Having a Winning Formula at Work

Andy Murray has just won Wimbledon, the first British tennis star to have done so in 77 years.  He has obviously finally found the winning formula and achieved a most desired objective by him and the legion of fans.  When it comes to applying success in the workplace there are methods that can be applied.  However successful people seem to have similar habits.

Plan

It is important to plan out your working hours.  Making a list every day or every week will ensure that urgent matters are attended to as well as important issues.   It is also important to plan out weekly, monthly and yearly goals and make sure these steadily worked towards.  With any big projects these need to be broken down into manageable, do-able chunks.  Time is precious and should be used effectively.

Work Out the Hours

It is important to work out how long activities take to get an understanding of what work is being undertaken and how productive you are.  It is pointless undertaking fruitless long winded tasks.  Keeping a log will help you do this.

Make Success Possible

Having worked out your objectives it is important to make sure that they are carried out to ensure success.  One good way to do this is to write your objectives down.  Research shows that if you do so  you are more likely to get things done by a) not forgetting what you need to do and b) focusing your mind.

Understand What Is Work

Too many of us spend lots of time undertaking tasks that are not really work eg reading and answering emails.  Email has the capacity to fill much of the working day if it is allowed to take over.  It is important to ration access to the inbox and allowing time to concentrate on completing a project. Often meetings can take over the working day.  Therefore you should really check whether a meeting is essential or could the communication take place another way ie a phone call or send an email.

Practice

To become good at anything you have to practice (Andy Murray has shown this).  You should continually practice your existing job skills including any new ones you have learnt.  Just think about a training course you went on and what you could remember six months later if you had not used the skills learnt – probably very little.   You should be striving for constant improvement which is often the basis of most performance appraisals and by which you are measured against.

Develop Yourself

You should be constantly looking at ways to develop your skills to avoid becoming stagnant or at work unemployable because your skills are outdated.  The world of employment moves on so quickly and and industries are developing all the time.  You therefore need to stay in touch.  Seek out new opportunities, new projects, take on a mentor.  You can also develop a portfolio of work to show off your skills.   Building up a network of people can help you get on.  Seek out new contacts as well as keeping in touch with existing ones.  You never know when you might need to call up them.

Seek out pleasure

Don’t make work the be all and end all.  It is important to enjoy work but having a work life balance is also essential.  Being able to switch off from work and pursuing enjoyable hobbies or  spending time with the family and friends will bring enormous benefits to your overall wellbeing.