5 Ways That 10 Seconds Can Buy Back An Hour of Your Time
Are you always trying to be more productive?
Are you always looking to get that extra hour out of your day, or make one footstep travel a mile? We are too.
We are constantly trying to optimize our time, our productivity, our output. It’s core to our company, but only because it’s core to who we are.
So in the act of trying to optimize every output we have, we would like to pass on some of the things we’ve learned. Check out the 5 ways we at Spectafy optimize our time and lives below!
1. Eat a quick and easy nutritious breakfast
Bonus points for pre-sorting!
It’s pretty straight-forward, we are always more productive when we have a nutritious and enriching breakfast. We also hate making breakfast because it’s morning, and we naturally don’t like mornings. So what happens? We don’t give our body what it needs, we rush things, we cut corners, and we eat cereal.
Don’t do that.
10 more seconds of your time could make you 10x more productive with a better breakfast that is more nutritionally sound that will boost your physical performance and mental clarity.
You can easily make eggs, as Tim Ferriss shows in this video, in 3 minutes. A ton of protein, healthy fats, hours of energy and complete mental clarity.
As mentioned before, it’s a lot easier to get things done when you sort everything out before going to bed the night before. Put everything together in an organized spot that you can easily bring together and prepare in the morning.
2. Prioritize your tasks, and use tasks better
Spend extra time prioritizing tasks as they come up.
Assign tasks to individual times on individual days, instead of leaving them in an open queue. Keeping a huge queue of tasks makes all tasks ripe for procrastination.
Break down the really effective tasks using the 80/20 principle, tackle those up front, and make sure you have at least 1 big task and 2 small tasks each day. Start first thing on a big task, try to knock it out up-front and get in to a “flow.” Then the rest of the tasks don’t seem as daunting.
Partition tasks up over the course of a week, and have a “today” task list that you actively work off of. As more tasks come in schedule them out for days that either don’t have as much associated to them, or are just further out.
Use the “2 bad pages a day” adage from Tim Ferriss that he takes when writing his books. Tim focuses on being able to write 2 “bad pages” a day, which lowers the expectations so much that it doesn’t feel threatening to get to work. Getting to work is the big struggle. Once he gets to work he doesn’t want to stop, and he will get in a flow, and before you know it 15 pages have been put to ink.
The approach should always be to break down procrastination, procrastination is the enemy.
Break down tasks, prioritize tasks, schedule tasks, and just get started.
Belle Beth Cooper from Buffer also wrote a great in-depth post on the Zapier blog about prioritizing tasks, we really recommend you read it.
3. Actually use your calendar
A few seconds taken to add your appointments can take minutes away from searching through past email items.
We all have calendars on our phones, we have calendars on our project management tools, but sometimes they are the most neglected part of our productivity arsenal. Never leave an appointment unscheduled. This is also an easy way of seeing at-a-glance which days you’re busy, which days you have free, and when you really need to focus in on work.
By try not to leave a task un-assigned to a date (as mentioned above) you will be able to plan your days far easier, you will be able to use your calendar as a task list, and you won’t procrastinate as much. When you assign tasks for certain days you will naturally give yourself only what you know you can handle in a day, so your task list won’t look terrifying each day.
Calendars have vast potential, we just don’t use them as effectively as we could be. Apps like Zapier also help automate a lot of functions between our calendar and the products we use to interact with them.
4. Work hard in increments without distraction, then indulge in mini-breaks
Using techniques like the Pomodoro Timer you can increase the amount of productivity you have in 25 minutes by always being in a “flow” during your work.
By using a great technique called the Pomodoro Technique you can break your work activity up in to 25 minute increments, in that 25 minutes you may also need to block out any distractions by using apps like AntiSocial and other tools. AntiSocial and other tools like it focus on blocking out distractions of social networking sites, and limiting the focus of your projects to a single frame that you’re consciously working on in the moment. This reduces the amount of time you spend bouncing around between tabs and getting side tracked for a few minutes at a time that add up to hours of sporadic procrastination.
The Pomodoro Timer enables you to spend 25 minutes completely un-adulterated, and focused on the moment and the task at hand. Then once the 25 minutes is up, take a break, go breathe and walk around, go to the bathroom for five minutes of peace and quiet, then get back to work with another Pomodoro Timer. This has been proven to increase productivity in the workplace. Our bingeing during breaks frees up the urge to procrastinate during our flow time.
5. Automate most of your normal online activity
Again using tools like Zapier and IFTTT you can break up a lot of the things you already do online and automate them using triggers.
Say you usually post every blog post a certain blog publishes, just set an RSS “zap” or “trigger” to Buffer and it will push it out all of your social channels.
You want the scores of each game on ESPN as they’re developing, set up a trigger to text you via SMS when the score is updated for an NFL or NBA game.
There are literally hundreds of different things you can automate. Setting up the triggers might take 10–30 seconds, but may save you minutes and hours of checking and updating.
We use these kind of tools religiously to automate a lot of the tedious stuff we just don’t want to deal with throughout the day, or to make it more convenient for us to use tools in a different way.
All together
The focus is on automation, efficiency, and simply getting the most out of your time. This usually comes from organizing things on a systematic and routine level.
Make good routines a subconscious habit, and always keep looking for more things to help you along the way.
