11 Productivity Tactics to Work Smarter, Harder, and with More Impact
There’s an old quote, “work smarter, not harder”. The idea is fairly straightforward: spend your time wisely, and strategically, and you’ll be able to conserve your strength and energy.
At a startup, a better phrase would be “work smarter, and harder, and faster, and longer, please”. Building a business from the ground up is a near impossible task, and it requires founders and early employees to tap into previously undiscovered reserves of productivity and self-management.
Pulling this off isn’t easy, but doing so successfully can have tremendous rewards. Leveraging fewer people to do more work can lead to remarkable growth and value for a company, as Facebook below demonstrates:
The lazy way to do this is to just work more hours in a day. While work will naturally bleed into the mornings, evenings and weekends in a startup, prioritizing work at the expense of time with your family, or rest, consistently, is unsustainable (and will jeopardize an important stabilizing force when you’ve chosen an unstable career).
So how can you optimize the finite amount of hours you have in a day to accomplish the most? Productivity and personal development is not only a hobby of ours at Bootkik, in fact, our entire business revolves around it (more on that in the upcoming months)! We’ve done a deep dive into the productivity tactics and methodologies that are the most effective, and have battle-tested each of the following. Here are 11 of the best productivity hacks to help you leverage your time and energy for greater impact, shared by various members of the Bootkik team.
Work in the Right Direction
Leighton Healey
I define working productively as doing high-impact work that clearly aligns to strategic priorities, well. The first step to being productive is the take the time to determine where you are going. You could earn your black belt in productivity and still fail if you are not working in the right direction. Even the smallest organizations should have time alloted to annual, monthly, weekly and daily strategic planning time to evaluate progress, determine milestones, recalibrate the route, and set objectives.
Related to this is the ability to avoid the alluring song of the ‘busy work’ sirens. There is a big difference between working in an impactful manner and working in a compulsive busy matter. There is no shortage of busy-work, or what I like to call ‘productive procrastination’. Many people confuse movement with progress. The best swimmers and runners make the most progress with the least amount of movement, they calibrate their movements to ensure all form and action aligns to the ultimate task, forward motion, where ‘forward’ aligns to a clear finish line.
Real-Time Brain Dump
Travis Martin
I have a horrible memory, and when I was younger and less organized, I would commit to things I genuinely wanted to do, but then forget about them entirely. When work got busy, or if I was responsible for a project with many moving parts, I would become easily stressed out, often feeling like I was drowning and not in control of my work.
I’ve eliminated both of these issues with a Real-Time Brain Dump. I always have a notepad (analog or digital) and my Asana easily accessible. Whenever I randomly remember something I need to accomplish the next week, or a conversation I need to have, I immediately stop what I’m doing and jot it down. Then daily (if not throughout the day), I am consulting my Asana and notepad to follow up and turn these ideas or passing thoughts into reality.
This practice not only ensures I’m able to stay focused with my time and do what I say I will do, it gives me more peace of mind when I’m resting. One of the greatest sources of stress for me is worrying that I will forget something important, whether that be a coffee meeting, deadline, or tiny detail. Documenting these thoughts, the second they occur, allows me to quickly move past them and back to whatever I was doing beforehand.
Weekly Forecasting
Cody Giles
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and like you can never catch up, you likely don’t have a time management problem, you have a priority management problem. No one should be so brash that they think they can manage time, it’s just not going to happen. If we want to get faux-philosophical: you do not manage time, it manages you. I think I saw that in a fortune cookie somewhere…
The key is to not plan your tasks day-by-day, but to plan them out by week. You may plan every day out to a T, but things have a habit of springing up without notice, causing tasks or projects to be put on hold. This can be demotivating when you were focused on getting that thing checked off that day. When looking at things from a week’s perspective, it frees up the pressures and makes it easier to adapt. Like Travis, I use a notepad app for my brain dump, to capture ideas/to-do’s throughout my day, anything and everything. If it’s urgent, I’ll book it in my calendar right away but if it’s something that’s important but not urgent I wait until the evening to add it into Trello, a project management app. Every Sunday, I set a chunk of time to plan out my week using pen and a weekly planner and Trello. I then book in these tasks into my calendar. This is the most important part. You need to set the specific time to do what you set out to do. Then every evening I see what got completed, what didn’t, and adjust their status in Trello and my planner.
This strategy has benefited me greatly and is a great foundation to setting up a good routine which further complements productivity.
