Time Management

Boost your personal productivity with these tips from five experts

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Steve Jobs said focusing “means saying no to the hundred other good ideas.”

Focusing is not something that comes naturally to me. Personally, I see opportunities everywhere around me, have a better eye for the upsides than for the downsides of these opportunities, and am blessed (cursed?) with a healthy degree of FOMO…

Therefore, I decided to make focusing my new-year resolution for 2023. 

For starters, I ordered five popular books of experts in the area of personal productivity in general, and more specifically on focusing.  

In this post, I will share my takeaways from their books. One word of warning: these are my personal takeaways – no mini-reviews! If you are looking for these, I highly recommend you to look them up on goodreads.com. 

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This activity at the start of your workday will dramatically increase your personal effectiveness

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Illustration Oxygen Mask (Pexels)

Make your responsibilities your priority

For many business leaders, their day in the office resembles drinking from a fire hose. Not only do they need to attend a large number of meetings (often back to back), they are also hit with a continuous stream of ad-hoc questions from their staff, peers, customers, and line managers which require their attention and action.

A couple of years ago I started to get really worried about my personal effectiveness. Despite the outrageous number of hours I spent at work, I found it increasingly difficult to complete my tasks and finish my projects.

In order to address this, I decided to analyze my workload to find out what I could do to change this.

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Focusing means saying no

Dirk VerburgLeave a comment

Illustration Artiicle Focus

Leaders need to do three things in order to set clear priorities for their organisations

By Dirk Verburg

Most executives I know are extremely busy. It seems they always have more things to do than they have actually time for. This is probably the reason why articles, books, websites and software packages claiming to offer personal productivity solutions are more popular than ever.

Time Management Tools have a limited effect…

No matter how different these solutions are, they all have one thing in common: they force choices. Whether it is the Eisenhower Matrix, Frank Covey’s Time Matrix or Dave Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’ philosophy, they all force choices between things that need to be done and things that could be done.

Many people try to implement some or all of these tools and techniques in order to try to balance their time with the items on their to-do list. However, most of them remain structurally overloaded. They continue to have more ‘need to do’ actions on their to-do list than they have time for.

…because most often it is an organizational issue

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