4 Powerful Strategies That Will 40x Your Productivity
There are a million so-called experts today touting “productivity hacks” but let’s be honest, most of these hacks are generally ineffective or the usefulness of the tip quickly wears off once you revert back to your normal way of operating.
Most of these hacks fail because they are just a band-aid solution. If you really want long-term, sustained productivity, you need to create foolproof systems.
Coming up with quality work consistently can be extremely difficult. Not to mention there is an endless amount of distractions keeping you from achieving a flow state of work. Your phone, emails, your boss, co-workers, and attention-grabbing apps all keep you from becoming a creative, productivity rockstar.
The goal of this article is to help you learn how to create a steady flow of high-quality work in the shortest amount of time possible.
Many of us rely on willpower as our productivity hack but this is destined for failure. Willpower is a finite resource that gets depleted easily especially when you are tired and stressed.
If you want to be that guy that people stop and ask, how do you do so much in so little of time, you need to learn how to create a powerful system that focuses on creating a peak-performance routine, knowing when to work based on your internal body clock, how to eat properly for sustained energy, and how to create an optimal work environment.
If you master these 4 things you will be amazed by how much you can accomplish in a very short amount of time.
You’ll go from staring at blank screens, pulling your hair out in frustration to a constant flow of your best work possible. You’ll stop beating yourself up for not being able to perform simple activities because your brain feels sluggish and tired.
Ready to start? Let’s begin
Create a Peak-Performance Routine
Ever notice how professional athletes have a very specific routine they go through over and over prior to competition?
It could be their warm-up routine, stretches, exercises, listening to certain music, or a combination of all these things. The point is, they do it so they can enter a flow state. The optimal state to unleash their best output of work.
You are no different. You may not be an NBA, NFL, or Olympic superstar but you can be your office’s accounting superstar, blogger, writer, or designer. Just start thinking of yourself as a professional athlete, as ridiculous as that sounds.
Routines are powerful because they help you do a couple of things. First, they help you get mentally and physically prepared for the work ahead. It’s nearly impossible to go from 0–60 MPH without warming up. Do you think an Olympic sprinter walks onto the track cold, gets into their blocks, and then expects to win the race? Of course not. They would likely tear a hamstring. They spend time warming up their body and mind before a competition.
Second, routines conserve calories and energy spent on low-value decisions. Think about your ability to make decisions in a day as a limited, finite resource. Each decision you make, regardless of importance, takes one away from the rest of the day. That’s why guys like Steve Jobs would wear the same outfit each day, to conserve decisions for the truly important ones.
So how can you get into a peak-performance state? Easy. Follow a combination of the activities below in the first 60–90 minutes to get you primed for daily competition.
- Have a plan the night before. Know what it is you will do tomorrow and what you will work on. As the saying goes, fail to plan, plan to fail.
- Prioritize a combination of the following activities: reading for ideas, eating properly for sustained energy, hydrating with water, moving and exercising to warm your body and mind up, and journaling.
- If you are very groggy when you wake up, consider using blue light therapy to kickstart your alertness for 15–30 minutes upon waking.
- Exercising even as little as 10 minutes in the morning gets your body warmed up and shakes your mind from its sleepy stupor.
- Journaling is a master mental warm up. It gets your mind primed for what it is you are about to do. Focus on your biggest goals, your aspirations, and your major activity you want to accomplish for the day. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that and it can be as short as 5 minutes.
If you create a morning routine that focuses on these elements you will be primed for what comes next, a flow of high-quality work.
The Circadian Rhythm: know when to work can be greater than knowing how to work.
The circadian rhythm is a 24-hour biological rhythm that is your internal clock. It determines your brains level of alertness and sleepiness.
Knowing and understanding your circadian rhythm may be the greatest boost to your productivity you will ever experience. If you learn to do specific work based on when your mind and body are best attuned for that type of work, you will no longer feel like you are pushing a boulder up a massive hill. Work will flow from you effortlessly.
Throughout the day, our mind is best suited for particular types of work as the day progresses. Knowing when your mind is best prepared for creative work or analytical work allows you to plan accordingly. This is a massively unfair advantage you can gain.
Without going too deep into the science, here are the cliffsnotes to most people’s circadian rhythms.
- First, Daniel Pink in the book When describes the importance of understanding your chronotype i.e. are you a night owl, a morning person, or like most of us somewhere in between? Not sure? Take this test to help you understand your chronotype.
