Have you ever feel like you never have enough time? Do you always have a never-ending list of tasks waiting for you? Or perhaps you are constantly behind the curve at work because you can’t work fast enough. If some of these resonate to you, be reassured! You are not alone. I’ve also fallen into this lack of productivity issue very often.
Time is one of the most valuable asset we have as human beings (alongside health and freedom, but that’s another story), and protecting it should be one of our top priorities.
This is why today I will share with you 5 practical ways to be more productive at work and at home:
1. Dedicate focus time
In today’s environnement we are surrounded by distractions. Social media, emails, news alerts, a noisy colleague in the open space office, we have to deal with a lot of turbulences while working. Being disturbed, even if it’s just 3 seconds every 15 minutes significantly reduces our ability to concentrate which eventually decreases our work efficiency.
But this is not a fatality. The remedy is to prepare your environment and yourself for moments when you will be able to dedicate your whole brain to your task for a sufficient amount of time – eliminating all potential distractions and temptations. Simple tricks can do the work:
- Turn off your phone, or at least put it in a different room. Do not leave it face down on your table, the temptation to reverse it from time to time will be too strong
- Log off from social medias and newspapers. Uninstall the apps if you have them on your computer to avoid notifications on your screen while working – the constantly-open social media page is the greatest plague of our world
- Turn off ALL notifications (email, slack, teams, etc.). Even if you think it is important in reality it can always wait a few minutes or hours
- Put yourself in a private appointment on your calendar. People will not wait nor expect from you an instant reply if they see you’re set as busy on your calendar
- Book a meeting room to work peacefully if you work in an open space. Take advantage of remote working (if you can) on the days you want to be more focused on your tasks
- Place ahead a bottle of water and a few snacks at your desk, and everything else you need to work comfortably. you won’t have to interrupt your work to go grab them (which generates the risk of stumbling upon a talkative colleague on your way)
Once you put yourself in the right environment you will see how more productive you become. You don’t realize how much all these distractions slow you down until you experience how you work without them.
2. Build routines
Routines are an efficient way to perform regular tasks efficiently, and help you be more prepared to the non-regular ones. Even if the time you gain each time doesn’t weight a lot, the compounding of all these small gains can generate a significant shift that you will notice.
In addition, routines are a great tool to be more prepared for the uncertainty of life. I illustrate my point with a few examples below. If you take a few minutes to think about it, you will come up with plenty of other examples:
- Have you ever been in the situation where you had something to do, but you keep forgetting about it, until it becomes very urgent, and puts your work at risk? Well, if you build a habit of writing directly to your agenda or notepad, what you have to do at the time you think about it (and stop saying, ‘I will write it down later’), then this situation will just become an old nightmare
- If you have a strict organization when it comes to administrative papers, like rituals on when and where to store them, etc. Then, the day you loose your ID card (which I hope will never happen to you) and need to ask for a new one, you will easily and peacefully gather all the papers you need
- If you always store your personal items (keys, phone, remote control, chargers, etc.) at the same place, then you drastically reduce the risks of loosing them. I’m sure this will really save a LOT of time for some of you
3. Track your achievements
Personally, I love to write to-do lists because I love marking items as done on them. Tracking your achievements and your improvements is a great way to first measure how you are performing, and second get the satisfaction of seeing that things are getting done. Moreover, writing things down will also act as a contract you sign with yourself. This contract will trigger a sense of commitment to deliver your tasks.
I recommend to split tasks into small easily doable units. Doing so, you can keep a good pace for checking your boxes. The only pitfall to avoid is feeling overwhelmed because there are too many boxes to check. That threshold is up to each of you, and depends on how you feel with a short or long list of tasks. Personally, I like to be able to check at least one box for every work session I do (usually a few hours long). This way I feel motivated and rewarded as I see that things are getting done everyday.
Last, tracking is also very important because it provides you objective data points to measure what is your real current productivity. Some of you may be surprised that their productivity is not how they assume it is. Eventually, these insights are a feedback loop that will help you refine your ways of working.
4. Celebrate your victories
This one is the natural continuity of my previous point. Being productive must be associated to pleasure and joy. It should not be a duty nor a pain. Otherwise in the best case scenario you will not be able to maintain that pace, and in the worst case it will damage your mental health, because you inflict to yourself an endless punishment.
To me, being more productive is a way to live a better life, by freeing up more time to do what you truly enjoy (spending time with your family, enjoying your hobbies, watching Netflix, etc.). Personally, I keep that in mind whenever I’m working on something that requires a lot of energy and commitment. Of course on the very moment it is easier to look out my social media every 5 minutes to escape from that duty. However, that’s just short-term optimization, which is in fact the worst option when looking on the long-term. The longer I spend time on that work the smaller free time I will get once I will be done. To beat the temptation of short-term optimization you must celebrate your achievements every time you make the long-term win over the short-term. Then, the next time you’ll face the same situation, your brain will remember the reward, which makes it more likely to win again.
Therefore, once you complete a task, or a productive day, celebrate it! Go out with your friends, watch one of your favorite series, cook your favorite meal, etc. You’ve earned it! Do not look out only for more work to do. Productivity for productivity will bring you nowhere. Productivity for life and passion will bring you happiness and peace.
5. Reflect on your current blockers
I already started discussing that point earlier with the distractions from today’s environnement. To me, this point is key if you want to improve your productivity for real. You must understand why you are not as productive as you wish you were. Of course the standards tricks I shared work (otherwise I won’t be sharing them). However, to grasp your full work potential you must personalize your solutions to your own needs.
Once you figured out what the problem is, then the solutions will come right and easy. This is the only true way to bring closer where you are and where you want to be. And be honest with yourself if you really want to make it happen. I’ve compiled below a few standard situations, but it’s up to you to reflect on yourself and identify where you stand:
| Blockers | Solutions |
|---|---|
| I spend too much time on social media | Comes back to the tactics from my first point |
| I switch from tasks to tasks without ever finishing anything | First, I must define what I must do to consider that task as finished. Then, whenever I want to switch tasks I must first look at whether I’ve met my Definition of Done or not. Multitasking is not a productive way of working |
| I seize every opportunity to do something | I must be convinced of the benefits of performing that tasks and not see it as a punishment. My point #4 can help on this one |
| The task is beyond my current capabilities | I should ask for help (typically a colleague) and express to my boss my current limitations. Maybe she/he can help clarifying the task, or providing support and resources |
| I am too slow. I have troubles thinking clearly | I should try working at the different moment of the day. Some of us are more productive in the morning, others at night. Listen to yourself and identify when you are the more incline to work |
| I spend my time on useless work and have little time for what really matters | I must prioritize my to-do list. Even if one task looks more fun, always prioritize best on importance and difficulty. Usually starting with the most difficult task is the best option. At least, always start with something really important |
| I always end in a rush because the task takes much longer than I expected | I should start by selecting my tasks for the day, then split it in half. As the time goes I will see that I’m able to better size my work, and eventually fit in more tasks. This one comes probably from a workload sizing issue. Overtime you will get better at it, however, at the beginning you should absolutely avoid the frustration of always being late while working a lot |
In this post I discussed 5 tactics that I will help you be more productive and achieve your ambitions. For my last thought I want to insist on something very important to me: if you hate what you are doing, then you probably shouldn’t do it. If the reason of your lack of productivity is a deep rejection that you are feeling in your guts, then you are not doing the right thing. Remember, life is too valuable to waste it being unhappy. So always do things that on the long-term will you make you feel better.