Productivity Hacks

An Extensive Guide to Removing Distractions and Getting Shit Done

Published in

Entrepreneurship, Happiness, Wellness, & Growth

9 min readJun 2, 2014

There’s no shortage of commentary about productivity—it’s important to everyone. We all want to know how we can increase our output. At the risk of being redundant, I’ve decided to throw my own thoughts into the pot.

There are two components to productivity:

Mental Conditioning. (Jumping into action, maintaining focus, and staying disciplined.)
Physical Approach. (Removing distractions, and using various resources and tools to support the mental element.)

Both components are critical. This piece focuses mainly on #2 above—distractions, resources, and tools. The landscape for resources is constantly evolving, but hopefully you’ll find my suggestions useful. If you know of other effective tools or techniques I haven’t mentioned, please feel free to leave a note.

Before figuring out how to streamline our schedules and boost our efficiency, it’s important to understand why we need to make a change in the first place. “There’s just not enough time in the day!” I’ve heard this statement—and felt this way—many, many times. The antithetical expression, “I’ve got all the time in the world,” is far more rare. How can we more consistently experience the sentiment expressed in statement two? How can we get our time back?

Let’s take a moment to understand what’s being said. In the first statement, “There’s just not enough time in the day”, we’re really saying, “I spend the bulk of my day doing Y when I really want to be doing X.” In the second statement, “I have all the time in the world,” we’re really saying, “I have a lot of free time, so I fill it with X, which is what I love to do.”

The key element is the stuff being done to fill the time. In the latter statement, time is still being filled with something, but that thing is something good. The difference between the two scenarios is that the person with all the time in the world feels they have control over their time, while the other person does not. Whenever you feel you have no time, there are two questions you need to ask yourself:

What are all the things I’m currently doing?
What are the things I want to be doing instead of the things I’m doing?

Both questions are equally important. You must take note of all the things you’re doing to determine whether or not you need to keep doing them. But, you must also take note of what you plan to do after you’ve freed up additional time. Without answering #2, you’ll end up staring blankly at a wall. This is bad. Time must be filled with meaningful activity. Dead time is just as torturous as a lack of free time.

When thinking about #1 deeply, most people will realize they can remove or reduce low-value activities to make room for high-value activities. Here’s a list of low-value activities I’ve either reduced considerably, or removed completely from my schedule:

Email
TV
Paying bills
Talking on the phone
Texting / chatting
Commuting / driving
Cooking (weekdays)
Errands / Chores
Shopping
Doing favors
Worrying
Browsing the internet
Reading / watching the news
Researching
Social Networking

I’ve compiled some tips on how to fight back against these common time-wasters. Included with the tips are a bunch of services that might also help. I’ve used most of these services myself. Others, I’ve learned about through friends or research. You should consider these lists as a starting point. Be sure to explore the services yourself and look for alternatives. New and innovative products are being launched every day!

Kill Email

Email is a massive time waster. I’ve reduced my time spent on email by 95%, from roughly twenty hours per week to one hour per week. Here’s how to do it (hat tip to Tim Ferriss on this topic):

Cancel all subscriptions. No more newsletters or daily deals.
Don’t give out your email to third party sites. Create a secondary account for signing up for new services. This significantly reduces spam.
For close contacts, respond to open ended emails with a phone call whenever possible. Phone calls are more personable, and it’s easier to get things done more quickly. You’ll also find that most people don’t pick up, which is great. Leave a message. Done.
Schedule a time to check email once or twice (no more than twice) per day for ten minutes. When you start, set a timer. When the ten minutes are up, you’re done. The rest can wait until tomorrow. When the time is up, be sure to close your email client. Leaving it open will be too tempting. Turn off email notifications on your phone as well, unless you’re expecting important messages.

You’ll find that a lot of catchup can be done on Saturdays. Don’t check email on Sundays if possible. If after using these methods, your email is still piling up, consider outsourcing some of your email to an assistant. You can find virtual assistants (VA’s) overseas for as little as $5 per hour.

If a VA is processing your email for an hour a day at $5 per hour, the cost is about $150 per month. This should cut your workload down considerably and make your personal commitment of ten minutes per day more than manageable. If you’re like me, you’ve just reduced time spent on email from twenty hours per week to one hour per week, a 95% reduction. You’ve gained 19 hours per week, or roughly 75 hours per month. If you’re using a VA and want to look at the cost-to-benefit ratio of this in terms of expenses, you’re getting an additional 75 hours of free time per month for a cost of $150. That’s $2 per hour of free time. Is your time worth more than $2 per hour? I would hope so.

Note that this method is easily customizable. For example, you can decide to check email regularly on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and use the ten minute rule only on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. You can also adjust the ten minute rule to twenty minutes, etc.

To close out this section, the two most important steps in reducing time spent on email are:

Remove lengthy back and forth communication.
Block out a specific time to check email so you’re not doing it constantly throughout the day.

Twitterize Email

Another general email tip—send shorter emails. Try to keep it to 140 characters, a la Twitter. Keeping your message to two or three sentences is a good rule of thumb. This forces you to be concise. The recipient will appreciate it, and it will create less back and forth. If more information is absolutely necessary, put it into a separate document and attach it. This makes it easier to consume the main purpose of the message before jumping into deeper content.

Kill TV

Use TV for movies, sports, and the occasional TV series. Avoid live programming. Use that magical doo-hicky called a DVR to record your favorite programs and watch them later (or use Netflix or Hulu). You should do this for two reasons:

It allows you to take downtime on your schedule, not the schedule of a television network.
It allows you to skip commercials, which can reduce time spent by 30-50%.

