If you’re always busy, but you’re not happy with your productivity, you’ve come to the right place.
Trying to achieve your daily goals can be a frustrating thing when you’re being pulled in a hundred different directions at once. You’ve got your job, your family, your friends, and your hobbies all vying for attention and draining your energy in the process.
As the saying goes, being productive is about working smart, not hard and if you’re going to increase your productivity, you’ve got to get a few important things straight. Today, we’re going to give you 9 productivity tips that’ll have you feeling good about life again.
1. Don’t Sleep With Your Phone
Believe it or not, most people go to sleep with their phones in their bedroom these days. That probably means the last thing you see before you fall asleep and the first thing you see when you get up is your smartphone. If this doesn’t sound healthy to you, that’s because it isn’t.
Not only is this proven to negatively affect our sleep patterns for various reasons, but it’s also unnatural to jump right into work mode from sleep. Stay away from your email and messages until you’ve taken some time for yourself in the morning.
2. Optimize
When you open up your MacBook in the morning, what do you see? If there are files everywhere, slowing down your computer and causing you stress, you need to find ways to optimize it.
There are different ways to optimize your computer, many of which are laid out in this post: https://setapp.com/how-to/how-to-optimize-your-mac. The more efficiently your computer runs, the more efficiently you’ll run.
3. Do More With Less
They say that most people achieve 80% of their results from just 20% of the time that they spend working. If that’s true of you, you’re wasting a lot of time trying to be productive, but that doesn’t have to be the case.
Try to take better notice of the times when you’re really “in the zone” and consider what factors are typically at play when this is happening. Why sit there for 6 hours trying to get something done when you could be doing it in 2 hours and spending the other 4 achieving other goals?
4. Don’t Pack Your Days
People often associate productivity with being busy, which is essentially what we’re trying to refute in this post. Filling your daily schedule to the brim with meetings, work, and more meetings doesn’t give you any time to decompress.
If you can’t decompress, then you can’t analyze what’s being said in meetings or even what you’re doing in your work. You’ll feel most productive when you’re able to give your all to whatever tasks you’ve laid out for yourself, so don’t forget to pencil in a few breaks every now and then.
5. What to Do With Down Time?
Now, what do you do with this newfound downtime? You might end up trying to clean up loose ends or finishing up other tasks, which is totally fine, but you have to be alright when procrastination rears its head.
You can look at procrastination one of two ways: as a waste of time or an opportunity to clear your head and reboot. Go for a walk, tidy up your office, or call your mother; you don’t have to be working all the time to be productive, remember that.
6. Change Up the Scenery
Sometimes the office environment can leave you feeling stagnant and restless. Take your computer and head to a nearby coffee shop for a change of scenery. Just being around people that you don’t see every day, even if they’re strangers in a coffee shop, can boost your productivity.
Most companies these days understand that a little bit of out of office time is necessary for all employees. The work-life balance is important and you can’t let yourself feel trapped by your job.
7. One Thing at a Time
Multi-tasking is certainly a great skill to possess, but overusing it is going to poke a gaping hole in your productivity. We’re not saying it’s always going to be easy, but whenever possible, try to focus on one thing at a time. Follow it through to completion and move onto the next task.
Finishing something and crossing it off your list for the day will fill you with a sense of accomplishment and give you the confidence to accomplish the next task. When you do too much at once, you’re bound to get worn out more quickly or just drop the ball on something.
8. Figure Yourself Out
Busy men like yourself (and many others) tend to put other things (work, family, etc.) before their own well being. If you want to truly be productive day in and day out, you have to take time out of each day to figure out how you tick.
Try out meditation and other self-examination exercises to quiet the noise coming in from the outside. The more comfortable you are in your own skin, the better you’ll be able to handle your daily business.
9. Set Time Limits
Giving yourself a set amount of time per day to work on a task can help you schedule your work a bit better. This works really well for ongoing tasks, but if you really need to get something done, you can’t restrict the time you spend on it.
It also works well in keeping your procrastination time in check. Give yourself 15 minutes to check out the news headlines in the morning and 2 minutes to scroll through Instagram before you get back to work after lunch. If left unchecked, you could end up wasting a lot of time.
Don’t Forget These (And Other) Productivity Tips
You should always have an eye out for new and interesting productivity tips. It’s not easy to stay productive in a world that’s becoming increasingly distracted, but it’s definitely possible to be happy with yourself and your productivity. Come back to this guide anytime you’re feeling too busy and unhappy with your level of productivity.
If you liked this post, there’s plenty more great content for gentlemen on our website.
