Productivity is not as difficult as you think. You just need to know your onions, and you are good to go. You can apply the tips explained below anywhere from school to work and other places that demand your value.
Follow the tips explained in this article to learn how to be more productive.
1. Have A Workspace
One of the best things to do to stay productive is to have your personal workspace. This works perfectly whether you are a student or someone working from home. A workspace helps to put your mind in work mode and allows you to stay focused. It enables you to shut out distractions and hit your goals with speed.
You can set up your home workspace (in the dining, bedroom, etc.) or rent a coworking space. All you basically need are a desk, a suitable chair, your work supplies/tools, and your privacy. Note that you may be less productive when you work from places like your bed.
2. The Eisenhower Matrix Works
The Eisenhower Matrix is a practical productivity technique that began in the 1900s. The method helps you identify long-term priorities by focusing on what is urgent before attending to others. To create this matrix, form a 2 by 2 square and tag each side of the four axes as "important", "not important", "urgent", and "not urgent", respectively. Then decide what is urgent and begin acting on them first.
3. Use The 2-Pizza Rule
The 2-pizza rule is one of the best ways to stay productive. Sometimes, it can be less productive to hold a meeting with too many people as a study from Stanford University in the US revealed that you should not have meetings with more than seven people– worst-case scenarios should be nine. In this light, Jeff Bezos, in the early periods of Amazon, introduced the 2-pizza rule. The rule states that no meeting should be larger than being able to share two pizzas conveniently.
4. You Don't Live Alone? Set A Schedule At Home
It may not be easy to balance home duties with academics or other tasks because you do not live alone. This condition can cause your productivity levels to drop a ton. You can overcome this difficulty by agreeing on schedules with whoever you live with (your parents, spouse, siblings, friends, etc.). This way, you'll be able to prepare and prevent distractions.
5. Work With A Reasonable To-Do List
To-do lists are essential for someone who wants to stay productive. They help you to be accountable and thorough with your tasks. They save you the stress of trying to remember important tasks, events, and meetings, throughout the day– all you need is to take a glance and you're on track.
When creating your list, you should include the time frames and how urgent each task is so that you can be effective. You can give yourself an added advantage by creating your to-do for the next day before you go to bed every day.
6. Begin With The Most Important Item On Your Schedule
We often start our day on the wrong foot of our schedule. This simply means that we begin with tasks with low priorities. Practicing this technique will only earn more unproductivity. If you want to stay productive and don't have urgent tasks on your table, you should begin with the most important task (MIT) before attending to others on your list. Starting with the most important tasks helps you to avoid wasting your time or procrastinating.
7. Take Breaks
Taking breaks is one of the best ways of staying productive. It is not right to sideline break periods even if you are tight-scheduled or are rushing to meet up with deadlines. You definitely can't cheat nature. Breaks do not have to be long, as they could be as short as 10 minutes. You can take a walk or exercise, call a loved one, take a shower (if you are working from home), go get some meal, play a game, close your eyes and relax your head, etc.
Make sure that it's something unrelated to your work or anything that totally distracts you from thinking about your work. Even if you have a whole lot of things on your table, always take a break in between schedules before you get exhausted. This way, you'll stay productive.
8. Work With The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule states that you should ensure that 80% of the results you achieve stem from your 20% efforts. This implies that for you to be productive, you should find what makes you impactful and place your attention in it.
9. Remove Digital Distractions
We live in the digital world and social media is our glue to the virtual space. You cannot agree more that social media and other mobile applications have their advantages as well as downsides. One quick peek at a notification can have you scrolling through feeds for the next 30 minutes. Yeah, time wasted can be painful.
On this note, you have to master the art of controlling your social media engagements while working or studying. You can do this by disabling these distracting applications or setting your mobile device to hide all notifications. You can also download applications that help you shut out applications you don't need for as long as you want.
More so, you can attend to very important messages on schedule. This means that you can schedule a time to respond to important emails or chat messages.
10. Avoid Multitasking
One of the best ways to stay productive is to avoid multitasking. Many people, in a bid to be more productive, often multitask. While it is not entirely wrong, it has a lot of downsides. One thing you should note is that multitasking does not necessarily mean that you are performing two tasks at once. Instead, you are basically switching between two activities and that can significantly affect your focus.
Every time you get back to one of the tasks, it may take a while to produce something substantial before switching back. This is what causes multitasking to be inefficient. Instead, manage your energy by performing one task at a time or calling on another person to help on stuff.
11. Work With A Distraction List
A distraction list is a record of everything that pops up during your work or study period. They are important to you but are either not helpful to what you are doing currently or not worth being distracted for. So while working or studying, you could have a sheet of paper or a word document where you can jot out ideas or distractions. You can always come back to check them once you are done. This productive secret helps you stay focused.
12. Use The Early Morning Hours
The benefits of working very early in the morning cannot be over-emphasized. Agreeably, these periods are often very tempting to get some extra sleep. But on the contrary, they are usually the most productive periods of the day as they are often quiet. You can have an alarm wake you early enough, get some beverages, and handle your tasks.
13. Get Quality Food And Sleep
If you want to stay productive throughout the day, eat right and get plenty of sleep. Understandably, you may have quite a lot on your plate to handle, but you cannot effectively manage them if you don't eat and sleep well. Studies show that lack of water causes the brain to run into exhaustion, and the body loses the ability to pick signals and coordinate. At the same time, a lack of food forces the brain to function strictly in its basic form (survival mode) and shut down complex functionalities.
14. Split Your Tasks Into Bits
It can be overwhelming to look at your tasks as one huge goal. However, it becomes easier when you break tasks. Split them into smaller pieces, and watch your strength and enthusiasm grow. Yes, you will also pick up speed because it's all seeming pretty easy now. To further soften things, you can set goals for the tasks to help you stay aligned till you finish.
Conclusion
As explained in this article, you can stay as productive as you need if you engage in the right practices. Working from home or being engaged anywhere at all has its successes as well as mistakes. All we have to do is maintain the right practices to stay productive.