You know, people have been giving productivity advice for ages. People have published so many books which outline tips on how to increase productivity. This article is going to take a different approach. I am going to show you how to be productive using psychological insights. Not copying the habits of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or any other successful person. With these insights, you can build a system to increase productivity that works for YOU.

The problem with looking at the habits of the most productive people is that it is fundamentally flawed to look at them. I am talking about the survivorship bias. For a few people who are successful by developing productive habits, many are unsuccessful in spite of using the same habits. Very few survive and tell their success story. But the failure stories often have the same habits and productivity insights. So it isn’t useful to blindly copy the habits of productive people. You can read more about the survivorship bias here.

Take a deep breath.

Once more.

Let’s begin.





How to be productive: Fundamentals, Tips, Examples

Back to using psychology to improve productivity. We are going to look at some fundamental insights that will help you design a life conducive to productivity. These productivity tips are not aimed at making you successful overnight. All those books and articles which say ‘These tips will make you a millionaire or the next Einstein or Jobs’ are a lie. A blatant cold-hearted lie.

Oh, and if you think you can copy the habits of productive people and wait for them to increase your productivity, you are chasing a wild goose.

We are going to talk about using the fundamentals of productive outputs to your advantage. We are going to draw insights from all relevant areas – psychology, neuroscience, economics, etc. to answer the question – how to increase productivity – for real. As the author, my goal is to give you what you have come looking for.

Ok. So, this article will have 2 sections. Section one will look at some fundamental factors, habits, and attitudes you will need to address. Section two is about specialized actionable tips to increase productivity. (You can print those out and paste them on your wall along with the infographic – your cheat sheet).

Note: This article is huge & detailed. Over 4500 words with a razor-sharp focus on how to increase productivity. I urge you to take some time out and go through this article in one go. If you are short on time, go through the index, the infographic, and section 2. But, I guarantee that it won’t be enough. You can print or save the infographic and section 2 to later remind yourself what you need to do to increase productivity in the long run.





Section 1: The fundamental factors that affect productivity

Remember I mentioned that following the habits of productive people is pointless because of the survivorship bias? We are going to circumvent that. We will work ground up with respect to YOU. You can figure out your ‘design’ by looking at these factors and implementing them appropriately.





Mental Health:

Depression has become the leading cause of disability. Depression has the following characteristics – inaccurate evaluation of the self, the world, and the events that take place; lack of motivation; lack of energy to do something. Depression hits hard and can cripple you before you know it. It’s not surprising that depression leads to lowered productivity. But that is not it.

Obsessive-compulsive disorders & impulse control disorders can also take a huge toll on your productivity because you can be preoccupied with certain thoughts and spend an inordinate amount of time on doing something about those thoughts. For example, if you have obsessive thoughts about revenge and you engage in behaviors to counteract those thoughts, you’ll just be wasting time.

Anxiety can lower your productivity even further. For starters, anxious thoughts can intrude and break the chain of thoughts you have while working. It can transport you to a different and unpleasant world. Anxiety also makes people extremely self-critical which leads to work that remains forever incomplete. People suffering from anxiety often judge their work too harshly and believe it is sub-par which itself becomes a hurdle for completion. Sometimes, anxiety makes you judge the yet-to-happen output poorly and that kills productivity before the work even begins. Learn to regulate destructive emotions to reduce their negative impact on your work output.

Does this have empirical support? Yes. Research has demonstrably shown that poor mental health is associated with lowered productivity in the workplace via two mechanisms – absenteeism (skipping work) and presenteeism (low performance when at work). If you want better emotional and cognitive work-outcomes from the tasks you do, maintain your mental health.

The productivity tip here is very straightforward. Do not compromise on your mental health. Deal with the problems you are facing (with professional help if necessary). Regain control of your mind and then get back to work. Build healthy coping mechanisms so you don’t enter a downward spiral.

Poor mental health sucks up your mental resources in virtually every context. You are left with very little if you are struggling internally. Take care of that first. Productivity will follow once you take care of your mental health.





Sleep, Wake, Rest, and Stress:

We know that sleep is one of the most internalized aspects of biology on earth. It serves many functions. One key function is the consolidation, formation, and refinement of cognitive processes & memory. That means, ensuring good sleep ensures good memory, learning, error spotting, critical evaluation, attention, and concentration. Quality sleep also helps you stay mentally & physically healthy as it has a number of restorative processes involved. The point: you do not want to compromise on sleep if you want to be productive.

A lot of people have anecdotes about how they stayed up and did great things. Sure, maybe you submitted your thesis or finished a report. But if you cut down on sleep regularly to improve productivity, you are doing some serious long-term damage.

