Not only will your income increase but your job satisfaction will increase as well. It is so much more satisfying to be able to look at your work day and to say with total conviction that your time was well spent.



In order to understand how to get the most out of your day let's look at the three types of workers.

The first type of worker is time focused. He rates his contribution in the amount of hours he spends at work. You will often hear people speaking in this fashion describing how dedicated they are because they work 60 hours per week.

The question the time focused worker needs to ask is what exactly are they doing with that time. Studies have shown that most workers are only effective for about 20% of their working time. The other 80% includes things such as coffee breaks, conversation, browsing the internet, talking on the telephone, preparing to start, preparing to finish and all the other things that keep a person busy but aren't really productive.

The second type of worker is activity focused. They realize that they aren't being paid just to put in the hours. They will think about what tasks they are being paid to perform and they will judge their value as a worker in terms of what they actually do in the organization. When you hear this type of worker describe how hard they work they will give you a list of all the things they do in a typical day.

The question that the activity focused worker needs to ask is what outcomes are they getting from the activity. You could be the hardest worker in your organization but all the work you do may not contribute a single dollar to the bottom line profit.

Many self employed people and many managers fall into this category of worker. They genuinely believe that they are the backbone of the company because they work so hard but in fact if they resigned very little would change.

The third type of worker is the results focused worker. This worker realizes that no-one really gets paid to put in hours or even to keep busy. People get paid to produce a result. Whether you are an employee or self employed it is the results that you produce that will ultimately determine your value to the organization and therefore, sooner or later, your income level.

If you want to get the most out of your work day ask yourself what results you are being paid for. Once you are clear on your results objective then periodically throughout the day ask yourself if what you are doing at that moment is producing the results that you are paid to produce.

If the answer is "no" then stop doing that and start doing something that will produce the appropriate results.

Once you become consistently results focused the next step is to ask yourself how you can improve on the results that you have been getting. There is always room for improvement no matter how good your results are. If you develop that combination of results focus and constant improvement then you will soon discover that you are enjoying your work a lot more and that your income is going up as well.