Problem and Solution statement

ProWork® – Problem and Solution statement

Productivity in the modern office is low, and staff feels frustrated

There is a general feeling in large companies that knowledge worker productivity is low. Staff frustration is high from a feeling of too much work. Email is often blamed as the problem since volumes are so high.  More importantly though most work tasks do not seem to be managed well.

The symptoms are many:

1. Staff routinely complains of being overloaded with tasks, but on examination, their list does not seem unreasonable.
2. Managers complain that assigned tasks are not getting done. It is as if individual work assignments disappear into a black hole.
3. Staff seems too busy to reply to or act on most of the e‐mails they get. Important e‐mails with requests for a reply are ignored.

The underlying problem in some cases is that staff really is overloaded, but more often, staff is not trained in good e‐mail and task management, and so uses precious time inefficiently, ineffectively, and stressfully.

Individual Symptoms typically are:

• Staff work late and feel they have far too much work to do
• Staff have a sense that there is no time in the day to get things done
• Staff leave important work uncompleted
• Staff focus only on the work that is right in front of them, and rarely plan tasks in advance
• Staff have no organized task management approach
• Rather than controlling e‐mail, staff finds themselves barely reacting to email
• Buried in overflowing e‐mail inbox are many requests for action that go unattended

How ProWork® solves the problem of getting things done

“Knowledge is worthless if it is not acted upon” – Peter Drucker

Unlike other time management experts, ProWork does not start by emphasizing on setting priorities. Instead we teach how to implement a dynamic system by creating lists of tasks that are specific to a context. Where you are and what tools do you need for getting things done? That’s what context is about.

The psychology of ProWork® is based on making it easy and fun to store, track and retrieve all the information related to the things you need to get done. In everyday life, this is often not easy to implement. We spread information about things we need to plan for in various places, making it hard to retrieve and find. We can’t keep track of what we need to do and we don’t see what we need to follow up upon. We experience mental blocks in regard to doing certain activities and suffer procrastination.

With ProWork, you will learn to collect and store everything you need for your planning and execution of tasks in one place – in one view, easy to retrieve anytime. This makes tracking your projects easy and really helps you get rid of mental blocks.

Less stress, better control and more time available for what’s important

This system helps us like a ‘second brain’ – very much like a calendar is trusted to remind us about any meetings we have at a certain time, your ProWork system reminds you of anything you need to do in a certain context. Your calendar holds the ‘due at’- and your ProWork system holds your ‘due by’ commitments.

Thus any commitments you have made to be finished with anything by a certain date, will have its place in the ProWork system outside your brain, exactly as any commitments you have made to be available somewhere at a certain date.

Due at and due by are very similar in this way. We get very anxious if we can’t remember where we’re supposed to be in the future and thus make notes about in the calendar to ‘get it out of our heads’. So why don’t we do it for all our ‘due by’ commitments?

Our ‘due by’ commitments are also very different from our ‘due at’ commitments: they are not time specific – they are context specific.  Thus they do not fit in the calendar. The ProWork systems gives all of your ‘due by’ commitments a new home in a single view, for easy access and tracking and helps you to ‘get everything out of your head’.

In the ProWork seminar, you’ll learn and see for yourself what astounding effects the implementation of a few easy principles will lead to: less stress, better control of your life’s commitments and lots of saved time every day!

Productivity boosts come from three main areas

1. ProWork® Seminar students find they finally have a system to ensure that the right things get worked on at the right time. Inherent in the training is a proven task management system which consistently places the highest priority tasks in sight when needed. Lower priority tasks can be deferred for optimum timing.

2. Students find they can fly through their email using the system’s method of converting action email to tasks. Most can empty their inbox daily.

3. And students find once they are in control that they have an improved attitude, which leads to a virtuous cycle of better output.

The effective gain in productivity is measured by survey the student prior to the Seminar and 4-6 week after. Typical results show gains in productivity of 30-90 minutes per day and student!

Examples of results from surveys are available here.