Compromising sleep is a big NO if you want to increase productivity in the long run.

The body and mind experience enough stress throughout the lifespan. That is why you need a healthy sleep routine to maintain productivity for decades. Sleep serves the function of restoring your mental and physical resources to the extent that your waking life is optimized. Be sure to sleep well and sleep enough for high productivity. And when I say sleep, I also mean rest (relaxing, power naps, breaks, massages, idle-time, vacay, etc.)

In case you have trouble falling asleep, follow the evidence-based tips in the linked article.

Oh and then there is taking breaks. Spacing out for a while helps you consolidate information better, counters getting into a rut, inspires creative thoughts, makes errors easy to spot, and gives you additional perspectives. The brain likes space and time-outs. Take breaks. Not token breaks. Healthy breaks that let you space out and return to work with a fresh mind.

And while you are at it, remember to work in chunks – small time units (20mins to 45mins) with tasks which are related to each other. Then, take your break and return to work for a new chunk. You might have heard of the Pomodoro Technique. It is a system similar to what I just described.

Pick a timer, Set it to 20 or 25 minutes

Spend 20-25 minutes on a task

Once the timer rings, stop.

Take a break of 5 minutes (cycle 1)

Return to another 20-25 minutes on a series of tasks

Take a break of 5 minutes (cycle 2)

After 4 cycles, take a longer break

Pomodoro means ‘a tomato’ in Italian and the technique is named after the tomato-shaped timer Francesco Cirillo used (the inventor, 1980s). The Pomodoro Technique is a popular way to increase productivity.





Approaching a task:

There is often the question: Do I do this or do I ask someone/something else to do it? Outsourcing can be cheap & efficient but can often lead to a loss of control. Building trust w/ people, softwares, and new systems take time. So what do you do? Do you always go Do It Yourself? Outsourcing here refers to people, companies, softwares, or any tool for that matter. Outsourcing = removing & reducing your burden.

Here is a simple scenario. Your phone is glitching. Would you rather waste a few hours, some money, and 3 working days to repair your gadget or spend 1 hour to figure out if you even need to go to the service station? We have the internet and it is full of solutions to problems. Many of which are very easy to implement. This could be a life-hack, could be a tech tip, could be a mental health tip. A DIY attitude could save time. On the other hand, if you are in need of a professional logo and you don’t know anything about design, outsource it.

How about other productivity related problems? Say you need proofreading done and you have tonnes to write. Is 8 dollars a month for Grammarly (proofreading app) too much to pay if it saves you 3 hours a week? This is a judgment call. It is important to know when saving yourself the effort is worth it.

Suppose you are stuck and you cannot produce the necessary output. Is your fundamental approach wrong? Perhaps there is no way of knowing that. Let us introduce the idea of scaffolding. To go from A to B, we often don’t know the ‘how’. Scaffolding is half-baked help you can gather from many places, so you get a less ambiguous ‘how’. Scaffolding helps you just enough to get the work done and see it get done at point ‘A’. The path to B is then clear enough for you to work. Looking at related problems on the internet and reading about how people solved them is like scaffolding. Learning a little more about a process can be like scaffolding. You don’t have to go all the way and master a skill before getting to ‘B’. You just need a little bit of help and your brain will set you on a path to figure it out. Scaffolding is a powerful learning technique; you should leverage it to improve productivity.

A final note on approaching a task. The fundamental approach can be wrong and you should be open to accepting that it is wrong. You might want to change your perspective (psychological & physical) to get things done. Change the order of priorities, change the plan. Try to complete what you can readily complete first and then move back toward the more difficult part. You can work on a project linearly, go step by step, or in parallel, work on many fronts simultaneously. Working in parallel helps one aspect inform the other and helps you see a whole picture forming over time instead of part by part. Working in parallel also gives you the chance to complete what you can at its earliest. It is a lot more streamlined even if it appears scattered. You get the unfair advantage of seeing the bigger and smaller picture simultaneously.

A post-final note on approaching a task. Sometimes it is better to use a strategy designed for a particular type of a task instead of using a strategy you are used to. People usually stick to their existing study habits, but they are, more often than not, inefficient. Here is a guide to study using insights from the cognitive sciences. There are many other systems such as a proper protocol to write code or debug. Or a set of useful keyboard shortcuts to better play a game and use specialized software. There are systems for cooking as well. Use those. They are designed to handle problems better and increase productivity. Have faith in the design of successful systems over your existing habits.





