Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning and focused efforts. By increasing your productivity, you’ll have more time for other things in life. You can improve your life by making small changes in your daily actions. The secret of your success is found in your everyday routine. Through extensive research and experience, I’ve developed a list of 13 different ways for you to boost your productivity to live the life you want. By learning the tools to help you guide your focus, you can train yourself to become your best.
1. Set ambitious, yet realistic goals
It is important to set various goals with different difficulties and different deadlines. If you can cross off everything on your list too easily you will lose motivation. Therefore, make sure you set yourself ambitious, yet realistic goals at the same time to keep you focussed on what you want to achieve. Les Brown, a motivational speaker and radio DJ, once said “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” People that set higher goals have a tendency to be more satisfied than those with lower expectations, according to research published in the Journal of Consumer Research. One of the major reasons why people fail a goals is because they did not set a deadline. Goals have to be very specific and they should be written down. It is good to get feedback about the goals in order to redefine them.
2. Create a to-do-list
Make a list of all tasks that need to be done, prioritise them and mark the ones you can delegate. Putting everything that is in your head creating chaos into an order, decluttering everything. By writing it down, you can make sure that you will not forget about it. ‘Braindumping’ is a good method to stay focused instead of being distracted by your thoughts.
3. Don’t waste your time
Especially nowadays we have to distinguish between what is important and what isn´t. You are going to have to learn how to say ‘no’ to things. Don´t be afraid of people’s reactions, if you do so. It depends on the tone of voice and the way you say it, but saying no to something doesn’t mean you are being rude, it means that you know your values and the value of your time, which is the most precious thing. By declining unnecessary meetings and co. you save time, and get your focus back on what you want to accomplish.
4. Delegation
Ask for help with your projects. By delegating tasks to people, you have time to focus on other things without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work you have to do. Being able delegate has to do with trust. Furthermore, you have to know the strengths and weaknesses of your colleagues in order to delegate the right tasks to the right person. It is about relinquishing a part of your control. Sometimes we need to let go of the impulse to control everything and trust that somebody will do the work. If we keep on checking on them, we could use the time to do it by ourselves. So, give up control to a certain extend. If something went wrong, learn from it and improve your delegation. It´s important to provide them with all necessary information and resources to fulfil the task.
5. Disconnect
We are available every second of the day. Social media apps are distracting us. As part of the multitasking-society we live in, most people are online during work as well. How effective is multitasking, though? Is doing multiple things at the same time ending up in not doing anything in a correct and efficient way? We text people back without really thinking about what we want to say. Why not taking a time off during work and set yourself a phone free hour a day, only concentrating on what you want to focus on right now? This will be beneficial by making you more efficient.
6. Take breaks
Recently scientists at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Louisiana reviewed the lifestyle of 17,000 men and women working in an office over the course of 13 years. The scientists found that 54% of those people are likely to die of heart attacks! The reason was because those people were sitting for most of the day. The enzyme, lipoprotein lipase (LPL), breaks down fat in the bloodstream and turns it into energy. When people are sitting, it is likely that LPL levels drop according to Marc Hamilton, a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri. This causes fat cells to build up.
If you spend more than 8-10 hours at a desk and without moving around much, then you will notice that you have less energy. Productivity is not measured by the number of hours you sit at a desk. It is measured by how much you get done without sacrificing your health. (Amit Chowdhry , 2013)
It is especially important to acknowledge that every person is different. Companies should offer the space and time for people to be physically active during their work, self-managing their time and knowing their personal performance cycle is really helpful to get the most out of their work without harming their health and body. That could be accomplished in forms of a meditation space, a balcony, a gym, yoga classes…
7. Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. It is a technique using a timer to break down work into intervals that usually last 25 minutes and have small breaks in between. These intervals are called pomodoros, which came from the Italian word pomodoro (tomato). Cirillo firstly applied this technique with tomato-shaped kitchen timer as a university student.
There are six steps in the technique:
1. Decide on the task to be done.
2. Set the pomodoro timer (traditionally to 25 minutes).
3. Work on the task until the timer rings.
4. After the timer rings put a checkmark on a piece of paper.
5. If you have fewer than four checkmarks, take a short break (3–5 minutes), then go to step 2.
6. After four pomodoros, take a longer break (15–30 minutes), reset your checkmark count to zero, then go to step 1.
8. Designate times to handle e-mail
Everyday there is a good amount of time spent writing e-mail replies in a timely manner. Urgent information tends to be passed through phone calls rather than e-mail. If you are spending an average of over 2 hours per day replying to e-mails, then you might want to reassess how you budget your time.
Instead of stopping what you are doing to respond to a new e-mail, you should consider setting aside a time for responding to e-mails in batches. You can generally detect the urgency in the e-mails by the subject line. This is why setting up push notifications for e-mail on your phone can be very beneficial. Being able to quickly glance at the subject lines of e-mails you are receiving throughout the day saves you from having to constantly open up your inbox.
9. Constantly ask yourself if what you are doing presently is productive
If you catch yourself spending a lot of time at Facebook and other social media platforms, you need to redirect your attention to what you actually intended to work on. When I realize that I am not working on something productive, I mentally scold myself and get back to the grind.
10. Reward yourself for motivation
When achieving a goal, it is important to reward yourself somehow for motivation. This could be in the form of a material possession or certain type of food, etc. Life is not only about achieving things, because there is always going to be the next challenge waiting for you, so make sure you reward yourself inbetween for the small and the big successes.
11. Watch less TV
People are spending a lot of time watching series. It somehow releases stress, relaxes and takes your mind off things you worry too much about. Also, it is not productive at all and has a bad impact on your health. Think about ways to replace watching TV with other ways of relaxation. Sport is the obvious solution. Maybe there is more to it. You don´t have to stop watching TV at all, but you might be able to reduce it slowly.
12. Spend a few minutes preparing for the next day
Mornings can be chaotic and the less you have to do before heading out the door, the smoother your day will be. Therefore, selecting the wardrobe for the next day, preparing lunch, pre-checking the agenda for tomorrow and maybe even setting up the coffee maker will make a huge change and helps you to be more efficient.
13. Sleep early and get up early
Sleeping late and waking up early can be detrimental to your productivity the next day. If you are half-awake at work, then the odds are that your quality of work will suffer. Also, it is proven that sleep before 12 pm is more qualitative than going to bed after this time. As Benjamin Franklin once said “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”
Author
Sarah Lilly Steiner is a globetrotting Impact Maker with a background in business management and entrepreneurship. She has worked at Impact Hubs in Italy and Sweden.