One of Timyo’s biggest goals is to help people increase their productivity. So, as 2016 gets under way, we thought it would be useful to highlight some of the great productivity advice from great minds around the Internet. Here are #10-6, and we’ll follow up with the final five next week.
In the meantime, have a productive week, and thanks for reading!
10. Calendars beat To-Do Lists
This helpful tip comes from Zac Mustapha‘s great Lifehack article “12 Super Productivity Tips Every Entrepreneur Must Know“.
To-do lists can be seductive (which is probably the first time in history that sentence has been written)—being able to just unload all of the tasks we need to get to in one long list certainly feels productive.
But the key benefit to organizing your day and week by calendar is that it requires you to account for time (which, if you haven’t noticed, is kind of a big deal around here). As Mustapha writes:
“[Calendars are] time-conscious, so you know exactly how long each task should take therefore avoid cramping in too many tasks in a day. It’ll force you to eliminate the unimportant stuff.”
9. Get Automated!
Forbes‘ Lawton Ursrey has this great tip:
“Schedule and forget all recurring items for the year, like dentist, doctor, and auto service appointments. Get really comfortable with your calendar – schedule everything once and let it go.”
By investing a little time up front to pre-schedule things like appointments and bills, you can forget about keeping track of these things day-to-day or week-to-week.
8. High-Leverage = High-Priority
A common productivity tip you’ll see is to tackle your hardest tasks first, the “eat your vegetables” school of thought. While I get this approach, I also find myself automatically pushing back: Just because something is difficult, doesn’t mean it is worth doing.
That’s why I prefer productivity expert Chris Bailey‘s take at Lifehacker. As Bailey explains:
“There are just a few tasks in every area of your life (like your mind, body, emotions, relationships, career, finances, and fun) that contribute most of the value in each area. For example, there are likely just a few activities in your work through which you contribute 80-90% of your value to whomever you work for.”
By figuring out your highest-leverage tasks, you can then focus on what truly matters in your workday. Whether these are your most disagreeable, “hardest” tasks or not, they will be the ones most beneficial to your productivity quotient.
7. Make it Harder to Suck
One essential aspect of productivity is recognizing the many parts of you that really, really don’t care if you are productive. These parts of you would prefer to sleep, go out, play videogames, rearrange couches, or do anything else rather than deal with the task at hand. That’s why I like this tip at Inc. from WordStream founder Larry Kim:
“Sometimes the best way to break a bad habit is to make things incredibly difficult for yourself. If you hate that you watch too much TV, keep the remote control in the upstairs closet.”
The genius of Kim’s example is that it makes the lazy part of you that wants to watch TV do battle with the lazy part of you that doesn’t want to go all the way upstairs, and if there’s one thing that the lazy parts of you hate it’s doing battle or doing anything because they are lazy. So the odds that they finally give up and let your productive self get back to working are pretty high. Suckers!
6. Acknowledge—And Accept—That You Won’t Always Bring your A-Game
We’ve talked about decision fatigue here before: basically, it’s the simple idea that your brain tires out over a long day just like any other part of your body—as your day goes on and the decisions (some important, many not) that you have to make pile up, your brain actually gets worse at making them.
This is just one way in which your performance won’t always be optimal. As the saying goes, life happens—and being sick or heartbroken or just plain burnt out means not playing at your highest level.
And that’s okay. It’s okay to take a step back; it’s okay to take a day off; it’s okay to accept that some days it’s just not working.
Or, as Chris Bailey puts it:
“When you throw more energy at your work without taking the time to recharge or nurture your energy levels along the way […] you’re going to run out of fuel and burn out.”
Remember, pushing yourself to the point of exhaustion is actually counter-productive. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is go easy on yourself.
Which reminds me, I’m probably due for that nap.