- As shown in the graph above, alertness peaks mid-morning, around 10 am. This is the best time to do your most strenuous and mentally taxing work. This can be writing, doing analytical work, designing, selling, etc.
- Your alertness takes a dip mid-afternoon, around 3 pm. Afternoons are generally the hardest time to do mentally strenuous work and thus the ideal time for a 20-minute power nap.
- Late afternoon and early evening we have an energy rebound and this is a great time for creative work and brainstorming.
- In addition to peak alertness, our moods ebb and flow with our alertness. Mid-morning we are most alert and most optimistic. Mid-afternoon we are more sleepy and more pessimistic. Here’s a quick tip on working with others, if you need an important decision made from a client or colleague, schedule that meeting in the mid-morning when they are more alert and you are more likely to get a positive outcome.
When you learn your natural circadian rhythm, you learn to harness your mind for the greatest output. Your colleagues and friends will watch in awe as a steady stream of high-quality work flows from you.
A quick word on circadian rhythms, knowing your rhythm isn’t enough, you must plan and protect your rhythm like your baby! If you work in a large company this can be hard to do.
In large companies, people often try to schedule meetings at all hours of the day and at times that are most convenient for them, not you. Knowing that you are most alert mid-morning, block your schedule off. This is a no fly zone for meetings. You need to protect this time so that you can perform at your best.
Follow this simple rule: work in the morning, meet in the afternoon. (As mentioned above, the one caveat to the meet in the afternoon, if you need an important decision from somebody, do it in the morning. Is this selfish? You bet, but it’s necessary for you.)
Eat The Right Foods For Optimal Energy
We’ve all been there before, a colleague brings in a big box of drool-worthy, tasty donuts. Your inner Homer Simpson is activated. Mmm…Donuts.
How nice of your colleague to bring in donuts. Nice, as long as you want to take a nap in 3 hours.
If you want to be an idea machine, then you must avoid the carbohydrate sugar crash.
For long sustained energy, prioritize high-protein, higher-fat foods over carbohydrate-rich foods. You want to eat low-glycemic foods so you can avoid that crash.
This means eating proteins, nuts, and low-glycemic fruits and vegetables (avoid tropical fruits like pineapple which are high in sugar).
High-glycemic foods like bread and sugary snacks spike your glucose and provide a short burst of energy. The end result is a quick come down and crash of energy.
If you eat foods that are low-glycemic and favor complex carbohydrates over simple carbohydrate foods, your body will process them slower and you experience a more gradual rise in blood sugar.
Not only will you avoid sugar crashes, but if you eat low-glycemic foods that are higher in fat and protein you will feel fuller, longer.
Create An Optimal Work Environment
With a powerful peak-performance routine, an understanding of when to work and what to eat for sustained energy, the last thing to do is a create an optimal work environment. Without it, all the rest is wasted.
Here are the keys to an optimal work environment:
- Eliminate distractions: text messages, phone calls, emails, pings, buzzes, and notifications. Each time you are distracted it can take as long as 25 minutes to return to your task. Minimize distractions so you can stay focused. Here are some ways to optimize your phone to eliminate distractions.
- Find solitude and a quiet place that is distraction free. If you work in a large office, this can be difficult now especially with the open floor concept. If you can, find a quiet office, room, or area in the office to take your laptop and work from. Noise, interruptions, and chatty colleagues will suck huge amounts of time up. This doesn’t mean don’t be friendly, just set aside time to mingle and be friendly.
- Avoid multitasking and bouncing around activities. Multitasking can cost you up to 40% of your productive time. Do one thing and do it well.
- Batch activities. Focus on doing one type of work for half a day. For example, if you are writing, write until noon so that you stay in that flow. It’s harder to achieve a peak flow state if you are jumping amongst different types of work that use vastly different parts of your brain like writing, statistical analysis, or research. Perform similar tasks in half-day blocks.
- Plan little mental vacations. Follow the Pomodoro technique for working which means working for 30 minutes and then resting for 3–5 minutes. Repeat this during your batched activities.
- Listen to songs without lyrics on repeat. This blocks out noisy distractions and helps you get into a mental zone. The repetitive nature of the music fades into the background enabling you to get into a deep, thoughtful state of work.
With the proper tools in place, you can become an idea machine. You’ll be able to produce more work before noon than most people can do all week. The key: create a peak-performance routine, know when to work, eat well, and create the optimal work environment.
If you do this, you can unleash a steady stream of high-quality work on demand. Others will look at you in awe. You will be the envy of your colleagues and friends.
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