If you ask almost anyone what they’ve been doing lately, they will tell you they have been busy or possibly even super busy.
However, it is easy to see that many people achieve much more in a day than others.
How do some hyper-performers get so much more done than others in the same 24 hours?
As someone who is truly a master of wasting time on mindless activities and wondering where my day went, I am also a student here in learning how to be more productive.
I have assembled a few tips, tricks, hacks, and habits here to help all of us actually accomplish the goals we have in the next days, weeks, and years.
First and very most important:
SCHEDULE EVERYTHING YOU DO IN YOUR CALENDAR.
Read that as many times as you need until it is seared into your brain.
Whatever you schedule is what is important to you (Did that sting a little? Yeah me too).
If you are going to go to the gym, a meeting, work, or anything else then schedule it.
Want a better relationship with your spouse and kids?
Schedule some time for them in your calendar.
It seems too simple and tedious, but achievers and overachievers have meticulous calendar schedules and they follow it to the letter.
If you have open time on your calendar, it will somehow get filled with nonsensical time-wasting activity.
This leads into what is called “living with purpose”.
People will fight this and say well, “What if I just want to sit on the couch and watch “Stranger Things” in Netflix for two hours?”
Why can’t you schedule that in?
If you want to do something spontaneous, then schedule in a time block to be spontaneous.
This is how effective people get so much done in a day.
Okay, so what else?
The rest of this is helpful, but not near as important as what is written in bold above.
The diagram below is what is called the Eisenhower Matrix.
There are 4 quadrants there that everything in your day fits into:
- important and urgent
- important and not urgent
- not important but urgent
- not important and not urgent
People who are effective spend the majority of their day in quadrants 1 and 2.
They do what is important.
Too many of us spend time doing what is urgent but not important and many times what is neither urgent or important (checking my fb posts for likes and comments as I finish this sentence).
You can start planning your day by looking at the tasks for the day and honestly putting them into the quadrants they go in.
This helps to see if some tasks should be done first and which ones to leave until tomorrow if something takes too long or possibly even completely remove it from the list.
The next tip to becoming more productive is to stop multitasking.
I don’t know how many times people have told me that they are good at multitasking, but nobody is.
It takes time to switch thinking from one task to another and the neural pathways that were running for one task are different for another and the back and forth wastes time, destroys quality, and can even cause you to forget an important task or thought.
In fact when possible, remove any and all distractions while working on an important task.
Phones, email, conversations, and even potentially snacks can kill your productivity.
Now, what can you do when you still have work to get done but you feel like your brain is getting foggy, bogged down, or wore out?
There are a few hacks that have been proven to work.
Exercise and light, especially sunlight help to either provide a mental break or reset to the brain.
In fact dark office spaces can confuse your body’s circadian rhythm and make you feel tired for no reason.
Put a light in your office if you need to have that extra light in order to convince your brain that yes indeed it is still the day time.
Obviously, schedule exercise or a walk outside into your day, but these are things that work well; especially when you’ve already had too much caffeine.
A Japanese study said that looking at cute furry animals can also actually help your attention span.
I’m not sure why the study was performed, and how Japanese scientists even started down that road, but you can take a second to look at pictures of kittens or puppies and it should help you get more focus on your task when you go back to it.
I’m just relaying results here ok?
The last thing I want to discuss in this post is meetings.
Meetings at most organizations I have been involved in have been marginally helpful at best.
They are a productivity killer for many organizations and getting input from other participants can be extremely difficult.
Everyone knows that nobody likes a complainer and many people are not confident enough to put a great idea out in front of a large crowd in case there might be something wrong with it.
Smaller meetings are better.
If you can get the group size down to 3-6 people, then you have better participation.
People in small groups are more likely to give input and work together efficiently.
This post is obviously not exhaustive, but just adhering to the very first tip will actually do wonders in the lives of 80% of the population.
It was not my idea.
I just looked at what the ultra-successful do and there is a pattern there.
Thank you for reading.
Phillip Adams