13 Strategies To Jumpstart Your
Productivity
Looking to increase your productivity? You’ve
come to the right article. I don’t claim to be a productivity master (I always
think there’s room for improvement), but I am very passionate about increasing
productivity. I’m always looking for different ways to be more productive –
stealing pockets of time where I can, deprioritizing the unimportant, getting
system overhauls, etc. And I love it when I see my efforts pay off in the form
of increased outputs at the end of the day.
In this article, I have selected 13 of my
best productivity strategies – tried, tested and validated. If you follow all
of them to a tee, I can guarantee you that your productivity will double,
triple whatever it is right now – or even more. I personally make it a point to
follow these steps every day. During the days when I don’t do that, my
productivity plummets. The days I do, my productivity soars. The correlation is
obvious.
1.
Set your productivity targets
Probably half of the self-help articles out
there keeps telling us to set goals and set targets. Do you know why? It’s
because it really works. When you set goals, you focus your energy on the
things you want to achieve. Things which you wouldn’t be achieving by default.
That automatically makes you more productive.
I do regular goal setting to maximize my
output. For example, one of my goals for the upcoming month is to write 30
articles, which is an average of 1 article a day. These articles will include
articles for my blog, The Personal Excellence Blog, and guest articles for other
large sites, including LifeHack.Org. My average output in the past few
months was only been an average of 1-2 articles per week, so I decided to set a
30 article goal to stretch me to write a lot more than I normally do. By virtue
of just setting this goal and striving for it, I’m naturally increasing my
output more than if I didn’t set it.
Be clear on what exactly you want to achieve.
What do you want to accomplish for the upcoming month? What is a goal that will
make you feel absolutely exhilarated and surging with pride if you achieve it?
Set that as your goal. From there, set your weekly goals. Finally, you can set
your daily goals which become your day-to-day targets.
2.
Maintain a work environment conducive to productivity
Does your work environment encourage you to
work? Or does it distract you more often than not? Your environment sets the
stage for your work flow, so pick the right environment to work. What is the
kind of environment that encourages you to work? This might require a bit of
experimentation. After trying out different places, I find that I work best in
quiet spots where there are minimal people around – such as my room, the
library, cafes and in my neighborhood. So I only do my work at these areas.
Those of you who are employed can’t exactly
choose the environment to work in. If that’s the case, then modify your
environment to make it conducive. Organize your work desk (next step). Decorate
it with your favorite pictures and inspirational quotes. Put up a photo frame
or two. Have your favorite mug there. Sometimes you may not enjoy all the work
you have to do, but that doesn’t mean you have to make yourself miserable. If
you feel like home, you will be more inspired to get things done.
3.
Have an organized workspace
Having an organized work desk will
undoubtedly help improve your productivity. If you have a messy workspace, you
will feel disorganized and sluggish. You won’t even feel like doing anything
since it’s so disorganized. Whereas if you have a nice, tidy and organized
workspace, you’ll be inspired to get work done. You can find your things easily
rather than waste precious minutes sieving through your pile of papers for
something you saw just a while ago. If you are self-employed like I am, it’s
especially important to be organized and on top of things.
I have a small work desk in my room which I
make a point to keep clean and tidy. My reports, folders and random papers are
stashed into a magazine organizer (which I got from Ikea 3 years ago for a few
bucks only – one of my best investments ever). Pens and stationery are placed
in the stationery holders. I leave enough space for my laptop and a writing
area on my right side. Throughout the work days my table will get cluttered
naturally, so every few days I will do some cleaning and tidying to get things
in order. Even my own laptop is considered a part of my work desk – and I use
post-it notes and excel sheets to organize my task lists. All these create an
inviting space for me to work at any time of the day.
4.
Put first things first
Habit # 3 in Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of
Highly Effective People. First Things First refers to putting the important
things first before anything else. And why does this matter? That’s because
there are 24 hours a day. There are about a million different things we
can pick to do. Some will be important things that make a difference. The rest
will be unimportant things that actually don’t make any difference at all. Out
of this million things, we have to pick and choose, otherwise we’ll forever be drowning
in work and never get anything done. Focus on the important and deprioritize
the latter.