Daily Meditation
Laura Gosselin
When working at a startup or running your own business, it’s important to set yourself up for the right mindset every day and every week. Ironically, taking time to slow down can actually make you more productive. No matter how busy you are, there’s always time to take care of yourself.
Boosting your productivity can be a simple as 10 mins of meditation every day. Plenty of studies show how helpful the practice of mindfulness and meditation can be helpful for your daily stress, well-being and focus.
Practically, what does this look like? I set my day off right by meditating when I wake up in the morning, and then again right before I go to bed. 10 mins is a minimum, but I strive for 20–30 mins. After only 30 days, I guarantee you will notice a difference in your ability to focus, to be objective of your emotions and get stuff done!
Adopt the ‘Old Person Bedtime’
Leighton Healey
To pursue a coast-to-coast North American market, your schedule needs to be able to accommodate 8:00 am calls and video conferences from EST to PST. Living and working in Calgary, AB, Canada MST, being fresh as daisies for an 8:00 am EST call requires a 5:00am or 5:30 am wake up time. To make this happen sustainably, it means my bedtime falls between 9:00pm — 10:00pm Sunday night — Thursday night. Take it from me, the ‘4-hours of sleep badge of honour’ that some brag about gets old, and is not sustainable when the cognitive complexity of your work and decisions escalate. I did my homework, tried a decade or so of entrepreneurship on no sleep, and now commit to 7–8 hours of sleep per night. There is much more that could be said about the connection between good sleep and productive work, but all I will add is that one of the great deterrents to working productively is unresolved distress (not to be confused with eustress, or ‘good stress’).
Stress is an ever present variable in the equation of building a business. When your body experiences stress, it releases a hormone called cortisol. Unresolved heightened cortisol levels in your body lead to weight gain, memory loss, heart disease, paranoia, decreased resilience etc. The good news is, that of the three most effective ways to burn cortisol, right up at the top is ‘good sleep’. So, if your response to this tip to go to bed earlier is summoning up your 6 year old self declaring ‘I don’t wanna!’, just think of an early bed time as doing the productive work of burning that impressive amount of cortisol you’ve generated today.
Starting the Day Off Right
Sarah Delaquis
“How you wake up sets the tone for your entire day.”
I am an overthinker, and in the past it has put me on the path to many sleepless nights, anxious days, and awful headaches. I would often take on way too much, burden myself with other people’s issues, and spend way too much time living in the future, not the present.
Over time, I have developed an early morning routine that not only makes me feel better but also centers me. Each morning (regardless of the day or night before) I wake up with intention. I take my first 20–30 minutes awake for a workout, journaling, or sitting in as much silence as possible. I focus on all the things I’m thankful for, and what I can do to improve where I am and how I’m feeling.
This practice has given me the ability to live in the present moment of each day, adjust my daily activities for more productivity, and have a generally open and calm mindset. If you don’t have 20–30 minutes, I’d encourage you to just take 10 — — how you feel at the beginning of your day seeps into every other aspect of your life.
Eliminate Distractions
Travis Martin
I’ve worked hard to make my iPhone as unattractive as possible. Most of the fun time-suck apps like Facebook or news readers are gone, and I’ve switched my screen to greyscale to make it less visually appealing.
Phones can be an incredible productivity tool, but my temptation was to use them as an unproductivity tool instead. A scary compulsion to pick up my phone every five minutes to refresh my Instagram feed would distract me from work I actually wanted to accomplish. Even once I had closed Twitter or Reddit, it would take me a few minutes to get dialled in again, leading to more lost time.
There are plenty of third-party resources on desktop and mobile to help you eliminate distractions, and I’d encourage you not to think of these as a crutch, but instead a tool like any other that helps you focus on what’s important. From Bootkik’s Cody: “I had a weird mental hurdle I had to get over where I felt if I needed an external tool to monitor my behaviour, then I was in some way admitting defeat. After some meditation I asked myself ‘who or what am I admitting defeat to? And why am I concerned about that?’ Once I took a more realistic approach to my strengths and limitations, my productivity skyrocketed!”
Tackle Tomorrow Today
Sarah Delaquis
It’s a long running joke with my friends and family that I make lists for my lists and I organize my organization. I’ve always enjoyed planning — — from planning my days, to events or trips. For many though, planning is a chore and can be very overwhelming, so they just wing it. If this describes you, I have one simple daily suggestion which will improve your productivity, no questions.
