We live in an age of abundance. There’s too much of everything today – too many commitments, too much work, too much information – too much stuff pulling our head from every direction. The only thing we don’t have is: time. One great challenge we face today is to find time for everything, for all the various activities life throws at us, from day to day chores, to stuff we’ve taken upon by ourselves, to stuff given to us by others, all stuff we cannot run away from. If all we have is 24 hours, how do we cram all this work into it? How can we make the best use of the 24 hours given to us? In other words, how can we be most productive?
Books, audio & video are already available on this topic, & the internet is full with tips & tricks, then why double dip again? Why write again? Because there is too much of ‘best’ advice out there, and we know we don’t have time to follow all the advice outlined in those places. I hopped onto this ‘productivity’ bandwagon a couple of years back and found through experience that some tips worked better than others. The most important tips which made a difference in my life are:
- Have Goals – We all know the saying “goals are dreams with deadlines” but seldom practice it. Break your goals to yearly, monthly, weekly resolutions/action items/tasks. Instead of having “get in shape” as a goal, resolve to “go to gym atleast thrice a week” – it is clear and specfic. Once set just focus on these small chunks of the goal – with one step at a time, we can eat an elephant too.
- Set deadlines – Have you ever noticed when we are pressured to deliver work in unrealsitic deadlines, we tend to complete the work more often than when we have enough time to do it? I find it true especially when I write for this blog. I think I need atleast 4 days to come up with decent content but then I procrastinate till the last moment and end up writing the post in 4 hours. I ask myself if I need 4 hours or 4 days to do my work? Set a deadline and push yourself to meet it. We don’t need all the time we claim we need to get our work done.
- Know your body – I’m a night owl. I like working in the night. When do you like working? What’s your working style? I can work only in short intervals with a break every 90 minutes. How about you? When are you most rested? When most distracted? When are you active? When are you tired? When are you energetic? Play your strengths, know your body & energy patterns and schedule work accordingly.
- Sleep well – There’s a raging debate everywhere on how many hours one should sleep. 4 hours? 8 hours? The answer: Experiment. For two weeks don’t sleep with any alarm, just sleep when you feel fall asleep and get up naturally, ask nobody to disturb you. Make a note of the sleep timing & your moods every day. After the two weeks, check the intervals: When did you feel irritated? When did you feel relaxed? When did you feel enough? How many hours did you sleep that day? That’s your magic number.
- Setup routines – Tony Schwartz, the CEO of The Energy Project and the author of “The Power of Full Engagement” has been very vocal of our need to have as many ritualize/routines as we can in our daily lives. He goes on to say that we all have a reservoir of will and discipline, which gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. Rituals – highly specific behaviors, done at precise times, which eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline to monitor 1 – free us from using our will power to do even the most mundane of works, freeing up our mind to do the heavier lifting. So, setup routines – for mornings, evenings, commute, and for any other regular time we have in our day2.
- Eliminate distractions – If working from home, lock the door and hang a ‘do not disturb’ sign; if online, close all unwanted tabs & apps, no email, no IM; if no need to be online turn off the wifi; turn off phone & text; if a couch potatoe – turn off the TV. With less to distract, there is enough time to do stuff that matters.
- Create chunks of time – This method is a little similar to Pomodoro technique. Create chunks of uninterrupted time for 45-60 minutes and aim to do only work in that time without any distractions. Schedule seperate time for play. It is better to have seperate dedicated time only for work and only for breaks than mixing both and ending up neither completely productive nor completely relaxed. I prefer to work in 90 minute ‘focus sessions’ and break for 30 minutes. (Research suggests 90 minutes is the optimal limit for focusing intensely on a task.3) With clear cut chunks of time, focus can be harnessed to drive quality of work.
- Don’t multitask – No matter how much todays culture loves people who can handle multitask, I found it to be counter productive – it reduced the quality of my work. Try concentrating on two tasks at a time. We can’t. If you notice closely, when we move our concentration from task 1 to task 2, we can only think about task 2 and not 1, and vice versa. The only thing which happens here is that this switching of tasks hampers the quality of what the work since we are not concentrating properly on one task. So, next time when you are tempted to send an email to a client while on call with a friend, hold back and do only one thing – because it is the only way to do it well.
- Write it down – Our brain is not a good place to remember stuff. It can be put to better use than remembering grocery lists and meeting appointments. Always have a capture tool with you and track all your commitments, appointments, to-dos on a paper or in a digital system you can look into regularly. Writing frees the mind to concentrate on doing the work rather than trying to remember what needs to be done.
- Have a Productivity system: Be it GTD or Covey’s Focus model or a simple to-do list, have a system in place and keep it current – update and review it on a regular basis. I’ve time and again in this blog stressed the importance of a weekly review where I process all the open loops in my mind and plan my coming week. Having such a system helps us a lot in the heat of the battle, when I’m not in a position to think about my next steps.
- Think via Contexts: Divide your to-do list into contexts. Contexts are nothing but categories to assign to our tasks to better manage them. Some tasks need you to be at a particular place to be done like office, home; some need a particular tool like a phone, computer; some need the presence of an individual; so once all tasks are assigned with contexts, depending on the time we have, place we are in, tool we have or the energy we have left, we can filter our task list and get appropriate work done.
- Clear to neutral: This is a very useful tip I picked up from asian efficiency blog. It simply means whenever we finish an activity, we need to move everything back to its neutral position. That is, after we’ve done our main activity, we need do this post-activity work to set everything up so its ready for the next time. Doing so reduces friction when we sit down to work next time. Ex: once done eating, washing the dishes; when closing for the day, cleaning our desk.
- A place for everything & everything in its place: Order is the antidote to overwhelm. We all need to have systems in place to help us find what we need when we need it. Not knowing where our stuff is, is a time waste and searching for it dilutes our focus on the work at hand. Do you know where you keep your keys? Bills? Tax documents? Can you find them easily? We should be able to quickly locate the information we need and the best way is by ensuring every possession we have has a home, and by putting it back in its original place after we use it.
- Do – The only way stuff is going to go away is by doing it and discipline is the only way to get things done. Editing, thinking, planning, preparing – none of this is actual work. Having state-of-the-art productivity systems with multiple to-dos will not help in getting any thing done if we never act. We need to overcome resistance towards work and focus on actually ‘doing’ something to move the issue to closure. In short, as Nike says, “Just do it”.
- Schedule downtime– We are all stressed today and one aspect we overlook is giving time to ourselves. We need to remember that we employ productivity techniques to improve the quality of life. It is very important to have some time to relax – schedule it if neccessary – not to read any book, or catch up on instapaper, or email, or IM, but just to have unstructured time – to do nothing – to stop and smell the roses. Because, if we are too busy, too occupied with filled calendars and crammed todo lists, we miss out on life.The real key is to remember that productivity is a tool and that the ultimate goal is quality of life.4
Footnotes:
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