There is an endless pursuit of efficiency in America. People are always looking for that “next best thing.” Fad diets, workouts, and other “hacks” changing every week should tell you so.
The problem is, the next best thing never is, so why do we keep chasing them? Surely the next one is better, right?
The truth is, like any goal we set for ourselves, there is not a simple path to reaching it. You cannot just make one simple step to change your whole life. Eating one single food is not going to make you lose thirty pounds, nor is one simple workout going to make you beach ready.
If you want long-lasting change in your life, you have to work for it. This includes becoming more productive.
Time Management
Managing your time is surprisingly easy if you take a few proactive steps. I like to relate time management to budgeting my finances; you spend your time like you spend your money, so stop buying garbage with your time.
Plan Your Ideal Day
My original method of planning my ideal day started as a yellow sheet of paper broken out into quarter hours. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed, I labeled each quarter hour the way I would like to ideally spend my day.
I can say with almost certainty that my day has never gone exactly how I planned it on this paper, especially with two young kids, but with this framework in the background I know what I should be doing instead of just doing what feels right in the moment. If I lose focus or can’t remember what needs to get done, I check my plan and get back on track.
Plan For The Unexpected
Unfortunately nothing goes perfectly all the time. When something pops up and derails your day, it can be devastating for your productivity and a bit demoralizing.
If we plan for these interruptions then they won’t have nearly as big of an effect on us. At work, I like to build in a half hour buffer into all of my larger tasks on my calendar. This way, if I am interrupted or get in over my head, I’ll have extra time to complete my work. On the other side, if I don’t actually need this extra time, I can pull tomorrow’s work into today and be even more efficient.
I also know my kids will wake up between 5 and 6am most mornings. Instead of getting into something that requires deep thought between these hours, I do smaller and less mentally straining tasks so that he does not wake up while I am halfway in the middle of a thought that will just disappear now that I need to shift my focus.
Sharpen The Axe
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln
Whether Lincoln actually said this or not is up for debate, but the point remains; if you have a task at hand that requires repetitive actions or will be repeated in the future, make sure your tools or processes are well honed.
It would be silly to chop down a tree with a dull axe. You might get really good at chopping at trees with an axe, but that is not your goal. Your goal is to chop down the tree! You might get really good at doing your work, but your goal is to complete your work, not just spend hours doing it.
Complete your work, refine the process, repeat. Make sure the next go around is better than the last.
Task Management
While time management is important, if you don’t manage what tasks you are doing with your time then it’s all wasted effort. If I spend eight hours at work and get about one hour worth of work done, I have managed my time (I showed up to work) but I did not manage my tasks (I apparently did nothing productive for seven hours.)
Deep Work
Some tasks just require more physical and mental power than others, there is no way around it. These are the tasks that you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, be multitasking through and instead shift all of your thoughts into them.
It is best to schedule out time in your day specifically to tackle these tasks with no interruptions. Turn off the email, phone, instant messenger, and become difficult to contact for an hour or two a day.
By devoting specific time to the heaviest workload in your schedule, you will not only accomplish more throughout the day as these tasks won’t be hanging over your head, but you will also realize you will get into something of a mental flow by having zero interruptions.
I cannot tell you how much more I can get done when I am laser focused on my work like this. What normally takes three hours might only take half the time.
Distractions
Those distractions I referenced earlier do have a place in your life. The problem is, they like to have their place in your life immediately. Think about it for a second; is it really that urgent you should drop everything you are doing? Of course, if the distraction is actually urgent and needs to be immediately addressed now is the time to get it done… but the majority of the time this is not the case.
Keep a piece of paper, a spreadsheet, or whatever works best for you on hand and anytime a distraction appears while you are doing deep work, write it down on the list. Once you are ready for a break or finish the work on hand, shift your focus to this list. This way you will not break your mental flow more than necessary and not neglect those smaller but still meaningful tasks that appear throughout your day.
Prioritize
When you have a huge list of things to be done, whether at home or work, it is easy to get caught in the trap of short term productivity. Sure you can get all these tiny, essentially meaningless tasks done, but you will be neglecting what is important in the long term.
The 80/20 principle is a good way to avoid this trap. This principle states that 80% of the results in the world come from 20% of the effort. With that in mind, why would we not devote all our time to this 20% of effort? Find your 20% tasks and put them ahead of everything else. Reduce the time spent on the other tasks that aren’t producing your biggest results.
A more visual way of identifying your most important tasks is to use a matrix.
Draw a large square and break it into four equal sized smaller squares. The boxes on the left are urgent, on the right are not urgent. The two on the top are important, the two on the bottom are not important. Now put all your daily, weekly, monthly tasks into these boxes.
The goal is to focus on the urgent and important tasks, schedule the not urgent but important tasks, delegate the urgent but not important, and avoid or reduce the not important and not urgent.
Self Management
Possibly the most important step here is to figure out how to manage yourself. You can have all the good intentions in the world, but if you do not follow through with what you have planned then it is no better than worthless talk.
Be Honest With Yourself
Be honest with your family, coworkers, yourself, and whoever needs to know. If you promise to get something done but know you cannot, tell someone so it can still get accomplished. Don’t panic and try to be a superhero doing more than you reasonably can do in a day.
At the same time, being honest with yourself means not making plans that are unreasonable. The tools above are meant to show you what can and should get done, so don’t expect to do everything yourself. Get help when you need it, before you need it.
Work Before You Are Motivated
For some people this may seem counterintuitive. How can you do anything without being motivated to do it?
That is where a shift in attitude needs to occur. In reality, action leads to motivation. Once you get the ball rolling on your task, you will find that you suddenly know what to do next and will be inspired to follow through. Even if you have to take the tiniest of steps, just get started.
Momentum causes motivation. Get the ball rolling before you think you want to.
You Have More Attention Than Time
There is a reason it is advisable to complete your hardest and most mentally draining tasks before anything else. By doing so, you can use your most energized and peak efficiency hours on what needs them the most, and you can save the less important or strenuous work for when you are not feeling at your one hundred percent.
I am guilty of this. I will try to finish up a long and hard project before leaving work for the day. I know the end result will be significantly cleaner if I just wait to do it in the morning, but for some reason I want to push myself to complete it then and there. As you can imagine, it goes poorly.
Save the easy work for the times you know you will not be at your best performance. Do the hard work when you are at your peak.
Recharge
You can push to be productive all you want, but if you burn out then it was all for nothing.
Making sure you get enough sleep, exercise, and eating well will all improve your productivity and keep you focused. Taking breaks when you need them will keep you from burning out causing even more delays than just taking a break would.
You need to make sure your mental and physical health are both well taken care of before worrying about pushing your productivity to the limits.
Final Thoughts
A little forethought goes a long way towards what you can get accomplished in a day. Implementing a few of these strategies will launch your ability to get things done to a whole new level, and you won’t know what you were spending all your time doing running in circles.
By planning ahead, focusing on the right tasks, and taking care of yourself, you will see incredible improvements in both your personal and work life.
