A lack of productivity leads to a lack of happiness. You become anxious and stressed when you can’t see yourself making progress or getting things done. That’s why it’s essential to learn how to be productive.
There are also many things that contribute to unhappiness here: social media notifications, e-mails, texts, and chatty co-workers are just a small fraction of the disruptions we’re bombarded with. These “little things” can stack up fast and hamper your happiness and productivity levels.
Practical Ways to Be More Productive
With only so much time available each day, productivity is essential. Either putting in more time or working smarter is the key to greater results. Managing your time more purposefully isn’t a secret formula, but it can help you become more effective while working.
Implementing even a few time-saving strategies into your routine should help you feel more productive overall.
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Identify Your Time Thieves
We all have time thieves, but most of us haven’t yet identified them. For some of us, it can be the apps on our phones that we scroll through. For others, it can be the bad habit of constantly checking e-mail or spending more time taking breaks than actually working during our peak productivity hours.
If you can identify your biggest time thieves, the activities or situations that throw you off course, distract or interrupt you, or the bad habits that keep you from performing better, you will improve your results much more quickly and learn how to be productive on a daily basis.
Productive people know that eliminating time thieves is key to staying focused in the long run. If you just aim to change one of your worst time management habits, you will change your results immediately.
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Finish Your Day Before It Starts
Proper planning is the secret to peak productivity, and it’s also a good idea to set important goals daily. Get yourself a planning tool and prioritize your daily tasks with it in order to spend your time on important tasks.
If you know exactly what you have to do and the timeframe you want to complete it in, you’ll be well on your way to learning how to be more productive and finish all of your most important tasks during the day.
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Recharge Your Batteries
Figure out how many hours of sleep your body needs and make sure you get it. Take time to stretch, walk, or relax in order to recharge throughout the day and after work.
One study found that the best way to ensure consistent productivity throughout the day is to work for about 50 minutes, followed by a 15-20 minute break.
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Become an Early Riser
This is one of the most underused productivity “hacks” on the planet. Ever since I decided to start waking up at 5 AM every day, my productivity levels and happiness have gone up dramatically.
Most people aren’t up that early, so no one can bother you or disrupt you from what you want to do. A productive person will use this time to exercise, meditate, or get a head start on their day.
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Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
Not much gets accomplished when the mouse is used for repetitive tasks. Keyboard shortcuts are the best technique to increase productivity while surfing the web. With technology’s help, you can double your work efficiency.
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Use Time Blocks
When I wrote this article, I gave myself a one-hour time block. This prevents unnecessary dilly-dallying, like updating your social media and checking your email. Instead, start developing better work habits and manage your time for a more productive day.
There are plenty of apps that can help you do this, or you can simply set an alarm on your phone, so you know when you can take a break and enjoy some free time. During your set time block, do your best to eliminate distractions. Find a quiet space, declutter your desk, and create a short to-do list to keep you on track.
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Celebrate Small Wins
Every time you check off a task from your to-do list, you release a “happy chemical” in your brain called dopamine. This gives you the motivation to move forward and do even more.
For example, after I have finished writing this article and crossed it off my list of things to do today, I’ll get a nice burst of “happy chemicals” released in my brain. The best part? Zero side effects!
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Avoid Interruptions
Interruptions are among the most significant barriers to both productivity and happiness. Every time you’re interrupted in the middle of a task, your level of productivity takes a hit.
We’ve all been there: you’re fully immersed in an important project until suddenly, the workplace chatterbox appears out of nowhere and starts talking about the crazy night they had last weekend. By the time s/he’s gone, you’ve already forgotten where you were, and it takes 30 minutes to get back on track.
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Shut Down the Digital Disruptions
The common time wasters include instant messenger, video games, checking social media, television, and extraneous internet surfing. According to BBC, people spend 4.8 hours on their mobile phones.
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Listen to Podcasts
Audio learning has the power to add hours to your day. Not to mention, your cranium is sure to thank you for it.
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Go on an Information Diet
Most of the world lives on information overload. We must eliminate mindless Internet surfing. Stop reading three different newspapers a day and checking your RSS feeds multiple times a day. Otherwise, you’ll never get anything done.
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Do Work You’re Passionate About
Make it your goal to blur the line between work and play by doing more things you’re passionate about. This promotes happiness both inside and outside of the workplace.
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Leverage Like There’s No Tomorrow
Look for ways to use the 80/20 rule by identifying tasks that you might be able to outsource or leverage out to a virtual assistant. Don’t be afraid to trust others with tasks you believe they can do. They’ll likely be happy for the opportunity, and you’ll feel better about lowering the amount of work you have to get done.
