5 Counterintuitive Ways To Be More Productive (that actually work)

What are some things that come to mind when you think about productivity tips?

Create a to-do list. Do the hardest task first. Don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today. Block time on your calendar to complete each task.

While these tactics are fine, they aren’t always effective.

How do we know the standard advice doesn’t always work? According to research by VoucherCloud, the average employee in the United Kingdom is productive for only two hours and 23 minutes each day. Statistics for workers in the United States don’t fare any better. Most workers follow the standard advice, yet it doesn’t seem to make them any more productive.

We’ve been hearing the same tired productivity advice for years. While these tips may work at times, we need to be flexible enough to take different approaches when the moment warrants.

Here are some counterintuitive tricks you can try to increase your productivity.

1. Do the Easiest Task First

The typical advice to do the hardest thing first, an approach known as “Eat That Frog,” a phrase coined by Brian Tracy in his classic productivity book of the same name, is often flawed.

Sometimes it’s best to knock out the lowest limb on the tree to get momentum going before working on the hardest thing. If you start with the most challenging task, it has the potential to take a lot of time and energy and could crowd out everything else on your list.

When you get momentum going with a relatively easy task, you’ll feel an immediate sense of accomplishment which will help you gain momentum toward working on that next, more challenging task.

2. Do it Tomorrow

Unless that task is high on your priority list, take any new, incoming task and put it on tomorrow’s list.

According to research conducted at the University of California, Irvine, employees are interrupted approximately every three minutes and five seconds.

If you continually stop to respond to every incoming request that comes your way, you will never maintain the momentum required to complete priority tasks.

So, unless something comes in that’s critical and ranks higher than what is on your list for today, put it off until tomorrow and don’t give it another thought.

3. Create a Not-To-Do List

Who doesn’t use a to-do list? To some degree, we all write down tasks that need to be done. But, ostensibly, we never seem to complete all of them.

Instead of focusing critical resources on all the things that need to be done on a to-do list, focus instead on stripping out as many non-critical items as possible.

How do we do this? Create a Not-To-Do List.

Popularized by famed author and entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss, the Not-To-Do List is a repository for all those things in our lives that distract us from what is truly important.

For instance, Ferriss recommends never answering telephone calls from unknown numbers. Besides interrupting you in the middle of your work, unknown callers do not allow you to be prepared for the incoming request — thus depleting you of the necessary energy and attention needed for your priority tasks. Let such calls go to voicemail, and let the messages determine how you handle the requests.

By writing down things you won’t do, your actual to-do list becomes shorter, and your attention will be more focused.

4. Don’t Block Time off for Tasks

The standard advice is to schedule X amount of time to work on a project or task.

Supposedly this advice is designed to help you better manage your time and ensure you have enough time to complete a task without distractions.

However, unless you know with certainty a task is going to take 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, or some other increment of time, you may be blocking off far too much time or far too little time.

Be more open-ended with how long it will take a task to complete.

5. Don’t Take Breaks

I’m not suggesting you never take a break — good luck trying to do that, even if you wanted to.

What I am suggesting is that if you have a big task at hand, and it requires your utmost focus, then it’s best to guide all of your attention and energy toward that one item to complete it efficiently and effectively.

By taking breaks, you break up your energy, and it will drain more of it to get started again once your break is over.

By all means, if you are truly drained, take a break. Otherwise, if you have the energy and focus, stop setting arbitrary 25-minute Pomodoro timers or one-hour stretch breaks and just power through until the task is complete.

The Bottom Line

In life, we have to know the rules. They exist for a reason, and often the reasons are good.

However, by keeping an open mind, we can identify the moments when breaking the rules can be more effective than following them.

When it comes to productivity, one size does not fit all. If the standard advice isn’t working for you, feel free to break the rules and try some counterintuitive approaches. Who knows? You might find yourself finally getting to the bottom of that endless to-do list.