Shamelle has written a great post on distinguishing between “being productive” and “being busy” all the time.

This is a coincidence,  since I was reading Seth Godin’s book (featuring his blog posts) and one thing jumped at me: “Give me nine-to-five executives who can create remarkable things and I will change the world”.

Put these two thoughts together and you will come to the conclusion that you can get a lot of things done without slogging for 15 hours a day. Honestly, I believe a strict nine-to-five job is generally not possible, especially as you move up the ladder.

Teams spread across different time zones, systems that function 24×7 and the sheer volume of decisions that need to be taken, makes it almost impossible not to have a Blackberry. Which, essentially, means, I disagree with Seth (on the nine-to-five part ;) )

Back to the real question, how can you be productive and not just busy? To add to Shamelle’s advise, I have a couple of things you can do.

1. Deliverable-based Structure (as opposed to WBS)

Most of us, including myself, think of work in terms of activities and not as deliverables.  For example, if I have to send out a report, my task is named as Create Report with sub tasks as organize a meeting, talk to systems group and get information etc. You can see the output of each activity is not clearly identified, with the result that the meeting happens, but there is no concrete outcome.

Instead, reword your tasks as units whose progress is measurable. In our trivial example, the sub-tasks could be Meeting minutes with commitment from the teams, raw data report from the systems group, analysis document prepared from the data etc.

2.  Schedule tasks as much as possible on your calendar

This allows you to focus on things you need to get done by meeting with yourself. By allotting time to your tasks, you make sure you have made some progress on all your tasks, rather than look only at the urgent tasks.

An empty calendar can also get you pulled into meetings that don’t have much value :) .

Bonus tip: Use a Task Manager (not the Windows Task Manager). Check out my post on using TaskCoach.