Practical Productivity
9 easy and practical productivity tips
As someone who went from subpar college student to starting and managing 2 startups before graduating, being productive to me means time management, not necessarily working harder.
In theory, increasing your productivity should not be that complicated— increasing output with the same or decreasing resources. This could mean accomplishing more in less time, with less money, help, etc. Knowing that everyone is playing with the same amount of time each day, I’ve found the interchangeable hacks to be those that let you get the most out of your time, whether that means easily multi-tasking, focusing on what’s right in front of you or anywhere in between. The skills for time management, as subtle as they may be, should be internalized as early as possible, as no one can say for sure what will and won’t work for you, but inaction in this area is one sure way to set yourself up for disappointment.
The following are 9 practical productivity tips I’ve worked into my own routine that I can directly contribute my own achievements to.
Get up early
I cannot stress this enough. Getting up early is how you get a head start on what’s to come. The early hours allow you to do what needs to get done before typical workday distractions start pouring in while also giving you time to wake up so you can hit the ground running when everyone else joins you. Simply put, days that I wake up later than I ‘should’ are immediately off to a rocky start.
Before anything else, take a walk
While it does not need to be a walk necessarily, the point is to spend the first moments of your day putting what lies ahead into perspective without outside influence, meaning not even email before this. For me, every morning starts with a 30–45min walk with my dog followed by an hour and fifteen minutes at the gym, often completing this entire routine by 8:00–8:15AM. Spending this time mixing in audiobooks and music while rarely engaging in conversation extending beyond greetings, you’re left with nearly two hours to frame the priorities ahead without letting someone else dictate those for you.
The health and fitness benefits are an obvious plus as well, and knocking these out before putting your body and mind through the stress and rigors of a work day will keep you sharp.
Don’t discount audiobooks
The excuse “I don’t have time to read” is as old as books themselves, and as true as you may think it is for you, that doesn’t mean you don’t have other options. Any ride or walk that takes longer than 5–10mins is a perfect opportunity to listen to an audiobook, and you will shock yourself, not just in how fast you get through each one, but how much you actually retain. With the iPhone, you can rewind in 15sec increments so missing something is never an issue, while also providing you the flexibility in how fast you want the recording to run.
I was honestly skeptical of audiobooks at first, but over time I’ve gained an appreciation for how the narrator leads me through the story all while engaging in various activities, from driving to walking to surfing the web. From experience, I’d also recommend switching up the types of books you are listening to or reading, especially if you’re trying to simultaneously read and and listen (not something I’d suggest), so as not to get bogged down by repetition.
Find ONE planner that works for you and stick with it
Keeping your schedule and priorities in one, easy to access and update location is an absolute must. Whether you choose to use the calendars provided by Google, Facebook, Apple or any other service is up to you, but it is vital to make that it is capable of accurately representing and accounting for the information you need it to account for. For example, while each of the mentioned services provide integration and syncing features that let you input events into the calendar and access the information on multiple devices, they offer very little in the area of scheduling ‘tasks’, which I refer to as activities or actions you need to perform that don’t necessarily need to be done at a specific time or have a specific duration. These could be specific emails, studying or homework (if you’re in school), research, errands or anything else that doesn’t require you to pick a specific time, but you really just need to ‘fit it in somewhere’.
As of late, this centralized planner for me has been my Passion Planner with scheduled events in their appropriate spots and post-it notes corresponding to each days top priorities. When I was really trying to make an online planner work for me, Plan was my go-to and sometimes gets me to contemplate switching back. Plan sources scheduled events from your email calendars and allows you to create tasks by category and schedule them with much more flexibility then each of the former options listed.
