What is Productivity?

Productivity is the measure of how effectively someone uses their time. It is the precise ratio between the amount of time inputted with the amount of work outputted.

Benefits of Increasing Your Productivity

Greater productivity can greatly improve your life.

You will be able to get more work done on a daily basis.

You won’t feel the stress of deadlines and will enjoy your work more

You will become generally more positive and happy due to less stress

You will have a lot more spare time to enjoy with your family and friends

Still not convinced?

Well, think about it like this then. Your life is limited. Time is the most valuable commodity in this world and if you could buy it, every second would be worth millions of dollars. So make use of what you have been given. It’s like having money in the bank that you know will be gone tomorrow, but you still refuse to use it.

So if you’re interested in using the time you have before it slips between your fingers. This article will give you the tools and ability to become a more effective and productive person.

5 Easy Tips to Become More Productive

1. Learn to Prioritize

Face the facts. If you’re a normal functioning human in modern society, you are always going to be busy. You are always going to have multiple things to do. And you’re always going to have multiple deadlines to meet. But don’t think that this means you can’t be productive. The reason why you see so many people getting buried under piles of work is not that their slow or anything but that they probably just don’t follow the key pillar of productivity which is prioritizing.

By doing things in order of urgency, you greatly improve your level of efficiency. A great tool that I like to use is the Eisenhower Decision Matrix and I urge you to use it as well.

Quadrant 1 contains things that are vital and urgent such as a crisis or an upcoming deadline. It’s important that you do these things first before everything else.

Quadrant 2 contains things that are still important but not as urgent as quadrant 1. These things you are able to plan for and do ahead of time.

Quadrant 3 contains things that are not important but are still urgent. This includes things like most work meetings, phone interruptions and things you have to go to even if you don’t want to.

Quadrant 4 contains things that are both unimportant and not urgent. These are generally time wasters and things you want to do to relax like television or Facebook.

What your goal should be is to try and stay in Quadrant 2 whenever you are in your allotted work time. Make sure you don’t waste time on Quadrant 1 things while working.

As for when you finish work, you should start focusing on Quadrant 2. So things like relationships and your goals. Deal with Quadrant 3 things as they come up and give yourself a prearranged time for Quadrant 4, but never put Quadrant 4 things ahead of the rest.

2. Focus and Never Multitask

Multitasking is a myth and whoever tells you their good it, is lying. It’s humanly not possible to do two things at a single moment of time. Either you’re doing X task or you’re doing Y task. There’s no such thing as doing both X and Y. All you are really doing when you pretend to multitask is go back and forth between two tasks quickly.

This just simply doesn’t work, not to mention the stress and headache you get from it. You end up giving less focus to each task and probably ending waste more time in the long run. So try doing this from now on. Only do one thing at a time but give it your undivided attention.

A good trick I like to use is the “15 Minute Rule”.

This is a technique that forces you to give your full attention to something because you only have fifteen minutes. You will find that using this simple lifehack will make you super productive and help you finish things a lot faster and better.

If you have a computer around simply Google “15-minute timer” and an easy to use timer will show up. It even has an alarm so you know when to stop task 1 and begin the next 15 minutes.

3. Set Your Own Deadlines

The worst thing that you can do for your productivity is to let a large deadline loom over your work. Not just is this nerve-wracking but it doesn’t let you to properly organize your time. Large deadlines mislead many people to procrastinate because to fully visualize all the work required to finish the task is difficult. It’s always better to have smaller deadlines, where you can see what you need to get done hence you are more focused.

So if you do have a large deadline coming up in a few months, try setting yourself smaller bite-sized deadlines that you are able to reach every week or even every day.

You will notice that you will get a lot more work done and all the anxiety you might have had before will instantly go away.

4. Eliminate Distractions

When you’re working on a project that is important or urgent or both, you need to cut the distractions down to nothing. You have to focus on one task at a time. So unless you are able to mentally ignore or resist:

Turn your phone, texts and all those fancy alerts

Don’t even peek at your Email

Turn off the TV and even put a ‘Do Not Disturb” sign on your door.

Remove any other unnecessary distraction

5. Sleep Early. Rise Early. Sleep Better.

It just makes sense. If you have more time to invest in work, you will equally output more results. Sleep is king for two main reasons:

The amount of sleep you have directly correlated with the amount of time you have to stay awake in a day. The more restoring your sleep is the better your functionality and efficiency will be throughout the day.

The main point is, is that you can’t master your day without mastering your sleep.

Final Words

When you boil it down, all productivity really comes down to is not wasting time doing things that aren’t useful. These things can be like thinking or even reading this article…

Best of Luck!