Execution:

I’ll keep this section short. Learn actionable execution skills. Have great thoughts? Learn to speak and write. Have great software ideas? Learn to code. Have great visions? Learn business processes. Have strong recommendations to make? Learn to sell. The truth is that execution is important because that is tangible. There is little value unless you can make it tangible.

Do you already have the skills to execute? Why aren’t you implementing them? Is it because you procrastinate? We all are guilty of that. Procrastination has a hidden demon – The completion anxiety. There often is an anxiety associated with your productive output. This is an imagined anxiety about the outcome. It isn’t based on our objective reality.

These hidden anxieties take various forms. For example: If I study I’ll realize I am stupid. So… I’ll just not study. Or, if I complete this now, the output will suck. So… I’ll hold off. People procrastinate everything from decisions to relationships & conversations to feedback, everything can be procrastinated. Here is a system to overcome procrastination by addressing the underlying anxiety.

Let us now assume that procrastination isn’t a problem. Once you work on execution skills and actually increase productivity, it is easy to start believing that you are doing great. But I’d like to remind you that self-evaluation is tricky. Holding yourself too high or too low can be detrimental. It takes an enormous amount of time to become a real master of some art. Most people are decently competent and stop at being better than average. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication to be one of those insanely productive people.

When should you execute something? The answer is ‘there and then.’ Even if it is just a simple phone call, a text reply, an email, do it there and then. You see an error? Resolve it there and then. Forgot to do something? Add it to your to-do there and then. Of course, something like writing a report takes time, but you can make edits and notes there and then. If there is no hurdle, execute at the earliest possible time. This does not mean that you don’t plan ahead. Do the simpler tasks there and then, the sort of things you tend to forget about the next day.





Functional fixedness:

Functional fixedness is the tendency to use an object or a resource in the way it is meant to be. People often use an object just for how it was designed. Now that limits resourcefulness. If you want to improve productivity, you need to start seeing multiple uses for resources and objects. Increasing productivity means increasing the utility of resources so you can leverage your resources more than you thought you could. Researchers have shown that past experiences can limit our perception of objects/ideas and reduce their resourcefulness in the context of productive thinking and problem-solving. That is why we need to deliberately learn and update how we utilize resources.

Have you wondered why experts fail to solve problems or provide a template solution even when there are simpler solutions? It’s the Einstellung effect – Past learning and experiences can hamper novel problem-solving.

Social media is awesome to share cat photos, but it is great to find the latest popular research too. In fact, using ResearchGate is convenient, so is browsing through Reddit to find research that trends. That is the research people are likely to build on first.

See multiple functions for resources so you can increase your output.

You may have heard of the saying – if you only know how to use a hammer, all problems will appear like a nail. Think about it. You can actually use a hammer in novel ways or you can learn new tools. Food for thought. I’ll let you be creative.

This is closely tied to improvisation. Loosely put, that is the ability to create things and solve problems on the fly. In the kitchen, you can improvise by using different ingredients if your usual ingredients are over. Musicians work on improvisation. What they do is learn to quickly implement pseudo novel ideas on the fly. Improvisation increases your chances of solving a problem, especially if you are stuck. To improvise better, learn to access information within your brain quickly and learn to manipulate the basics of a problem. Want to give a lecture? Don’t waste time learning your routine, spend time accessing what all you know and what all you don’t. That will put you in a position to take micro-decisions while producing your ‘productive output.’ The core of improvisation is snowballing around and manipulating ideas as well as readily accessing those ideas.

Once you get into the habit of improvising, you’ll have saved dozens of hours a month because you won’t need heavy preparation. The other side of increasing productivity is availing resources, and time is one.





Managing resources:

What do you think of when I say resources? Time? Money? That’s only the tip of the iceberg. Here is a list of resources you need to account for so you can choose to be in a ready state.

Phone and laptop charging

Updated and access to useful apps

Easy modes of payment and purchases

Ensured logins so communication is easy

Knowing where to find what you need

Food & water, so you don’t die while working

Space to do what you need to do

Knowing useful humans

Ability to ask those humans for what you need

Time – doing small things there and then. I cannot stress this enough.

Time – committing to a future hour in a reasonable capacity

Backlogs – working on backlogs without ignoring current priorities

Managing & maintaining your tools – stationary, gadgets, software, utilities, etc.

Your self-notes, to-do lists, bookmarks, need to be up to date and dedicated. Making them and forgetting about them is not so useful.

Physical resources – maintain your energy supply with food and nutrition

Psychological resources – maintain your mental resources by constructively handling current and past problems/issues. Let it not drain your capacity to perform.





Trial & Error:

One of the most fundamental aspects of human learning is variance and trial & error. Research on learning has shown that the execution of a skill and its performance is highly dependent on the variations you experience as well as the amount of trial and error you go through.