One question I use to filter out the
unimportant tasks is “Will doing this make a difference in the next 6 months?”
If the answer is no or a small yes, I put it aside. If it’s a big yes, then I
give disproportionate focus to it. Of course, we can never give a 100% accurate
assessment since we can’t see the future, but we have sufficient knowledge to
give a good assessment. For example, my key goal for this year is to develop my
blog, which is an essential part of my personal development business. When I
apply that question to my list of blog tasks, I automatically focus on tasks
like (1) guest posting which lets me reach out to significantly more readers
and gains new long-term readers and subscribers to my blog (2) writing new,
quality articles to my readers and (3) writing my book which will be a personal
milestone and establish a new income stream at the same time. Other
miscellaneous tasks like checking emails, sorting them, editing the site and
reading facebook/twitter messages get deprioritized to later parts of the day.
5.
Time box your tasks
Time boxing refers to boxing your tasks
within fixed time slots. For example, boxing task A from 9-10:30am, then task B
from 10:30-1pm, then task C from 2-4pm. Time boxing is good because it prevents
your task from dragging on and on. There’s a saying that your work will take
however long that you want it to, and I find it’s very true. Ever have a
project deadline where you need to burn the midnight oil to get the work done?
Most of us usually feel that we wouldn’t need to rush like that if the deadline
was later on. Fact is, it doesn’t matter when the deadline is. Even if it’s 1
week later, 2 weeks later or 1 month later, the same last minute rush will
still take place before. We take that long to do the work because that’s the
timeline we give ourselves.
Hence, time box your tasks. If you set a
specific time period and strictly adhere to it, you will find a way to get the
work done. Of course, set a time that is challenging yet achievable. If a task requires 3 hours, don’t set
4 hours because you will use up all the 4 hours. Set 3 hours – preferably
lesser so you can learn to optimize your output during the period (again, provided
you enforce the time box strongly).
Of course, it may be hard for the neurotic
perfectionists among us to limit the time spent, because that’ll result in a
compromise in quality. That goes to our next principle, which is…
6.
Use the 80/20 rule
80/20 refers to the phenomenon where 80% of
the outputs is brought about by 20% of efforts. The remaining 20% of the output
can only be achieved by putting in 80% effort.
So let’s say you have a report due, and to
produce the absolute best report you are capable of, you need about 100 hours.
80/20 rule says that you can get 80% of the quality in by spending 20 hours
(20% of 100 hours). On the other hand, the finishing touches to boost this
report from a 80% to 100% quality requires you to spend 80 hours (80% of the
time). From effectiveness standpoint, that doesn’t cut it at all. 80/20 rule
tells us to just get the 80% quality in and chuck the remaining 20% since the
time needed doesn’t justify the increment in value we get.
Hence, by the 80/20 rule, we have to learn to
let go of the nitty gritty. Forget the little details that no one but you
notices. You can keep revising something to perfection, but that time is
probably better spent working on a whole new task. The key is to focus your
energy on producing the 80% of every thing you do – which is also the 80% that
matters. Draw a mental cut off limit and let go of everything that lies outside
of the limit.
7.
Have a separate list for incoming tasks
If you’re like me, you are going to get a
whole streaming list of random, miscellaneous tasks to do throughout the whole
work day. I used to give attention to these things when they come immediately.
Say extra task # 1 comes in now, I’ll do it immediately since it takes just
5-10 minutes. This is the same for extra task # 2, #3…. all the way to #15.
After a while, I realized these things take a lot of my time and I don’t even
get any meaningful result out of them. Not only that, I never get to
finish my real work for the day because I’m so busy with the random stuff. I
may think I’m being very productive when I finish them, but truth is it’s just
fake productivity.
So nowadays, I just use a separate list for
these urgent tasks. I dump all the incoming tasks into the list and focus on my
daily goals list. Then at the end of the day, I allocate a time slot to clear
these tasks. I batch the similar urgent tasks, then clear them at one go. Turns
out I’m always able to get them cleared less than an hour, compared to the few
hours I’d have taken if I attended to them in the day.
8.