As a general rule, just don’t watch TV. 99% of it is garbage. I personally like college football and movies. I don’t use the TV for much else. Occasionally I’ll get hooked on an HBO series, but if that happens, I try not to watch it live. Don’t leave the TV on in the background or channel surf, unless you’re spending your time that way deliberately (i.e. “It’s Sunday and I’m vegging out!”).

If you really want to watch specific TV shows, try to hold yourself to one or two at most. Anything beyond that will start to dominate your schedule. Passive entertainment can be a great stress reducing activity, but keep it in check and don’t let it become a daily habit.

Finally, don’t watch the news. It’s a huge waste of time. It’s usually negative content, which can subconsciously affect your mood.

Paying Bills

Set up auto-pay. Check your bank statements monthly for any strange or unexpected charges. Done.

Answering the Phone

Don’t do it, unless it’s a close contact. Screen calls. Set a time to check voicemail. Get back to people on your own time. Get your voicemail transcribed so you can view it in text form whenever you want.

Voicemail Transcription Services:

Grasshopper: http://grasshopper.com/
Libon: https://www.libon.com/

Texting / Chatting

See above.

Commuting / Driving

Don’t do it. Live as close to work as possible, or work remotely if you can. Use commuting as an excuse to work from home.

Cooking

Here are some services that can make cooking more efficient, or remove it from your plate completely (please excuse the pun):

Get groceries delivered to your door.

Instacart: https://www.instacart.com/
AmazonFresh: https://fresh.amazon.com

Get ingredients for pre-determined meals delivered to your door.

Get pre-cooked meals delivered to your door.

FreshDiet: http://www.thefreshdiet.com/
SpoonRocket: https://www.spoonrocket.com/
Munchery: https://munchery.com/

Pre-cooked meal services can be a little expensive, so only do this if you have the available funds. I used FreshDiet for years and it was a huge time saver.

Errands / Chores

There are plenty of services that can speed up or erase chores and errands for a reasonable price. Check out these awesome services for taking care of general tasks, shipping stuff, cleaning, and handyman work:

Shopping

Shop Online.

I recommend getting Amazon Prime. For an annual fee, you get free 2-day shipping on all orders. I have Amazon Prime and it usually pays for itself within a few months. The 2-day shipping is also pretty amazing. Imagine buying a book or new workout gear and having to wait two weeks before it arrives. That waiting period can kill your motivation and momentum. Prime gets it to your doorstep in 48 hours.

If you must shop offline, outsource it whenever possible with TaskRabbit or a similar service.

TaskRabbit: https://www.taskrabbit.com/

Finally, stop shopping so much. You probably don’t need 90% of the things you’re buying.

Helping Others

Don’t do it as often. When you do it, do it consciously and deliberately because you want to. Don’t do it out of guilt or an unspoken obligation. Do favors for close people. They should be in your inner circle. Give to people as much as you can, but only as your schedule allows.

Worrying

Worrying is not useful. This is a tough one. I’m constantly working on this, and you should too. When you realize you’re worrying, accept it. Then consciously clear it out of your mind. Writing it down and setting it aside sometimes helps. Your mind will stop focusing on it, knowing it’s stored safely somewhere else. Come back to your worry list once per week and ask yourself if the items on your list really matter or not. If they do, leave them there. If not, cross them off.

Browsing the Internet

Don’t do it. It’s a waste of time. If you need to, set a time to browse. When the timer goes off, you’re done. If you deliberately browse for fun in your free time, that’s fine. Check out RescueTime. It’s a great way to track your activity online and avoid distractions:

RescueTime: https://www.rescuetime.com/

Reading / Watching the News

I consider this a complete waste of time. I don’t do it. If anything important happens, I’ll hear about it. If I haven’t heard about it, it’s not important.

I use a feed reader to read only the blogs I find useful. I also occasionally use an app called Circa. Matt Galligan, a fellow TechStars alum, is Circa’s CEO. He describes the product as “cliff notes for news”. It’s pretty amazing because you can quickly catch up on only the topics you care about. If you want to stay informed on a particular topic, you can follow that topic directly and you’ll get updates on it automatically as new, related stories are published across the web. It’s like a feed within a feed.

Researching

Researching often involves comparing two or more similar things, either for depth of knowledge, or to determine the best option. Research of this kind has diminishing returns. Usually the first hour is more valuable than however many hours follow it—by an order of magnitude. The most important information is easy to find. The rest doesn’t matter much. When I’m researching something, I limit myself to 2-5 sources. Anything beyond that likely won’t contribute substantially to what’s already been found.

You’ll never be 100% informed. Realize that the most important information is the easiest to find, and concede that you’ll never know everything there is to know. It’s okay.

Social Networking: Facebook is Eating your Life

Don’t waste time looking at your Facebook feed. If you want to follow up with important people in your life, make a filter to only show those people in the feed. This will save you from ‘Facebook feed creep’, the horribly addicting act of scrolling endlessly through your feed, looking at posts from people you don’t really care about. Why are you doing this? Get back to doing something meaningful.

Final Thought

Productivity can’t be achieved, it can only be improved. Removing clutter and streamlining your information synthesis can lead to big improvements. That’s really all we can hope for, right?

This post was adapted from The Connection Algorithm, my new book about taking risks, which hit #1 in the Entrepreneurship and Personal Success categories on Amazon a few days after it launched.

Learn more about me at: www.jtev.me