Improve Productivity With 6 Simple Steps

Productivity is something that is misunderstood very often. I believe that productivity is not when you work for 10+ hours/day, productivity is when you work for 3-4 hours/day but with immense focus. FOCUS is the keyword here. People often underestimate, what can they achieve in 4 hours of focused work. Even I learned this the hard way. I used to struggle a lot with productivity, I tried a lot of things, gave up a lot of things, and with trial and error I managed to find some tips and tricks to be productive and grow in life as per my plan, and I am sharing those with you in this blog.

1. Prioritize

Before work, it is equally important to learn to prioritize. I understand that you want to achieve a lot of things really fast, but trust me it will only slow you down. Therefore, it is so important to prioritize your goals and tasks BOTH. What are the one or two goals that you want to achieve first, focus on that, and plan your next 3-4 months according to that, the rest of everything is a distraction (for now).

1. Plan your months, weeks, and days

By Planning your next month, your next week, and your next day, you will have mental clarity about your goals, and where you are right now in achieving them. you can easily gauge how well you are moving towards your goals. It also helps you to understand that did you planned well or not, and if not, you can always replan.

Having said that, I will also advise you to get stuck in the trap of over-planning. It is very common to get trapped, I have been there. Plan once, Execute daily. Plan your month once a month, and plan your week once a week only.

1. Be prepared

Be prepared one day before the actual work. Keep all the things you need to perform that task at your workspace beforehand, this is a piece of great advice to stop yourself from procrastinating.

1. Work early in the morning

Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist, and a podcaster, in one of his podcasts, says that you are most productive in the first half of the day, after that your energy starts depleting. And my personal experience also says the same. Therefore, you should work on your most important and/or most urgent task in the first half of the day with immense focus and no distractions, and make out most of your day. After that, you can do your less important tasks.

I understand that everyone can not follow this advice because people have jobs, but you can use this advice even in your job-related work as I do.

1. Don't be Pseudo-productive

Pseudo-productivity is when you do work all day on a task that does not help you to move towards your goals, but you will feel that you've been productive all day because you get a dopamine hit from that. For example Over-planning something is also a type of pseudo-productive work. To prevent yourself from being pseudo-productive, before going into full work mode ask yourself this one question, "Does this task help me to move towards my goals in any way". If the answer is no, don't do it.

1. Pomodoro Technique

Many scientific pieces of research will tell you the pattern of our focus while working on something. It looks something like this.

You can see in the above graph that our focus peeks for a certain period of time and then it starts to deplete, no matter how hard we try to remain focused. But the good news is, we can reset our focus level with a small 5-10 minutes break. So, we can use this pattern to our advantage by taking several short breaks in the span of 4 hours to maintain a high level of focus throughout the session. You can work for 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5 minutes break and then repeat that. You can also do a 50/10 (which is what I prefer) combination instead of a 25/5 combination.

During the breaks you can either do meditation or can even choose to do nothing at all, I prefer listening to music. But social media is a big no-no here.

There are many apps on the play store and apple store to use this Pomodoro technique, you can use them.

So, these are my personal tips to improve productivity, use the tip that works for you, and scrape that doesn't. In the end, I just want to say that....