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“To focus on contribution is to focus on effectiveness.” – Peter Drucker
To identify your biggest contribution and maximize your effectiveness, ‘Know Thy Strengths’ and ‘Know Thy Time’.
Know Thy Strengths
“We are all incompetent at most things. The crucial question is not how to turn incompetence into
excellence, but to ask, ‘What can (I) do uncommonly well?’” – Peter Drucker
Find your strengths, put them to work, and achieve your greatest contribution.
What are your strengths? What can you do uncommonly well? If you don’t know, conduct a feedback
analysis.
"Most people think they know what they're good at. They're usually wrong. And people who know
what they're not good at are more often wrong than right (paraphrased)." – Peter Drucker
To conduct a feedback analysis, volunteer for roles at work, at school, in your community, and then:
1. Write down your upcoming responsibilities.
2. Estimate your performance for each responsibility (scale of 1‐5).
3. Six to twelve months later, compare your expectations to your results.
If you volunteered for a management position, were you better at creating plans and delegating tasks then you thought? Were you better
at solving problems and making decisions under pressure than you thought?
Know Thy Time
Contribution = Strengths x Time
Manage your time to maximize the time you do what you do best.
“One cannot even think of managing one’s time unless one first knows where it goes…the first step
toward executive effectiveness is therefore to record actual time‐use.”– Peter Drucker
If you look back more than an hour, you'll fool yourself into thinking you were far more effective than
you were. The only way to know how you spend your time is to record your time as close to real‐time
as possible.
I suggest starting a time recording habit by recording your activities for just three consecutive hours every workday.
If you work best between 9:00 AM and noon, set an alarm on your phone for 10:00 AM, 11:00 AM, and noon.
When the alarm goes off, open a physical notebook or a note on your phone, and write down everything you did the last hour ‐
be as specific as possible, and don't forget to include small distractions.
Estimate how many minutes you spent doing work that leveraged your strengths.
Do this for a month, and you’ll get a time log statement (much like a credit card statement) that will help you see how where you’re
wasting your time. Use your time log statement to create two lists: ‘Stop‐Doing’ list and ‘Offload’ list.
Typical ‘Stop‐Doing’ items: common distractions, useless meetings, and good but not great opportunities.
Typical ‘Offload’ items: cleaning, running errands, updating spreadsheets, formatting documents, and any work that doesn’t require
refined judgment or creativity.
Before looking at your ‘To‐do’ list each day, plan how you will systemically eliminate items on your ‘Stop‐Doing’ list, and give away items on
your ‘Offload’ list.
The Ultimate Goal: Spend your time doing what you do best, and stop doing or offload the rest.
www.ProductivityGame.com