Have you asked this question to yourself? In today’s busy life where we are running to meet two ends, when we are spending 10-12 hours at office, what we discuss at times with friends and family is work and office, it really helps to know the reason why we work.

According to me people work for WORK:

W – Wealth

O – Opportune

R – Responsibility

K – Kindness

Wealth

Money is necessary for living, we can not buy the basic necessities of life without money, but money shouldn’t be everything for you. There are people who are so crazy after money that they forget enjoying their life and they are running only after gaining wealth.

If you have seen “Up in the Air” movie, they show lead protagonist George Clooney is crazy about collecting miles to get a platinum status, and that takes him away from enjoying his normal family life. But, finally when he gets that status, he doesn’t react as he had dreamt he would, because by that time he had realized what he is losing out on. Similarly, while running after money we may not realize that we are sacrificing good family time, but when we grow old we realize what we missed out on.

Opportune

You like what you do. There are many people who sacrifice high paying jobs to get in to jobs which they like to do, even at a lower pay. We become mechanical after a period of time doing a job that we don’t like to do. We should ask ourselves that questions when we wake up in the morning, whether we would really like to do the work, if money is the only motivation, then we might start looking out for another job that interests us.

The other job can be a full day job, a part time job or a home business, but it should be something you enjoy doing. If you are happy, you will be able to spread the joy around and that makes everyone in the family and friends happy.

Responsibility

We have obligations to fulfill. We have family who is dependent on us, we have to pay installments of home/car loan, we have to plan for higher education of kid and we have to plan for good vacation for family. There could be many other responsibilities you have that makes you work like clock. Putting in extra time at work, working on weekends, taking extra load may be things you do to meet the need.

Have you ever tired sharing your responsibility? Sometimes, we feel we are the only who has to do it and no one else can do it, but it’s good to check out for a possibility. This is not to run away from our responsibilities, but to try and find a balance in life. The way we consider outsourcing when we want to get a task done quickly and we are the only doing it; we might want to look out for the possibilities of responsibility sharing in the family, say your spouse may be able to help you.

Kindness

There are some people who just work out of kindness. They just want to help others; they get happiness by helping others. Either they have achieved the financial status or they are philanthropic by nature and hence basic salary for survival is what they need.

People working at NGOs and charitable trusts have those philanthropic qualities; they get happiness by helping others. And then there are those rich people who have achieved good amount of wealth in life and they want to give to the needy. Many celebrities in different fields support or endorse a NGO or a charitable trust, this helps to give a boost to the NGO or the trust in collecting more funds.

Whatever your reason may be for work, or even if you have multiple reasons for work; you want to ensure that you have a work and life balance and enjoy the moment you are living in. It’s not always possible for all of us to be that way, but we can at least try to work towards being happy about working! J

What are your reasons for working? Are you happy?

All of us have the same number of hours in a day, then why some of us are able to do a lot in a day and others are able to do nothing or very little. Many a times we wish, we had more than 24 hours to do more.

The reason why the successful people are able to get a lot more done in a day is because they follow APT formula.

Presenting, the APT formula to get more done in a day:

A – Assign

P – Perform

T – Track

Assign

Do you plan your tasks in advance?

Do you allocate time to do a particular task?

Do you plan what you want to achieve in a day?

Many people just start their day by thinking that they want to do something big and want to have a very productive day, but don’t know what all they want to achieve. So, they will keep doing something and at the end of the day they will figure out that some key tasks were missed and some not so important tasks have been completed.

Plan the tasks you want to perform in advance, ideally do a week’s plan, on a broad level plan for a month and on a very high level plan for the year. First thing you want to do is get yourself a good planner from Office Depot, Wal-Mart or any other super market near your place. Assign yourself the daily tasks at least on the previous night if not in the previous weekend. Put duration against each task to complete it. This is very important as you need to monitor your assignments.

Now, let’s get on to performing your assignments.

Perform

Since you have already assigned tasks to yourself, key planning is done. Now you need to perform those tasks to achieve the target of the day.

Do you perform under pressure or do you perform under relaxed environment? This is very important thing you need to know about yourself. Some people perform great under pressure, when there are too many things on to do list they will start working faster and will be able to achieve a good amount of tasks. There are others who can not perform under pressure, they get very nervous; they need finite tasks to accomplish.

You know what type of performer you are, so, based on that you should have over assigned or under assigned tasks to yourself. While performing don’t change the order in which the tasks are assigned, also try to accomplish the tasks in defined time limit. And last but not the least while you are working on tasks; stop all distractions like mobile phone, instant messengers, checking your emails. These will help you do a lot more in the defined time limit.

Also, don’t burn out yourself; take small 10-15 minute breaks after every 2 hours. Based on your own condition you want to decide whether you need hourly break or a break every 2 hours. But, taking a small break is a necessity and it will definitely boost your productivity.

At the end of the day you will need to Track.

Track

Tracking is as important as assigning and performing. If you plan really well but not able to perform as per the plan than you need to revisit it and tweak it to get it on track. You need to analyze the reasons about why you are unable to perform as per the assignment.

If you take longer than expected to perform the tasks i.e. you complete all the tasks defined for the day, but end up spending 6 hours instead of 4 hours then you need to analyze the reasons for the duration, which tasks took you longer to perform, what were the issues. This will help you in future to plan your time in a better manner.

Tracking will also help you to analyze a trend about your working style and you will be able to find out ways to boost your productivity. Let’s say one day you were able to write 10 articles instead of 5, what did you do differently and then you can repeat the same in future. If on a given day you were able to do only 3 blog posts instead of 5, you will know what went wrong and hence what to avoid in future.

So, there are you are with the APT formula to get more done in a day.

The other thing that you can do to get more done in a day is to outsource some tasks, but there also APT formula is applicable. You should have great control over assignment, performance and tracking of the person whom you outsource the task. These are the quality of good managers! J

Hope you found the APT formula useful to get more done.

What do you do to get more done in a day? What are some of the best productivity tips that help you achieve more?