If you want to increase our productive output, your capacity to learn and execute has to be high. This increases as you go through variations. Let me explain. Do you want to be a more productive writer? Learn to write a variety of things even if they are unrelated. Want more productivity in your coding skill? Practice and try out a variety of problems. Want it to look like you did something while studying? Expose yourself to a variety of related problems.

Your brain learns to converge on productive and useful execution after it learns the bazillion variations. It also makes your learning and execution adaptive so you can implement things easily in the future.

Trial and error is spending time in trying to find a solution. Remember, you can still be productive even if you fail at something. Productivity should be measured by the quality of the process and then the output. Not just the output. Ensuring that the process is rich improves productivity at the output level. Trial and error often results in better solutions and increases the quality of the output. Focusing only on the output can yield subpar or average outcomes. You’ll soon feel that they are not productive enough.





Environmental design:

To improve your productivity, you need to take control of your environment and the peripherals. This includes choosing the level of noise, the organization of your desk, etc.

You can read about the research on music and productivity here and here. Keep your tools and utilities ready and accessible.

Your life is always in the context of an environment. You can choose to build a part routine, part variable lifestyle. The routine will make you rely on a system that governs your work. People often get fond of routines because they begin to work and yield results. If you lack one, build one. Just make sure that routines don’t become a rut. To prevent making it a rut, allow yourself flexibility, adventure, time-offs, travel, fun, and some time-wasting. Having fun and being in an active good mood is important.

There is evidence that increasing the cognitive load and construal level can help you do things better as compared to having things too easy.

Cognitive load: The mental resources needed to figure things out. Reading an academic paper to find an answer to a question has a higher cognitive load than accepting the first sentence you see via a google search. The increased cognitive load can bolster your learning and, by extension, productivity.

Construal level: The psychological distance between you and the information. Scribbled notes have a higher construal level than extremely clean notes. Scribbled notes can be more useful for some people. Construal Level is important because obscured information can help you build a stronger network of information in your head, can inspire creative thinking, and can help you develop new perspectives. It’s perfect for ideation and free-thinking.

Another aspect of environmental control is designing your space and choosing what works best. Be it an office chair that is better for your posture OR keeping a stress-busting bubble wrap next to you. Take control of the peripherals that affect your productivity. One common issue for left-handed school children is that desks are often designed for right-handed people. This physically kills the left-handed person’s ability to perform at maximum capacity. There are many more issues such as clothes and shoes which don’t fit you well. These extra annoyances can cumulatively hamper your baseline.

Taking control of your environment to increase productivity also includes small micro-adjustments such as customizing your phone, mouse, and laptop to better suit your needs. Customizing the computer is very useful for those who need to use the computer often. Graphic designers, sound engineers, writers, coders, etc. can all save a lot of time and reduce redundancies by taking control of their interfaces. Even arranging files in relevant folders so you can access them better, organizing your workstation to suit current needs (as opposed to long-term needs), etc. can save a lot of effort. All fall under taking control of your environment – the digital one.

On a related note: Connecting with nature is great for your mental health and well-being.





Setting things in motion:

The world is extremely fast and interconnected. That shouldn’t pressurize you. That should tell you that you can leverage each interconnected aspect in useful ways. Setting things in motion is about doing something today that will yield results in the future because you can control many variables.

Here is a simple tip: If you have no clear picture of what you want to do productively, do something. However little. Get started on the smallest steps. You’ll then be in the zone to see things happen more clearly as you journey through the steps.





Achieving targets:

This is highly anecdotal, but I’ll say it anyway. Trying to improve 1% at a time is reasonable. But it goes a long way. It is small enough a target to hold as a goal and achieve it. You’ll realize quality is often hampered by personal expectations that are unrealistic. Be incremental in increasing your productivity.

Knowing your limits is important. But it is also important to mildly push yourself to improve your limits. When you set incredibly ambitious targets, most people tend to disappoint themselves because they are too ambitious. If you set targets which are too low, you are accepting poor quality work. So what do you do? Not much. Just 1% at a time. You assess your capacity based on your previous experience and incrementally improve your work productivity, quality, and targets by 1%. That is it. 1% at a time. Do this consistently, and you’ll see the magic.

You’ll grow by 80% in a year if you can improve your productivity by just 1% once a week.

80% increase in productivity if you push your limit by 1% every week

You’ll grow by an astounding 3900% in a year if you can improve your productivity by 1% every single day.

3900% increase in productivity over a year by increasing only 1% every day

Anything in between is quite reasonable.