Upgrade your skills
Our limitations in output come from
limitations in our own skill level. Upgrade your skills and you will increase
your output. It’s like updating our computer software with newer versions so we
can create more. Our skillsets are our tools that help us create. We need
better tools to create better materials.
For example, now that I want to write an
average of a new article a day, I need to learn to maintain/increase the same
quality of writing as before, while writing in lesser time. In preparation of
that, I’m reading more A-List personal development blogs (to be more in-tuned
with A-list writings) and writing blogs like Copyblogger and Write To Done to pick up
writing techniques/skills. These will undoubtedly help me to write faster.
What key skills do you use in your work? How
can you upgrade them to become more productive?
9.
Know your motivation triggers
You know how there are times when we are
really inspired to work, where other times we’ll feel like a total sloth? It’s
normal. The sloth-like times come when we lose touch with our inner muse. If
you are aware of your motivational triggers, you can connect with them and
jumpstart your productivity.
For example, I’m usually inspired to work on
my blog, and I find I’m even more inspired knowing I have a target to achieve
(such as achieving X subscribers by the month), or when there’s (friendly)
competition (benchmarking my traffic against larger personal development
blogs), or when there’s a cause bigger than me (recognizing that there are many
people out there who stand to gain from my articles). When I sieve out these
triggers and integrate them with my daily life – such as subscribing to the
feed of those A-list blogs, having open communication channels with my readers
(comments area, facebook, twitter, email) and talking to fellow bloggers, my
momentum increases dramatically. It becomes an upward spiral that reinforces
itself.
How about you? What are your motivational
triggers? When were the times when you felt inspired? How can you integrate
these triggers into your daily life to reinforce your motivation? Doing this
will definitely boost up your productivity.
10.
Utilize time pockets
The time pockets refers to the little pockets
of time you have in between one event to the next. Time pockets usually appear
during waiting / traveling times, such as waiting for buses / trains,
commuting, waiting for appointments to start, etc. Have some ready activities
to be done during the time pockets. You will be amazed at how much can be done
in just a short amount of time. Some activities I do include listening to self
help podcasts and typing my articles on my laptop. Usually I make sure I get a
seat on the bus by taking the earlier buses. In a 40-minute journey, I can get
about 20% of my articles typed in a 40 minute bus journey, or about 400~500
words. That’s a good amount of work done compared to if I just slept on the
trip.
11.
Hold yourself accountable to your targets
Progress tracking is essential to know how
you are doing. We can be frantically working to up our productivity but if we
know there’s no accountability, at some point we’re going to slow down. I have
a weekly review with myself every Saturday morning, where I review my progress
in my goals the week before. If I met my goals, I give myself a big hug and pat
on the back. If I didn’t, I understand what went wrong. Then from there, I plan
out my action plan for the next week to achieve next week’s goals. These weekly
goals ladder up to the monthly goals at the end of the month, where I do a
monthly review.
12.
Wake up early
This may be specific to individuals, but I’ll
just share this as it’s true for me. Waking up early really does make me work
faster and better. Personally I don’t think there’s any scientific rationale
behind waking up early and being more productive. I think it’s more of a
psychological feel-good factor – Since you are up before 99.99% of the world,
you want to maintain the lead, so that spurs you on to work fast. When you work
fast, you finish more things, and that motivates you to maintain the lead and
do even more stuff.
Another reason why waking up early helps is
because the quietness in the morning is a conducive environment to get more
done. I love being up early (5am) and hearing absolutely nothing in my
neighborhood. The birds have not even broken into song yet, cars are not
on the road and my family isn’t up either. Perfect time to get things done.
13.
Remember To Rest
We are not machines or robots. We can’t
sustain the same output endlessly without rest. When the time comes, we need to
rest/sleep to recover our energy, so we can continue on the next day. Remember,
it’s about quality of work produced, not quantity of hours spent. I find that
when I choose to continue on when I’m tired, I’m still able to produce stuff,
but at a dismal pace. When I get my rest though, I can get a lot more done,
even though the total number of hours spent is actually lesser.
Celestine Chua
https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/13-strategies-to-jumpstart-your-productivity.html
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