Every morning, before going to bed, take 5–7 minutes to organize the next day. Pack your lunch, pick your clothes, make sure you have tomorrow’s calendar up to date and make a list of anything you may forget. This has helped make my mornings less rushed, by taking these simple steps to prepare for the next day I can enjoy my morning coffee, get a few small odd jobs around the house done and be out the door in less of a rush. It’s hard to predict what will pop up during the week but my evening routine is a life saver!
Biological Prime Time
Travis Martin
I learned about this idea first from the book The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey. Everybody is wired differently, some of us are night owls, others are early birds. Regardless, we’re all more productive at some points in the day, and less productive during others.
What I hadn’t done, before reading this book, is consciously chronicle when those times were, and then schedule my highest impact activities during that time (referred to as my Biological Prime Time).
Personally, I am the most productive between about 530am until 1130am (then I get hungry and all I can think about is food). Spending this time in standing meetings, replying to e-mails, or other administrative/maintenance tasks is a waste of when I’m at my most creative.
Your Biological Prime Time (BPT) should be reserved for the work that only you can uniquely accomplish, and creative problem-solving or strategic work. I save all my abstract thinking for my BPT, identifying possible solutions to whatever challenges I’m dealing with, and the steps needed to make it a reality. Once my energy levels begin to dip, I can switch into implementing these pre-defined tasks easily, because the hard work was already done in the morning.
Optimize Your Environment
Brandon Healey
A few years ago, I stumbled on an article that referenced Bruce K. Alexander’s famous addiction study called ‘Rat Park.’ I was shocked by the conclusions of the study. The study highlighted how living conditions and environment largely dictate one’s ability to make positive choices. The conclusion? To make any significant change to your life, you must change your environment.
Changing your environment can mean a revamping your office layout, swapping out food in your cupboards, or trying to live more minimally.
Want to stop spending all your free time watching television? Sell your television. Do you have a hard time avoiding that tasty bakery between the gym and your house? Find a new route home.
In an effort to increase my productivity and limit screen time over the summer, I decided to take the TV off my wall and disconnected the internet at home. Now, if I need to work on my computer or want to watch a movie I’m forced to head to a cafe, or catch a movie with friends. Both of which are much healthier choices than binge watching Netflix alone. In the dark. When it’s beautiful outside.
Are you trying to be more productive in your life, but don’t know how to make significant progress? Consider changing your environment.
Say ‘No’, Often.
Leighton Healey
Life becomes more complicated as you get older, and scaling a human-led organization certainly adds a compounding effect. A parent’s early counsel to ‘say no to bad choices, and yes to good choices’ becomes less functional when there appear to be numerous ‘right choices’, ‘paths to success’, endless events and ‘appealing opportunities’.
In a startup, distractions and non-priorities have a cunning ability to disguise themselves as promising opportunities. Making significant progress requires you to hone your ability to say ‘no’ to good things, that are not aligned to immediate priorities, daily.
Take ‘no’ for a test drive: “Great idea, though it’s not aligned to our current priorities at this time, so no”.
Bonus Quick Tips:
- Get an adblocker: Sometimes you’re required to browse around the internet for work — eliminating as many distractions as possible is key to being effective.
- Invest in high-quality productivity tools: a fast computer and capable cell phone with long battery life, even a reliable pen makes a huge difference over time. Nothing is more irritating to have your tools fail and interrupt your train of thought. This allows you to save your willpower and emotional energy for battles worth fighting!
- Find music that focuses you: songs with lyrics can be distracting (especially if you have an inner karaoke star that needs to be unleashed). Movie scores, classical music, or EDM can easily blend into the background while you work.
- Use separate profiles for separate roles: Create different accounts for work and personal activity on your laptop. This keeps your Slack messages from bleeding into your free time and your Facebook messages from bleeding into your productive time.
Additional Reading:
- The Productivity Project — Chris Bailey
- Smarter, Better, Faster — Charles Duhigg
- Willpower Doesn’t Work — Benjamin Hardy
Everybody’s journey towards increased productivity likely features a series of experiments, some successful, some not. I hope that this post has given you a few more experiments to run that will allow you to focus, and better leverage your time and energy, to accomplish more meaningful work.
I’m curious, what productivity hacks or tactics have you implemented in your routine, and what impact has it had on your workflow? Comment below, and I will try adding them to mine!
