Extreme Productivity - Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours

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DON’T SWEAT THE SMALL STUFF

In every organization, some employees spend an inordinate amount of time on tasks that don’t really matter. For instance, I once worked with an accountant whose job included preparing quarterly sales reports for a firm’s top executives. Although the executives told him that they needed only ballpark estimates, he devoted almost a week to analyzing each quarter’s sales data and making sure that the numbers were perfectly correct. As a result, his boss was reluctant to give him any new major projects—if it took him a week to estimate quarterly sales, how long would it take him to evaluate the financial statements of a merger candidate?

Though attention to detail is usually considered a positive attribute, your time ...