How to Supercharge your Productivity

[This has been cross-posted, with some variations, from my personal blog, jitha.me. Hope you find it helpful]

Do you feel like you’re doing too much? Working 7 days a week, and still scrambling to catch up? Finding it difficult to cope with the multiple things you’re doing, while maintaining a semblance of work-life balance?

Over the last two years, I’ve been doing a lot of things — running my startup, doing a few experiments on the side, etc. It’s not been easy, of course. But the worst is when some of the things you’re doing are time-sensitive, and others are open-ended.

It’s very difficult, when faced with a barrage of urgent tasks, to look at other important tasks before they become urgent.

The end-result — Earliest Deadline First scheduling, which will start like this (admittedly pretty cool):

But soon become this:

Let’s face it — I’m sure there are better ways to journey through life.

Here are seven things that have worked for me. Start doing them today, to supercharge your productivity. (OK, that’s a little aggressive. But I’m sure they’ll help). I’ll keep this succinct (don’t want the post to become too long and dampen your productivity!). But I’ve expanded on these on my personal blog jitha.me, here and here. Read more there (but in your free time).

1. Lose your TV. And your TV Shows.

Essentially, minimize distractions. Whatever’s your poison — be it television, Facebook, Twitter or Cricinfo (see point 4 below). This is especially important if you sometimes work from home. I don’t have a TV at home. I also don’t watch TV shows — I don’t want to watch one episode of Breaking Bad and commit myself to watching 5 seasons. That’s way too much of a time sink to lock yourself into right at the beginning.

2. Create a schedule, and stick to it

This is obvious at one level — I’m sure you keep a to-do list. Of course it’s incredibly useful to see what needs to be done when you get to work, but it’s only half the story. Personally, I’ve found it far more useful to schedule the tasks as well, i.e., put a time to them. Every day at the end of my workday, I take 15 minutes to review my tasks for the next day, and schedule them — I block time slots on my calendar for specific tasks.

This way, you don’t come in to work in the morning wondering what to do, and then make a list. Scheduling your workday is a cognitively intensive task — trust me, you’ll want to check Facebook after that! The other advantage of this approach is that when you complete one task, you don’t spend time choosing what to do next (which causes decision fatigue) — you already know what to do!

There are many task manager tools out there for organizing your schedule. I like Todoist best — the free version is nearly full-feature, and it has apps for everything so you’re synced on all your devices.

A couple of other things you should do:

1. Every evening, while planning the next day, jot down the three high-priority tasks you absolutely NEED to complete — that’s your definition of victory, which you want to achieve no matter what.
2. Another important thing is to stick to the schedule, but reduce scope if required. Make sure you start on something you’ve planned, even if you no longer have time to finish it — you’ll get more done over time.

3. Establish a routine

Apart from planning your day, try to establish a daily routine. Man is a creature of habit — if you do something at a certain time every day, then you don’t waste any precious brain cycles in making decisions.

Mark Zuckerberg has, of course, taken this to another level, with a wardrobe of only grey T-shirts (brilliantly parodied by Scott Adams in this series of strips). But the more fashion-conscious of us (and those who don’t run Facebook) can do a little of this too.

For example, I get up at 5 every day, and do my best to maintain a fixed schedule — read for an hour in the morning, do a few remote tasks, then a little exercise. So when I get to work at 9am, I’ve already done at least 1 of my high-priority tasks for the day (see point 2). I also try and check my email only at a few pre-determined slots in the day — much easier than reacting every time there’s a ping on my phone. But make sure to plan morning tasks that you genuinely look forward to — you need every motivation you can get!

4. Save your will power — Make it hard to do the things you shouldn’t

‘Ability’ is a key driver of behaviors — how easy it is to do something affects how frequently or consistently you do it. Conversely, if you make a task hard to do, would that reduce your proclivity to do it?

I used to compulsively check Facebook at work. On the hour, every hour. Sometimes even more frequently. I know it’s often just a waste of time, but I couldn’t stop myself. So I decided to test this theory a few weeks ago. All I did was uncheck the “Keep me logged in” box while logging into Facebook. And the effect was immediate — adding just one step to my Facebook checking routine made it much less likely to occur! Now, unless there’s a specific reason for me to go to Facebook, I open the browser, realize I’ll have to type in a password, and change my mind — why bother with the hassle?

Such small changes to increase the no. of steps involved can help control a bad habit tremendously well.

Make something even slightly harder to do, and you can control it.

5. Don’t multi-task. It’s a myth.

Throughout our studying and working lives, we’ve been trying to multi-task. And we’ve all found it difficult to be productive while multi-tasking for one simple reason — we’re all doing it wrong.

The best way to multi-task is to single-task on different tasks — focus on the task at hand, excluding everything else. If you’re writing a blog post, don’t look at your emails till you’re taking a break / moving to your next task. Accept only interruptions that are 2 min or less.

6. Stop relying on your memory. Use a note-taking software.

Your brain capacity is finite. And given the information explosion that’s currently underway, there’s only so many new things you can put in your brain without pushing something out.

In such a scenario, I’ve found note taking software incredibly useful. Whenever you think of something interesting or see a great article (say with tips to supercharge your productivity), just jot it down somewhere so you can refer to it later. Just like using a calendar instead of remembering meetings or using a task manager to plan your day, not having to remember every brainwave you had for later is a huge relief — capturing all the open loops in your head somewhere frees your mind to concentrate on the now.

I am a OneNote junkie — I especially love its deep organizing structure. If you use Microsoft Office, you should definitely give it a try. The only problem with OneNote is that its apps for tablets, phones, etc. are not great. So, for notes that I want to take while traveling, I use Google Keep (simplistic, but adequate for short bursts) or an even simpler, good old notepad (the physical version). It’s a complicated system, I know, but hey, I’m worth it!

Evernote is another great (and far simpler) option, for people who spend more time on mobile, or use a Mac.

So what are you waiting for — download your brain today!

7. Keep a time diary — track it till you crack it.

Studies have shown that one of the best things you can do to instill a habit is to track it. If you want to eat better, start tracking your food habits. Want to get more exercise into your day — get a step-counter. In the same vein, if you want to become more productive, start tracking how you spend your time.

And again, you don’t have to do this in a physical notebook or excel file — that’s too inefficient a way to track, of all things, your efficiency. There are two tools I use, which are incredibly useful — Rescuetime, which automatically tracks where you spend time on your laptop, and Toggl, which helps you record this manually in an easy interface.

That’s it! Those are the seven ways in which I have been able to get more done every day. Would love your thoughts — have any other things worked for you? Please comment here / email me at gt.jithamithra@gmail.com / tweet at me (@jithamithra).

And yes, do sign up on jitha.me for email updates — you’ll get a new blog post approximately once a week.

Bonus: Check out A Life of Productivity, for many more tips on managing your time, energy and attention better. I’ve tried many of the techniques discussed here to manage time better, but the 7 above have had the most impact for me.