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Focus on Most Important Tasks (MITs) first
You probably didn’t go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — but an MIT can help you be more productive.
The theory behind Most Important Tasks is that any given to-do list has some tasks that are more important than others. If you focus on simply checking off to-do list items, you’ll end up with a mix of important and less important tasks completed.
It also exposes you to the potential for procrastination — it’s easy to spend the whole day checking off easy, less important to-dos instead of buckling down on the hard stuff.
Instead, spend a few minutes at the beginning of your day to choose 1–3 MITs — the things that, no matter what, you need to finish by the end of the day.
With a renewed focus on what’s important, it’s easier to create a meaningful to-do list — make sure the important things get done.
Laura Earnest of Whole Life Productivity had this to say on the importance of prioritization as a productivity habit:
“Let me say that I distinguish between efficient and effective, but that both are needed for peak productivity. Efficient is doing things right and effective is doing the right things. So the most productive people work on the high value tasks, making sure that how they are doing those tasks is the best way.”
I also believe that the most productive people are able to discern which are the high value tasks, and are able to either let the others go or delegate them. It’s not a crazy rush to get everything done, because they recognize that they can’t get everything done.”
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Cultivate deep work
Some tasks are just hard. There’s no substitute for deep work.
Everybody has a few daily to-dos that could be almost be knocked out while sleeping. These are the tasks that you need podcasts to get through — if anything, they’re hard to get yourself to do because they’re not especially interesting.
At the same time, some tasks are just difficult. You can’t multitask your way to finishing them. You need to devote serious time and mental effort to knocking them out of the park. These tasks are called “deep work.”
Cal Newport wrote about this type of work in his bestselling book, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World . Newport argues that the skill of intense focus is increasingly rare—and that those who can master it are at an enormous advantage.
A few of Newport’s recommendations to cultivate deep work are:
- Schedule deep work: Plan deep work into your schedule at a similar time every day, probably in the morning. Having a regular time to do deep work helps you make it a habit.
- Get bored: It sounds counterintuitive to call being bored a productive habit, but being comfortable with boredom is important. Deep work isn’t always enjoyable, and boredom or frustration are what cause us to seek out distractions. Avoid using social media for entertainment as much as possible, and get more comfortable doing nothing.
- Be harder to contact: Email and other distractions can be reduced by asking people who contact you to do more work up front. Ask people to research their questions before coming to you, and provide as much info as possible in their emails. Same goes for you—spending time on communications instead of dashing off a quick email can minimize back and forth.
- Know your work habits: Do you work best in isolation? With periodic breaks? Are you working around a hectic schedule? You don’t need to overhaul your entire schedule—just set aside some time for deep work.
Highly productive people have mastered the skill of deep work.
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Use the Eisenhower Matrix to identify long-term priorities
One of the dangers of productivity is a focus on the short term. As management legend Peter Drucker once said, “there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” When you study productivity habits, it’s easy to fall into that trap.
On any given work day, it’s easy to get caught up in things that seem important right now .
The Eisenhower Matrix, used by Dwight Eisenhower to make decisions during his time as a general, was popularized by Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It helps you to quickly determine what you should work on and what you should ignore.
Organizing your to-do list based on each task’s importance and urgency can help you identify time-sinks that aren’t worth it.
Are you spending most of your day doing things that are urgent but not important? Look for ways to delegate, automate, or eliminate.
Are you spending time on things that aren’t important or urgent? Ignore those things.
Are you making time to work on things that are important but not urgent? If you’re like most people, you could be spending more time in this quadrant. The Eisenhower Matrix makes it easier to see what matters and what doesn’t.
To create an Eisenhower Matrix, make a 2 x 2 square. On one axis, write “important” and “not important.” On the other, “urgent” and “not urgent.”
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Break tasks into smaller pieces
Why do you procrastinate?
There are a variety of reasons that people procrastinate, but one of the most important is that the tasks on their to-do list just seem too daunting.
If you have to-do list items that are large in scope and not very specific, tackling those tasks becomes challenging. You look at the item and think “I don’t even know where to start.”
You can start by breaking large to-dos into smaller to-dos. Set small goals for each task.
If I have a to-do list item labeled “ write a blog post on productivity,” it’s easy to (ironically) put it off — because there are a few different places I could start.
What if I broke that larger task into smaller chunks? Instead of “write a blog about productivity,” an example of my to-do list could be:
- Look up keywords related to productivity and good, efficient habits
- Read the top 10 Google results on productivity
- Brainstorm other methods to become more productive
- Organize the ideas I’ve found or thought of into an outline
- Jot down any specific thoughts on each tactic using bullet points
- Go through my bullet points one at a time, to flesh them out into full sections
