people who have had a string of successes and are beginning to think of themselves as infallible. We can see this sort of behaviour in the ‘celebrity’ world all the time, but it affects everyone in some way.

The productive way to face up to the possibility of failure is to take all necessary precautions against it. That means researching the situation and weighing up the possible options in a realistic manner. It means acquiring the equipment, training and skills which are needed for success. Success can’t ever be one hundred per cent guaranteed, but the chances of it can be greatly increased by good preparation.

The key word in the preceding paragraph is ‘realistic’. Productive people don’t indulge in negative thinking or positive thinking. They use realistic thinking. Above all, productive people are realistic because it’s only a realistic view of a situation that provides a reliable base for productive action.

3 LEARN FROM THE FACT OF FAILURE

When we do experience failure, we need to approach what has gone wrong in a realistic way too. If we don’t examine the reasons why we have failed or are failing then we may find ourselves condemned to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Even worse is refusing to admit that we have failed in the first place and burying the evidence. This means that not only are we failing to examine what has gone wrong but that we are actually treating something that is wrong as if it were right. This is a very dangerous thing to do.

Einstein’s famous definition of insanity is ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. It’s a very well known saying, but judging by the way that most people behave it is also a very ignored saying. One of the most common ways that this manifests itself is to insist that when something goes wrong the way to put it right is to do more of what is causing the problem. The place to see this writ large is in many government programmes where ideology has taken over from evidence. But to be fair the government is only acting in the same way that individuals do. We all have a tendency to get stuck in a rut, and protect our rut, regardless of whether the rut is actually a sensible way to proceed or not.

As discussed in Chapter 6, there is nothing wrong at all with falling into routines – good routines are one of the basics of the productive life. It’s the content of the routines that needs examining.

If we admit that we’ve failed and look closely at the reasons, then we can stop doing the same thing over and over again with the same results. Then the next time we can do it differently.

Frequently it’s not the whole project that has proved a failure but only some parts of it. The danger is that we use the fact that we have succeeded overall to ignore the parts which weren’t as good as they should have been. It’s important that, whatever the overall result, we look in detail at what has happened. It may not be a question of failing so much as not doing as well as we had hoped. But the remedy is still the same. We need to look at the reasons we didn’t do well and put them right. This is an extension of what I covered in Chapter 6 about ensuring that our systems work properly to produce the desired results.

As an e...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• The basics of productivity
• The productive attitude
• Productive projects
• Aids to productivity
• Productivity in action
• Copyright