Before we talk about how to improve productive, pause, and think, for what?
YOUR GOAL! Right?
Goal setting is the most key factor in productivity than all other factors. Ask yourself: What you want to achieve? Is it important? Is it worth it?
When you are productive with these decisions, you work smarter rather than working harder. If you do not align your productivity with your goal, no matter how hard you try, you won’t reach your goals. Determine what is important, and meaningful to you. First set your purpose in place, then set productivity goals important for your primary goal.
So, productivity is not proportional to time spent doing a task. To improve productivity, we set tasks in priority. Start finishing the most important works first. So, despite working only 10 hours a week, you can achieve most of the work that you get by working 84 hours a week.
Sound weird? Well, keeping reading to learn the techniques…
Plan the strategy
Once you have set your goal in place, plan for achieving it. Planning tasks ahead of time puts systems in place.
This will avoid decision fatigue. It will reduce the number of actual decisions you need to make during execution. This will help you make better and obvious choices when you introspect and re-prioritize things.
You must have professional and personal “To-Do” things in this format
- Some-time in life
- This year
- This month
- This week
- Today
Make the next day’s to-do list before one day. So next day you can start the task with full energy rather than facing decision fatigue.
Breaking into chunks
To-do lists work much better when you break high-level goals into actionable steps.
Say a bigger task can be double your sale in one year. But how you are going to achieve this?
To do this, rethink your goals and connect the dots between high-level goals and low-level tasks. Like hire more salespersons, reconnecting old channels, explore new territories. Further, break these tasks into smaller steps, so the entire work becomes easy to tick checklist.
When you accomplish these tasks, no matter how small, the brain feels a sense of achievement. It keeps you inspired until the ultimate goal.
Make a “DONE” list. Even plan a reward for yourself or your team. It keeps you motivated in the journey.
Important things first: Biggest way to improve productivity
Completing your most important work first will automatically improve productivity. When you focus your mind on your high priority tasks, you will perform them more efficiently. It will reduce interruption by less important tasks that slow you down.
Many productivity experts suggest doing the most difficult and unattractive task first. When we can finish a challenging task first, we feel much more motivated and happier to finish easier tasks next.
When you define your to-do List for the next day, I advise you to rank the tasks in order of priority and decreasing difficulty. This way, you will always start your day with the most difficult and high priority task.
The two minutes’ rule
If a task takes less than two minutes, do it right then. As they are so small you already know what has to be done without using your brain. Clearing them from your to-do list will simplify your remaining day.
You can’t win without saying no
To achieve your important goal, you need to say no to everything that can take away your focus from the task.
It’s only by saying “NO” that you can concentrate on the things that are really important
Steve Jobs
If you are out to achieve something big, take this advice seriously. Learn to say no, without making excuses. Decline to do what can take away your focus from your essential task.
Stop delaying
You have an important task to do, but do not have the motivation to start. You end up wasting a lot of time. If not started, these tasks remain in the forefront of your memory and create mental tension. It creates an avalanche effect on your productivity because you can’t focus on anything else.
A straightforward way of overcoming this is to have confidence in your ability and focus on what needs to be done. Remember: the secret of getting ahead is getting started.
Identify and stop busy work
80% of your activities contribute to 20% results. These are busywork. These minor tasks can be useful for the progress of your goal. So, it becomes difficult to identify them. Accomplishing them gives a false sense of achievement while you have made no significant progress in reaching your goal.
This is the reason we spend most of our time on these mindless works rather than focusing on the most important tasks. So, you need to cut the time on these tasks and put greater emphasis on important tasks.
Finish what you start
To give your brain doses of dopamine, finish the tasks you start. It gives you a sense of thrill and inspires you to proceed to the next step.
Trying to multitask a lot of unfinished work will lower your attention span. It will make you less efficient and hinder your brain process to work efficiently. This will cause tension in your mind that leads to decision fatigue about what task to take on priority.
Don’ts for productivity:
Distraction is the biggest obstacle for you to achieve your goals. It can be your thoughts, notification on digital devices, or your habit of sticking to the news.
Unless you close all these distractions, you can never achieve your goal. Let me tell you, this is the single biggest reason for our failures to not being able to finish after starting.
You need to make a list of distractions that you otherwise ignore. Most of the distractions are because of our habits. To stop them, make another “Stop doing” list.
Internal distractions:
Sometimes thought crosses your mind, which may distract you from your work. If you think this can be important to your work, write it in your notepad or app on your mobile. This will remove the thought from your mind, and you can focus on your work again.
External distractions:
We need to stop information-seeking behavior. Now and then, we seek information from external sources. Reading emails, text messages, browsing internet with no purpose. We spent long hours on Facebook or YouTube where mind presume some valuable information is about to come. Or we presume information as a reward. But you know what happens, you spend long hours on these things wasting precious time.
Before overcoming this habit, acknowledge this problem as an enormous threat to your goal. This habit is hard to tame, but once done it will change what you can achieve. There are many apps that assist you to improve focus. Depending on your device, you can download them from your app store or browser plugin store. With this, you can avoid distractions and bring back focus to work.
Improve productivity in email handling
I have addressed emails separately among all the distractions. You won’t acknowledge it as a distraction at all. You use emails for work, so that is part of your job to send, check, and reply to emails. But do not get absorbed in emails the entire day unless email handling is your primary job, or you are into customer service.
I suggest you check emails two to three times during a workday. That is between 3 to 4 hours. You must respond to emails in batches.
Email Notifications are the biggest distractions. Turn them off on your mobile app and browsers.
You cannot improve productivity if you spend half of your time swimming through junk emails. Spend one hour to unsubscribe all emails you are no longer interested to read.
Distractions through digital devices:
Notifications from mobile phones are the greatest enemy of your productivity. You need to disable notifications from almost all apps. Carefully evaluate for yourself, which are the most essential apps that deserve your attention while you are concentrating on your work. I receive notifications only for phone calls (Yeap, not for WhatsApp, or even SMS).
Make these settings in your digital devices before day end to improve productivity.
While working on a laptop, close unused tabs on browser or use OneTab. Disable all browser notification on your laptop. Go to notification settings of the computer. Enable notifications for apps that may deserve your attention while focusing on your work. For my laptop, I enable notifications only for important system apps and printing.
It can take some days or weeks for you to overcome information-seeking addiction. For this, try to leave the mobile in another room on reaching home. Once you do this, you will feel better connected with your work and your family.
Ignore the news:
Brains are programmed to be alert from dangers. So, they will always deliver news that shows you in perceived danger. This is the only way for them to make you watch it longer. If they show good news 24*7, you will stop watching it. So, save your mind from fictitious dangers created by news, and improve focus on meaningful task and you will have more peace with your work.
I have dropped many topics related to productivity. I could have included automation of repetitive works, power of delegation, and power of taking regular breaks. But adding more topics will defy the “short-reads” purpose of this blog. Anyway, I have covered the major ground. Leave me a comment, what you think about this?
