Break the Rules

I’m not saying run through the red lights or book fictitious revenues – there are reasons for those kind of rules. But there are others that you can and probably NEED to break in order to attain productivity.

Like, are you still manually inputting numbers into your spreadsheets? Why? Here is where you can do it differently from all of those other accounting and financial professionals who are still inputting numbers by hand. If you haven’t been trying to figure out how to automate your work, you will have to start small and practice every chance you get. Set aside time to figure out how to make Excel do the work for you.

Learn macro programming. That is one powerful tool that will really speed up your work and give you time to do the big thinking.

Are you still trying to answer every single email as they come in? Why? Unless your job is a public facing job, you should re-think your way of answering emails. There are a lot of time and management books that suggest setting aside 2 or 3 times a day to answer your emails so that you are not continually interrupted by emails. Create larger blocks of thinking time by eliminating this email habit.

Are you trying to multitask? Haven’t you heard that multitasking actually lowers your productivity? Only 3% of the population can multitask and you are most likely not one of them.

If everybody is working similarly the same way and they are all failing to get the job done, why should you do the same? I used to work for a company where all of the financial types approached work the same way and they all were failing (we were trying to manage 100+ projects). I knew I couldn’t multitask, answer emails every second and do all of the various tasks like they did and still get things done. I was not superwoman so I had to come up with a different method. I definitely broke the rules, but only because I wanted to be able to get things done.

I ended up with the best team.

As Albert Einstein puts it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”