Following the planner plan
I’ll be the first to admit that writing down my days priorities and events does not exactly bind me to accomplishing anything, and many days have gone by where the planner goes untouched. It happens, and whether it is due to pure laziness (as often was the case with me) or unexpected events, combatting these threats to mitigate the impact they have on your day-to-day plans comes from building habits right into your routine. Some that have helped me tremendously include:
A. Turn off push notifications:
Besides the unprofessional or rude light you paint yourself in for having a Facebook or Snapchat notification interrupt a meeting or discussion, it’s hard to argue that they are not distracting even and especially when you’re working alone. That’s why one day I shut off almost all of my push notifications, including email and text message, so that the only notifications that can interrupt my work are Slack messages (keeping communication with my teams) and phone calls. Since all these other channels have their own value that cannot be ignored, once you choose to go this route it is important find a time each day that could be blocked off to run-through everything you may have missed. I’ll check emails 3–4 times per day (10AM, 1PM, 5–6PM), with the goal of either responding immediately, putting in my “requires response” all emails that require extended time, or archiving to keep my inbox decluttered — a practice I learned from inbox zero. My philosophy is simple; if someone REALLY needs to reach me, they will call.
B. Have anchors provide a framework to your day:
As you may infer from the name, anchors are scheduled or time-sensitive events or activities that must be done at a specific time. While this often means things such as meetings or class, these could be as informal as a dog walking schedule or even setting arbitrary timers for the work you’re doing. The point is to keep the work you’re currently doing in context with the whole days plans, ensuring that you aren’t spending too much time on any one activity. These anchors serve to break up your day by forcing you to step away, with an additional benefit being that it challenges you to focus on the task at hand instead of the time or the next thing; knowing you only have a limited amount of time to complete a task before you’ll be interrupted is one hell of a motivator to get you to do it.
C. Group and plan priorities:
To me, prioritizing what needs to get done does not necessarily mean doing your top priority(s) first. While many tout the importance of getting your biggest/hardest/longest task done before moving down the list, I’ve found myself exceeding my own productivity expectations by organizing my day by the type of work I’m doing, not specifically by the challenges each presents. For instance, my priorities post-it is only divided into 2 categories, “To do” and “To contact”, neither of which ever listing more than 5 or 6 tasks. I do this because, to me, priorities are priorities, regardless of their professional, academic or personal nature; they are things that need to get done by me and me only. Generally speaking, these priorities can either involve work that I need to do or people I need to get in contact with for progress to be made, and while each priority may have its own time sensitivity (which I would note), for the most part I am free to fit these priorities into my day however which way I see fit so long as they do not interfere with my anchors.
Getting your hardest task done right out of the gate is great in theory, but what kind of quality can you expect by starting your day with the task you were dreading the most? Some may love this approach. I have found that there is a time and place for every task, even the most challenging, and that time is not necessarily the first chance I get.
D. Time blocking and stamping:
When blocking off time to work on various projects, especially a student trying to balance school work and professional ventures, the best tool to keep you on track is an alarm. By setting and forgetting it, knowing it will go off at the time you set and not a minute later, you can give full attention to what’s right in front of you. At first these will be arbitrary durations, but over time you’ll start to learn how long it takes you to do certain tasks, and if you’re weird like me you may even make a game out of it. For added benefit, keep track of how long you spent working on a project for day-by-day/week-by-week comparisons and monitoring (toggl has a free app and chrome extension).
Start planning your next day the night before
Obviously you cannot predict everything that will happen the following day (especially if you are in the startup world), but start adding everything you do know before hitting the bricks. Who is someone you need to get in contact with? What project is waiting on you/your efforts before moving forward? These lists are not set-in-stone law and much of what goes on the list does not get completed, but just as Peter Drucker is famous for saying “What gets measured gets done”, what doesn’t get measured (or in this case listed) surely won’t get done. Plus, waking up to a half-baked idea of what the day looks like beats knowing nothing and planning on the fly.
Productivity is not something that will just happen overnight, but even more important to understand is that it is not an end-point; one does not wake up one morning knowing that “today is the day I will finally be productive”. It involves making minor tweaks to your daily routine that allow you to get the most out of your time. You, along with everyone else in the world, get only 24hrs in a day, and the people that find ways to get the most out of each second are the ones everyone looks at as productivity “superstars”. All in all, only you can decide what will and won’t work for you. As you go through your day take note of the little things you can do, and with time you’ll form your own habits on your journey to productivity.
