Making Progress and Avoiding Downtime to Improve Your Performance

How strategic are you with downtime? 

As an aspiring investor, the use of your time should be consistently strategic. 

There are many uses of your time throughout the day, but how are you choosing to use it.

Dedication, focus, goals and forward planning play an important role in using your time wisely. 

However, if you haven’t created extensive goals, you may encounter a lot of downtime.

• Avoiding wasted time, is not only effective for you, but it is effective for your team.

Seeing the goal and applying task-level action plans to support achieving the goal, is important to business. 

Let’s get started.

Goal Setting

With any individual, you have aspirations. Those aspirations usually include an ideal performance that you set for yourself.

When setting your goals, it is important to create actionable steps that allow you to gage when you are progressing. 

Applying short-term goals within your long-term goals is a great way to monitor this progress.

When you set your goals, also try to set your goals in doubles. 

Example – 

If you set a goal to become a field technician for an electric company, you should also set a goal for after you become a field technician.

• Do I want a higher level role within the same company?
• Do I want to get the experience and then transition to a more ideal employer?
• Do I want to learn a skill by performing the field technician role in order to start a business of my own?

The reasoning behind setting the secondary goal, is very helpful because it helps you to perform better knowing what your end goal is. 

• Working aimlessly will not help you remain productive in obtaining progress faster.

The forward planning described, creates purpose and helps you communicate more effectively. It helps you develop the relationships you’ll need and helps you perform with purpose.

Effective Planning

Once goals are set, you now have purpose and a grander goal for what you apply your actions toward. 

Now, you must understand and apply all of the small tasks that will help you become a top performer of your craft.

• Brainstorming on any and all applications of preparing, is an vital step in insuring you stay productive. This helps ensure, you don’t waste time doing nothing when you could be working on other things.

Know what to apply your time towards and why. Then evaluate your performance.

A key to becoming great at something you are passionate about, includes discipline, research, action planning and the application of all these collectively.

• Know what is consuming your time and if it is providing a return to you. 

Over time, you will determine if your tasks are helping you progress toward your goal, or if you need to alter a current practice, to increase the return in your results.

Performance

To determine if you are improving, you must compare your prior performance to your current performance.

Metrics and data can help a lot. But, you must know how you’re performing. 

Self-discipline is highly important when you are working on yourself. 

• However, the application of discipline is only helpful when you have created a task list. 
• The task list should consist of small goals that support the best use of your time.
• The small goals should also lead to your larger goal.

– Year over year, are you improving?

– What have you learned from your experiences and how are you using that information?

When you look back at what you’ve learned, you should apply any practices that have allowed better performances and remove any practices that have not allowed better performances.

Looking back at what has worked versus what has not worked is a actionable proponent to being accountable and improving your results.

• Review your results and acknowledge ‘the why’ behind your wins. 

Share your wins and look for opportunities to increase your future performance. 

Conclusion

You are now applying great attributes at becoming the best you can be.

Development of self, is a complex path. However, with the right tools and applications of knowledge, one can grow themselves and become better at helping others also develop.

As a leader, you are expected to bring the best out of people and help them to develop themselves for a larger goal. But, you must start with yourself.

Setting goals, planning effectively and evaluating your performance, are the variables to acknowledge to help you avoid unproductive time. 

During your growth, no matter what you are aspiring to, wasted time is never appreciated.

• We all want to arrive at our goals as quickly as we can. As you celebrate your wins, its important to know why you won.
• If you aren’t winning, its equally as important to understand why you aren’t winning. 

Applying self-discipline, and evaluating the use of your time, is a start to a better future.

Thanks for joining us today faithful readers – future leaders!

Love ya and continue to strive for growth.

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Please comment how you keep yourself productive.