Optimizing Performance

Every professional’s dream working day is certainly the one in which he puts up his feet at the end of the day with a self satisfied smile. A feeling of achievement underlies this happiness and this helps him to ride the crest even on the next day. So how does one get to this blissful haven? Well by optimizing one’s performance and in delivering one’s best in one’s working sphere.

There is no magic spell that one needs to know. It all comes from careful strategizing. It comes from tapping one’s inner resources and from honing one’s best asset: Oneself! Here are some very easy life skills to reach that zenith of joy. Planning your goal is the first step. What do you want to achieve? Knowing what you want to do will help get you started.

Becoming involved in a special interest, would help one to gain from newer experiences. Join a club that includes people that have similar skills. Discussing your aspirations with all and sundry is a wonderful way of getting a riot of ideas. These would widen one’s horizons and also help one to do one’s best.

Practise. This is the absolute key to success. If you want to excel at anything, you can’t expect to get there if you don’t try. Practice as much as you can, and at any opportunity. Practice makes one perfect.

Develop different skills – Widening your skill set is a very emphatic way of reaching an optimal level of performance and staying up there. The skills could be anything from academic, physical or artistic. It could be anything from speaking German to chess, from learning a dance form to mastering a musical instrument.  Don’t try to be the best at everything; just be the best at everything you do.

Remember, at the end of the day, just have fun. Enjoy each moment you have doing your interest. Most professionals who have optimized there working performances are generally viewed as efficient workers. They are described as troubleshooters and those who would not take no for an answer. A secretary who is able to juggle his or her boss’s busy schedule; a factory worker who learns to produce more units in less time; a sales manager who increases sales by 10 percent: These are just a few examples of efficient professionals.

Put simply, being efficient means producing results with little wasted effort. The better the results obtained, the more efficient the professional. The sum of these individual performances is what enables a company to achieve high all-around performance. It is always possible to strengthen the numerous factors that have an impact on personal efficiency. Being efficient in the workplace hinges more on an individual’s ability and work ethic than it does on the company he or she works for or its management.
The six main factors in determining personal efficiency are: responsibility, capability, self-motivation, self-management, creativity and simplification. Any professional can affect the performance of these variables.

In particular, responsibility, capability; self-motivation and simplification are largely shaped by an individual’s own attitudes and actions. To be a successful professional first requires embracing personal responsibility. If you refuse to take charge of your own performance, nobody will do it for you, and you will almost certainly underachieve. Next, capability determines to what extent individuals possess the knowledge and skills necessary to fulfill their tasks and achieve their objectives.

Being efficient then requires not only knowing how to do your job, but also actually wanting to do it and being self-motivated.

Simplification involves doing tasks the simplest way possible. In fact, simplification has a multiplying effect on efficiency, as it enables the worker to achieve better results with fewer resources. The final variable self-management makes doing the other things possible. However, individual’s ability to self-manage ultimately depends on managers apart from themselves. Even though individuals can try to steer working conditions in certain directions, their ability to manage themselves depends greatly on the organizational framework they must work within. For that reason, companies must try to provide individuals with appropriate organizational conditions for performing efficiently.

One can improve one’s performance by developing concrete perspectives and mindset associated with these efficiency variables.

Take responsibility, for example. This requires that you aspire towards realistic goals and show tenacity so as to not fall to pieces at the first sign of an obstacle or deterrent.

It is a great idea to compete with self than with outside forces as it prevents de-motivation.
Making tasks simpler, learning to prioritize and being able to focus on what is important are key aspects of the art of simplification. Optimizing one’s performance is like reaching for the horizon, and hence an adage to ponder over:

“Be able, be willing and then you will be the BEST.”
Dr. Jyoti Vora