How Goal Setting Improves Job Performance
Connection Between Motivation and Goals What motivates you to get work done? Perhaps you’d say it’s rewards, compensation, or simply a good personal work ethic. These are all factors that…
Automation works.
We have experienced the productivity of robots versus people in farming, manufacturing, and segments of transportation and retail over the last 100-150 years. Now, in the past 30 years, software and robots have thrived at replacing a particular kind of work: the average-wage, middle-skill, routine-heavy work, especially in manufacturing and office admin.
So, what’s next?
Nearly half of American jobs today could be automated in a decade or two according to a research paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne.
Now, what does all this mean for you?
As automation explodes in all sectors of industry, it creates incredible access to software that you can use to automate and delegate many of your routine heavy administrative tasks; tasks that consume significant amounts of your time and mental energy.
You only have 168 hours a week and a finite store of mental energy as well, according to research by social psychologist Roy Baumeister. And once you become mentally depleted – something that Baumeister calls ‘decision fatigue’ – you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. So the more choices you make throughout the day the harder each one becomes for your brain and it will eventually look for shortcuts – either recklessness or to do nothing. Neither of which are optimal choices.
Knowing what we know about the effectiveness of automation, we can conclude this: automating and delegating some of your tasks not only optimizes your time spend enabling you to allocate your time to high value tasks and projects, but also ensures that you can preserve high quality decision making, execute on tasks faster and virtually error free and avoid the black hole of procrastination.
So, where do you start? And what do you automate right now?
Now that you have decided what you want to or can automate, here are a few tools to support you in making that happen efficiently:
As you explore your workflows and look for opportunities to automate, don’t go overboard and automate tasks that bring you meaning and joy in your work and enable you to showcase and leverage your unique strengths. The best automation is strategic automation, so think strategically about where and how you can automate.
Because your time and energy are finite – and you’ll never be able to automate them. So, automate your tasks and watch your productivity soar.
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