Six Productivity Tips You May (or May Not) Want to Follow
Some productivity tips seem at first glance to be designed to slow you down or stall your progress. But they may actually help you to achieve results faster and better. I’m not talking about team productivity, which has its own set of how-to’s, but rather personal productivity. Here are some suggestions.
1. If your workspace is like mine (i.e., a mess!), declutter it. Throw stuff out. File it. Move it to a shelf or drawer. Do whatever it takes to get it off your desk. When you’re not distracted by all the clutter or busy searching for something that’s buried in it, you can focus better on your work. (Do as I say, not necessarily as I do….)
2. Take a thirty-minute yoga class before work. OK, that may be too extreme for some people. But the idea is to do something—whether it’s meditating, deep breathing, or even just sitting quietly for several minutes—to help you focus mentally before facing the onrush of work.
3. If there’s a task you’ve been putting off, identify a concrete step you can take to make some progress on it. Procrastination sometimes results when tasks are too big or fuzzy. By becoming explicit about what the next step is, you can take at least that step. Often, once you face that first little step, continuing won’t seem so bad. In fact, research shows that starting a task makes it much easier to finish.
4. You might also identify tasks that aren’t important to your organization, as well as tasks you can stop doing with no negative effect and tasks you can delegate or outsource. By eliminating even just one or two of these tasks, you’ll have more energy to devote to the ones you have to do or can’t fob off on someone else.
5. A popular tip for improving productivity is to delay checking your email until the afternoon so you can spend the morning fully productive. One explanation for this tip is that as soon as you check your email, you start focusing on tasks triggered by the email. Instead, so the advice goes, you’re better off completing—or at least making progress on—an important activity before sneaking a peek at your email.
If that works for you, fine. For myself, I reject the idea. Until I check my email, I’m distracted by what might be awaiting me, and I can’t focus on those aforementioned important tasks.
6. Sometimes, the best way to be productive is to do absolutely nothing when doing something is likely to make you unproductive. If you do pretty much nothing when you’re tired, anxious, or angry, you’ll avoid making mistakes that you’ll have to waste precious time undoing or redoing.
Doing nothing is my favorite productivity tip of all.
