Personal Management – A Key to Success

It is not only important to understand the significance of personal management or at least this article is not ideally meant for the purpose. The aim of this article is to help you figure out how small and easy steps can help you with better personal management that will consequently lead you to your desired goals.

There is one assumption that we make before moving further; personal management is as important and as vital to success as strategic management. The reason why this is safe to assume is because it is a well-managed person who leads to a bigger, organizational success; hence, the person has to be managed first.

Coming back to our objective of making it happen, there is one change in perspective that is vital to growth and success; today is all I have to make it happen! This does not mean that we start believing that there is no tomorrow but rather what it implies is to be as productive and valuable as s/he can be on a particular day. Once you are on the path of productivity with distractions minimized, here is what the easier part is.

Peter Bregman, who is an adviser to many CEOs and their teams to tackle priorities, suggests the following:

1.       Set Plan for Day: Before you start your day, sit down, relax, sip your coffee and set a plan for your day (writing it down is preferred). This should help you in listing down the things and filtering out what to prioritize and otherwise.

2.       Focus: Follow the list. Check your list every hour to evaluate how productive you have been the last hour. The aim of this exercise is to help you re-focus on the tasks you prioritized, filtering out the distractions.

3.       Review: At the end of every day, review your list to find out how productive have you been today to check and mark your success on the right lines. This should help you for a better tomorrow.

Why we at Nixon University believe that this area needs greater emphasis is because Time and Personal Management are becoming more of an art in the modern day scenario and thus it is imperative to manage yourself better and making full use of the time that you have.

What a Top Performer does that others don't...

Do you ever wonder why we end up checking our Facebook account when we should be working instead? The answer is an overtaxed mind which might also be lacking some essential training.

The next thing we ask ourselves is how do we overcome this problem, the answer is simple but we need to dedicate some time towards this essential training and REST!

A study conducted recently that examined top performers suggested that it is their ability to focus on the defined objective, their un-matched stamina to train their body and mind regularly and systematically combined with the time they dedicated to rest that enables them to give out their best in the field; be it athletics, composing music or their workplace. The study aimed at proving that the common practice of giving up rest with the expectation of utilizing that time to finish the job at hand is actually a flawed approach altogether. 

During the study, it was also found out that Susan Butcher who was a veterinarian’s assistant and was well aware of the physical strength of her dogs trained them for four-to-six hour spurts and allowed them to rest of the same time, earned her team a four time win in the race at the takes place in the Arctic and is measured at 1,100 miles.

The point is to understand the importance of work-rest-work-rest cycle as the differentiating factor rather than to be over-occupied with just work or rest to perform well both in the short as well as long-run.

Experts suggest that one should always keep in mind the limit to which a body and mind can be put to work to ensure appropriate levels of attention and performance. Although the fact remains that one can take help from meditation to strengthen the brain muscle. From the perspective of cognitive science all meditation methods are methods to train attention. An increasingly popular method to grow the power of the brain’s circuitry for attention is “mindfulness,” a meditation method stripped of a religious belief system. 

Other methods include solutions such as ‘lunchtime stops, during which employees are allowed to go home, have a hearty meal followed by a nap, ideally so as to ensure performance later in the day.