Increasing Effectiveness - or making the most of blogging opportunities

My desk looks a bit similar to this picture today, although there are more reference books, more pens, more post-its scattered across it and definitely more coffee (a whole cafetiere just for me). Bring on the jitters, but hopefully not until I finish writing this!

In the UK we are now required to stay indoors as much as possible, which puts a bit of a cramp on my adventurous outdoor lifestyle. So instead of getting up and immediately going out for a run I decided to be strategic about my time for the foreseeable future.

At the moment my workplace is closed (although very fortunately the emergency socialist measures implemented by the UK government has the benefit of both supporting my necessary outgoings of mortgage, bills and food; as well as assisting to protect the company that I work for giving it the best chances of survival for when this is all over).

Having completed an MBA while working full time (or more than full time as most people in management positions will tell you), I learned a few things about increasing my personal effectiveness. But before we get too far down this road - what does it mean?

Define Personal Effectiveness

In general, personal effectiveness is defined as using the tools (or resources) at your disposal to master your life! Now, life mastery seems like a laudable goal, however; it also seems a bit like eating an elephant - where on earth do you start?

Much like how to eat an elephant - one of my favourite analogies by the way, the answer is simple and not so simple at the same time. You eat an elephant one bite at a time, but you do have to ignore all the gnarly details things like:

• How do you stop the majority of the elephant spoiling while you're working through it?
• Who has that big a freezer, anyway?
• How many elephant recipes are there really?
• Whose elephant was this? and are they going to start chasing me?

So, leaving the elephant, how do you know what tools you have available to you?

Resources

There are multiple models that can be used to define your personal resources, and I'm sure I'll get into them at some point. Why you ask? Good question, because I absolutely love talking about and exploring resource and capability theories and models in ways that make them accessible to everyone, but its not strictly necessary for today's discussion. (And by writing this post, I'm actually procrastinating from the content that I'm creating for one of my sites - all are listed in my profile if you fancy wandering over and taking a look).

So what are my resources?

• Skills
• Talents
• Time
• Energy
• Experience

How I've used my resources to increase my personal effectiveness:

1. Work on hard things when you're at your best

Using my experiences from completing my MBA I know that I do my best work in the morning. So I have scheduled myself to do the complicated bits of content creation first thing.

Alongside working on two blogs (one niche, one exploring my experiences of the process of leaving corporate life to become an entrepreneur) I am also putting all my entrepreneurship skills and knowledge to the test, as I am creating the business alongside the blog exploring its creation! So, first thing in the morning, when I am at my best I am not only creating the content, but also creating the business.

2. Take small bites

I know that the maximum amount of time I can put into anything without losing focus is 90 minutes. I can keep going after that, but both the quality and the speed of my work decreases. However, this morning I decided to test this and use a smaller time period of work after reading a post by JSharpe on his site via the comments thread.

I've discovered that my sweet spot exists somewhere between the 90 minutes that I've previously used, and the 25 minutes suggested in the post. Learning this has helped me immensely because I now know what is too long to work on one thing for me, and what is too short.

3. Prioritization

Back to what Kyle says, delivering value through key word rich content is the key. At this point in my journey, creating keyword rich content has to be my focus and therefore is the top thing on my priority list. This is the thing that I will be working on when I'm at my best, but what about all the other things that need to be done?

4. If you don't know what to do, do something!

If I'm really at a loss for what to do, here is my go to list for this stage of my authority building process:

• Write a blog post (what I'm doing right now)
• Create website content
• Keyword Research
• Add to my business planning mind map or rich picture
• Share something to social media
• Comment on other member's posts via the comment thread
• Undertake more the Wealthy Affiliate training
• Research the next step of my journey
• Read the blog of an authority figure here on Wealthy Affiliate

But if you want some more inspiration from an authority figure, check out ChuckHolmes post on what to do when you Don't Know What to do?

What tools do you used to increase your personal effectiveness? I'd love some new suggestions to explore!