1% increase in productivity is a modest and reasonable growth target. Consistency over time is what makes you grow extraordinarily.





Drawing the line:

This may be the hardest-to-master tip to increase productivity. When is “good” good enough? When is an idea actionable enough to begin working on it? When is your write-up detailed enough to publish? When is your background homework enough? We have to draw a line around the point of diminishing returns. That is when your effort no longer yields enough value to improve the quality or performance significantly. This is subjective but 99% good is often good enough.

Way too much time is wasted when people don’t realize something is good enough. One can always come back to make improvements if needed. Combine this with other highlighted tip to increase productivity – doing things there and then, and you have 2 guidelines which can slingshot your output.





Asking the ultimate question:

Is what I am doing useful in any way?

When do you deem something as useful? The following criteria are a non-exhaustive list:

Adds value to yourself

Adds value to someone else

Makes an investment for potential use in the future

Relaxes you

Prevents a compromise of your physical and mental health

Prevents a comprise of your personal, professional, and social relationships

There is some future utility to what you are doing

It makes you feel good

You can call it awesome & gratifying

Taking a step backward if it helps accelerate future steps

When is it not useful?

When one useful aspect compromises something else that is useful – like relaxation makes you miss an important deadline

When you do something for money and it takes a long-term toll on your mental health and disables you from coping healthily

Doesn’t add value to you in the long-term

When short-term gratification is actually a 100 steps backward in the wrong direction

These points aren’t about holding a positive attitude. Use really is about utility: does your action have a value-adding aspect to it? It isn’t hard to answer but humans tend to overlook this core aspect of productivity.





Decision making:

I can write something exhaustive here but that is not needed. All the factors above are going to help you make an educated decision. That will, inherently, increase your productivity.









Section 1.5: How to increase productivity (Infographic)

This infographic is your cheat sheet on how to improve productivity. Do share it, pin it, tweet it, or print it to your liking!

3 groups of techniques and 3 groups of fundamentals to drastically improve productivity









Section 2: Simple actionable tips to increase productivity

These productivity tips can be implemented quickly and have long-term benefits.

Dedicate time for physical and mental restoration Keep resources ready and available Understand the law of diminishing returns Do small things there and then such as texting, appointments, quick edits, etc. If there and then is not possible, aim to make it possible. Piling up is a psychological burden you do not need. Prioritize mental health Be reasonable with your capacity to achieve a target. Try to do just a little extra. Overkilling and under-killing both have detrimental effects. Regularly filter your actions with the question – Is it useful? Assess the value of effort in creating productive outputs Value the effort as long as it helps you learn, solve problems, or eliminate hurdles Try and keep trying with variations in your approach. Add variations to the problem itself. Make errors at minimal costs and learn from them Build useful relationships Sleep. DO NOT COMPROMISE on a healthy SLEEP routine. Use designed strategies if they are better than what you are used to such as efficient study methods for studying or a system to write code. Overcome functional fixedness and learn to improvise by using your resources in unorthodox ways Learn when to go DIY and when to outsource or automate In case you are lacking in productivity, make sure you actually possess actionable, execution skills to make productivity happen. It ain’t going to happen magically. Be comfortable in your shoes. Literally.

This sums up the ultimate guide to increase productivity. We haven’t relied on successful people’s habits. We have looked at factors and tips that will make you a productive person by addressing the fundamentals.

Now you can build a framework which can make you a productive person. I’d love to hear about how well you do after addressing these factors! Feel free to ask any questions in the comments section!





TL;DR

In case this is all 2 much and 2 heavy, here are only 2 productivity tips for you 2 follow which will still make a huge difference:

Take a long hard look at when your effort starts yielding diminishing returns so you can draw the line where good is good enough.

Whenever possible, do the small things there and then so you don’t carry the psychological burden of tasks piling up.

Now you know how to be a productive person. 🙂 Congratulations, may the force be with you, and thank you for reading my longest article!













P.S. Mandatory postscript. Read the next postscript:)

P.P.S. Think like a freak is one of the best books you could read to become harder, better, faster, stronger, smarter, more insightful, critical, and strategic.

P.P.P.S. Let us assume you are now the best of the best. Why do others suck at work? Here is why.

P.P.P.P.S. I had planned to not write any postscripts because the article is long. But, here I am writing the 4th. Why not go full retard? Robert Downey Jr. says never go full retard.

Hey! Thank you for reading; hope you enjoyed the article. I run Cognition Today to paint a holistic picture of psychology. Each article is frequently updated with new research findings. I’m an applied psychologist from Pune, India. Love sci-fi, horror media; Love rock, metal, synthwave, and pop music; can’t whistle; can play the guitar.