成功人士都有的高效能工作习惯

When it comes to work, everyone has their own methods for getting tasks done. But it turns out that the most successful people tend to have similar habits.

If you want to give your working hours a makeover, you’ve got to know how long your activities take.

To get the same understanding of your own work or productivity, it is recommended that you keep a time log for a full week so you also capture the weekend — that’s when people tend to be less conscious of what they’re doing. There’s no one way of tracking your time, so just pick something that works for you. The goal is to be helpful, not to make you hate your life.

Time passes whether or not you make a conscious choice about how to use that time. And not being conscious of how you spend your time is also a choice. I can’t tell you how many people tell me by the second day, ‘I got so sick of saying, “checked Facebook,” for the tenth time that I stopped doing it.’

The next step to being more conscious with your work time is to plan out your hours. This might seem really obvious, but many harried workers find themselves in triage mode — only answering urgent matters and never taking a moment to strategize about how best to spend their time.

It is recommended having a planning session at least once a week — or a big one weekly and then smaller ones as projects get finished. It is also suggested planning over different time frames. For instance, at the end of the year, you could plan your goals for the year, and then, in your weekly planning sessions, make sure you are steadily working toward those goals.

With a new plan, it’s easy to start getting excited about your goals, become over-ambitious … and then fail. But you are more likely to reach your dreams as long as you set discrete, doable tasks for yourself — and then make sure you’re held accountable. First, break down big projects into small steps, and try to limit yourself to tackling three to six a day.

Then, make sure you get to them. Everyone has a different accountability system. I personally use an accountability partner, with whom I have weekly check-ins on Friday. Others might want a more punitive or public approach, such as making a promise on Stickk, a web site in which people can set goals and then promise to do something dreaded, such as donate to an organization they loathe, if they fail.

Many of us end up spending inordinate amounts of time answering email. According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend 28 percent of their time wading through their inboxes.

But checking email is not the same thing as doing “work” — and by that, I mean the core of what you’re trying to accomplish. If you’re the kind of person who is worried about leaving your inbox unattended, it is suggested starting to wean yourself off by being on email for 20 minutes, and then using the next 40 minutes to focus on a task without interruption. Eventually, expand those times between email check-ins.

Another thing that can look like work but isn’t always: meetings. The reason you have a meeting is that you want something to change in the world by the end of it. The problem is that people have meetings to check that everyone is still doing their jobs .

I recommend shying away from recurring meetings. Everything you do with an hour should be a conscious decision.

While professional musicians or athletes spend time practicing their craft or sport, many people with other jobs don’t. Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too. And that means that you can also consciously practice your job skills with the goal of improving, though you’ll need to ask someone to give you feedback.

That’s the chunk that’s missing for a lot of people in their work. We don’t have as much feedback as we need. If you don’t get regular feedback, then after you, say, complete a task or give a presentation, ask your supervisor what you can do to improve next time. Or, have a friend in the same profession either look over your work before you send it to your boss or watch you practice giving your presentation before the real thing.

Let’s say, God forbid, that you lost your job today. In order to find a new one, you’d have to draw on your career capital, which is the sum total of your experiences, your knowledge, your skills, your relationships — and all these things enable you to get a new job if you need one, create new situations for yourself or other people, or even let you take a break without having it ruin your career. Successful people tend to pay in to their career capital account regularly.

There are three main ways to create career capital. One is to simply improve your skills and adopt new ones important in your line of work. Take professional development classes, or have a mentor help you figure out what you’ll need to learn in order to succeed five, ten or 20 years from now.

Another type of career capital deposit is developing a portfolio of your work. The good thing about writing or illustrating books is that they are then out there in the market, speaking for you and your ideas even when you’re not around. And that explains why experts in many fields from medicine to business take up the pen. But writing or publishing isn’t the only way to create this portfolio. Doing work that has any kind of visible, tangible outcome will have the same effect.

The third and final way to build your career capital is to build up a network of people loyal to you. You can do this by introducing colleagues to others you know who could be helpful to them, providing references for people, and also standing by associates when they’re down. Anyone can have lunch with someone who is successful. Real career capital comes from having lunch with someone who just lost the job she loves.