Although I am not one for New Year’s resolutions I am certainly one for settings goals. One of the ideas I have been mulling over of late is the ineffectiveness with which I have been approaching the resources I have access to.
If I stop and look at all the tools I have access it would be rare that I use even 20% of their full features. Many things, I suggest I would use even less. It is so easy to get distracted and lose focus with so many different options today but I started wondering how much more use I could make of what I already have if I simply spent some extra time learning what features are available and try and move the utilization of that tool closer to 80%.
One the other side of the coin, there are plenty of things that I have signed up for or access occasionally that I really don’t make good use of. If I don’t and I can find such features elsewhere I really should stop using that tool and simplify things.
So with those ideals in mind I am going to try and dedicate myself to looking more closely at the resources I already have and whether I can use them better or whether in fact I shouldn’t be using them at all. Basically optimization if you will.
My approach is going to be to focus more on something when I do use it the next time and try and learn a little bit more about it rather than just using the defaults as I always do. Hopefully, this will move me more towards my goal of 80% utilization along with reduction in the number of things that I do in fact use. I have already found it somewhat frustrating to spend that extra time dedicated to learning about something in depth rather than just moving on to the next item, however in the long run I believe it will pay dividends.
So the my question for you is, how much of the stuff you are doing now could be done better if you just looked a bit deeper into the tools that you use? Even a few percentage points more utilization I believe can yield significant returns.