Productivity Hack To Eliminate Junk From Your Life – The 30-Second Test

By Mohul Ghosh Last updated Apr 9, 2014

[This is 19^th chapter in the #ProductivityHacks series currently running on Trak.in]

Perfection is Achieved Not When There Is Nothing More to Add, But When There Is Nothing Left to Take Away” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Productivity is often confused with how busy you are. There are several individuals out there who will keep themselves busy whole day, just to show themselves (and sometimes others) that they are being productive and output is being generated.

In my view, they are just wasting their time.

The objective of applying cutting edge productivity hacks is not to fill each and every moment of your day with more ‘production’ but rather managing your business in the most ‘efficient’ and ‘effective’ manner. By being both effective and efficient, you can generate maximum output and results in minimum time.

The time which you can get by eliminating unnecessary junk and pointless busy-ness can then be utilized to spend quality time with your family and to pursue your other goals and dreams.

Always remember a fact; 90% of the happiness in your life will come from happy relationships with other people, especially with those who are closest to you. Remaining 10% is materialistic happiness, which I normally consider as junk.

The 30 second test will help you to achieve this happiness..

Contents

How To Perform The 30 Second Test?

Take a blank page and a pen and bring out your timer, and set it to 30 seconds. Now within those 30 seconds, write down the most important goals of your life.

This 30 second test has been experimented with thousands of people, and surprisingly, the answers often revolve around 3 to 4 basic goals.

Why only 30 seconds?

There is a very famous productivity fact called Parkinson’s Law, which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Hence, if there is a task which actually takes 2 hours to complete can be expanded to 20 days if we provide 20 days to finish it.

By providing just 30 seconds to finish this test, we are in a way commanding our minds to go to a hyper drive and come up with the goals which are the most important in life at this particular time.

You can also try this test by asking your friend to keep a revolver at your head.. (just kidding)

The Rule of Three

As behavioral scientists have observed from this 30 second test, more than 80% of goals of any individual can be summarized within three broad categories:

Financial or career goals
Family or relationship goals
Health or fitness goals

If you observe closely, and think hard for a moment, you will realize that these are the only three goals which any human being should have, not necessarily in the same order though.

Your finance and wealth, your family and relationships and your health/fitness; is there anything which is more important in your life?

If there is, and if you have mentioned in that in the 30 second test, then trust me, you are going in the wrong direction. Either those irrelevant goals can be categorized under these three broad areas or eliminated fully.

You can ask you wife, your parents, your children, your colleagues to take this 30 second test and they all will be surprised by the answers which they will write.

These three broad areas can be further divided into sub-questions, which will again take 30 seconds or less to answer:

What are the three most important business related goals right now?
What are the three most important relationship related goals right now?
What are the three most important health related goals right now?
What are the three most important social & community related goals right now?
What are the three biggest problems and concerns of your life?

What is the Objective of More Productivity?

The single most important objective of being a more productive person is to have a happy, healthy and fulfilling life. A life where you are able to perform the best of your abilities, serve people, keep your family and friends happy and remain fit and healthy. The problem is that these activities require time and more time.

If you are running a business, then often maximum time goes into the business because you assume that making money is the most important goal of your life. If you are a health freak, then maybe you are giving too much time to the gym and ignoring your family.

We tend to ignore and avoid the other important activities of life, which creates imbalance and lack of happiness.

I hope this 30 second test of the goals of your life will assist you in finding that balance in your life. Be happy and be productive!

Previous Chapters in “#ProductivityHacks For An Entrepreneur” Series

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