6 Professional Life Hacks That Changed My Life.
When I was a fresh graduate, I thought the key to success and high performance was through working hard and long hours. I listened to popular social media entrepreneurs when they said, “Move Fast & Break Things”.
Boy.. that was such a WRONG move! I learned that I needed to find the most effective ways to get things done and with as little mistakes as possible. My boss once said, “I didn’t pay you to make mistakes, I pay you to fix them”.
I quickly learned the hard way, and these professional hacks made all the difference in my career and success.
1. Incorporate Your Personal Development Activities in Your Professional Work Calendar
• Make your personal development a commitment that’s as important as your professional commitment. What gets “calendar-ed”, gets done.
2. Instead of Being Proud to be a Multitasker, Be a Single-track Tasker
• It’s fallacy to think we’re more effective when we multitask; we get more done doing multiple single-track tasks, one at a time.
3. Treat Taking Breaks as Your Responsibility
• Working is our professional responsibility, so are taking breaks. It’s more effective to take breaks and come back stronger than continuously pushing ourselves.
4. Using Gadgets as Your Leverage
• Gadgets are excellent personal assistant, with the right usage gadgets and app can greatly enhance our productivity.
5. Side Learning Hustle
• If there’s one thing you’ll need to invest on, it should be your own learning and development. Instead of hustling for side income, hustle for a new skill; having a new skill will reap more benefits in the long run.
5. Journal Your Key Success
• We may fix or improve many aspects in our career, but our true success comes from leveraging on our key strengths. Creating a list of our key success factors provides powerful self awareness for long term achievements.
These 6 Professional Hacks may look trivial, but these small disruptions literally changed my life. The hacks allowed me to persevere over the past 20 years; working smartly & leveraging the right tools created my competitive advantage.
How about you? What are hacks that you’ll live by?