Are you sick and tired of having open loops, never-ending professional and family duties, and missed deadlines, all mixed up with the downward spiral of your nine to five and an unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle? Want to increase your productivity?
You certainly turned to this blog post with a fervent hope that productivity, whatever it means, will alleviate your pain. Maybe you’re somewhat skeptical about what productivity promises… I’m too!
Let’s ignore negative self-talk and see what productivity is and what steps you can take to shift into fifth gear and increase your productivity.
There’re countless definitions of productivity, but I think it’s best captured in Michael Hyatt’s words:
Productivity is achieving more by doing less.
Productivity, in my view, is something you live.
It’s a never-ending journey.
It’s about finding one’s passion.
It’s all about figuring out what’s important and what isn’t.
It’s a toolbox to get things done.
Before we move further, you must acknowledge a dilemma about productivity. (Later, we’ll discover why it’s so important.)
After reading lots of productivity articles and books I found that most of the takeaways are based on common sense. Why, then, is it worth to pay attention to productivity and read this blog post further?
Because it works.
Despite sounding common sense, some proven principles simply work.
Keep reading to discover:
- What do Hip-Hop and productivity have in common
- How to set up and maintain your very own productivity system
- What routines will make you invincible
- The unfair advantage that comes from ignoring email and social media
- What are the productivity boosters
- How to adopt a productive mindset
- What is the secret sauce to increase your productivity
Don’t waste more time here and get to the heart of this blog post.
Your 10-step road map to increase your productivity
Step 1. Create a productivity system
Step 2. Choose your weapon
Step 3. Do a weekly review
Step 4. Develop good habits
Step 5. Establish your morning routine
Step 6. Put a ban on email and social media
Step 7. Don’t discriminate, just eliminate
Step 8. Identify the three musketeers
Step 9. Identify your assistants
Step 10. Experiment like crazy
When it comes to productivity, many people think it’s all about your to-do list and apps. While the tech-side is very important, the solid foundation of productivity lurks on the other side…
Productivity principles
Hip-Hop veteran KRS-One identifies 9 elements of hip hop, arguing that Hip-Hop is a way to view the world:
Rap is something you do! Hip-Hop is something you live!
What I’ve figured out over the years is something very similar:
Productivity is something you live!
There’s 9+1 element to increase your productivity.
The steps below will alleviate your pain and, over time, transform how you perceive your world. I won’t declare that all of the steps below are my ideas. What I claim, however, is that they reflect my learning curve.
As a rule of thumb, each step builds on the previous one. Let’s dive in…
Step 1. Create a productivity system
The very first step to increase your productivity is that you build your very own and
You’ll find a couple of models here, of which David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) is highly popular. And not without a reason…
GTD is a framework that offers a work-life management system for stress-free productivity.
As long as you keep everything in your head, you limit your brain’s capacity. Think of it as the Random-Access Memory (RAM) in your computer: once you turn off your computer, data are lost—RAM is used for temporary storage only. GTD assumes that you write down immediately everything that comes to mind from tasks to agendas to ideas, to free up your mental RAM.
Next, you organize all your incoming pieces of information along two dimensions:
- All tasks belong to a certain project—think of it as a container to store action steps that will push the project into completion
- Any task in a given project can be organized by context—batch tasks by importance, time, place, assignee, and more
This two-dimensional thinking will ensure that you stay ahead of the game.
One more thing to keep in mind: do a task immediately if it takes no more than two minutes. Don’t even write it down. Just do it!
GTD is highly customizable and might serve as a scaffold to build upon.
Recommended reading:
Step 2. Choose your weapon
As we discussed earlier, you need a trusted place so that you can get things out of your head, which is a prerequisite to increase your productivity. A task management tool is a perfect candidate here. Below is a list addressing its major benefits:
- Stop worrying about forgetting important commitments
- Focus on what really matters
- Get a work-life management system—join the dots between different life domains
- Easily prioritize your stuff
- Carry your system in your pocket—most task managers offer real-time syncing through a cloud service so that you can work on a mobile device
- Easily find your stuff—search completed tasks and archived projects
- Leverage project templates so that you can avoid reinventing the wheel
- Revise your stuff smoothly without dealing with paper
- Work in a team and share your projects
Don’t yet worry about the technical details. I’ll provide some ideas soon…
Once you’ve set up your system, you need to follow up with your projects. That’s when the weekly review comes to the scene…
Recommended reading:
- Choose Your Weapon: How to Find the Best Task Manager?
- The Battle of the Giant and the Small: Asana vs. Nozbe
Step 3. Do a weekly review
Whatever fancy task manager you get, it’s useless unless you make a regular cleanup.
The weekly review is a one-on-one meeting with yourself when you go through all your projects and obligations and then prepare for course correction. Think of it as kind of a spring-cleaning when you dive deep into your system, weed out the unimportant stuff, and make sure that the important stuff gets done.
Go through all your inboxes, projects, and obligations; check your calendar, make sure that you schedule important tasks and reschedule other commitments; follow up outsourced tasks; and don’t miss checking your goals.
Honor your weekly review commitment and you won’t miss an important deadline anymore.
Feel free to check my ultimate guide to perform a thorough weekly review. It comes with a downloadable checklist along with the lazy day checklist for doing a weekly review.
Recommended reading:
Step 4. Develop good habits
Productivity is based on the premise that our habits govern our time, energy, and attention, all three contributing a pivotal role in how productive we are. We need to acknowledge that, in a large part, our actions are on autopilot. But we can turn things on their head and develop new habits to increase productivity.
I’ll use the term “happiness habits,” which was formulated by Richard Koch in his seminal book, The 80/20 Principle. By happiness habits, I mean regular activities that recharge your batteries. What follows is a list of happiness habits drawn from the literature along with some of my favorites, without the aim of being exhaustive:
- Reading
- Exercise
- Meditation
- Reflection, journaling
- TWWT (Thinking-While-Walking-Time)
- TWCT (Thinking-While-Cycling-Time)—yeap, my personal favorite!
- TWRT (Thinking-While-Running-Time)
- TWBWT (Thinking-While-Baby-Walking-Time)—another favorite of mine!
- Rejoining nature
- Doing a good deed
- Creative “work” (writing, art, etc.)
- Having lunch with a friend, mentor, or colleague
By practicing the happiness habits, your days will regain their meaning. Every now and then, I’ll revisit those happiness habits on my blog.
Recommended reading:
- How to Develop the Happiness Habits
- The One Surprising Tip That Will Make You a Walkaholic
- How to Read 20+ Books Per Year Without Claiming a Single Minute from Your Calendar
Step 5. Establish your morning routine
Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.
-Arthur Schopenhauer
Successful people have a strict morning and evening routine. All we need to do is copy their routines. Seems easy, right?
A significant part of morning routines is heavily built around the happiness habits, discussed above. Productive people read, exercise, meditate, and journal in the morning. They also drink plenty of water.
Don’t take it too seriously, though. Exercise and journaling have never been part of my morning routine. I do them in the evening because it best fits my schedule. The key is that you experiment and find the activities and time that resonate with YOU.
I believe that productivity should be approached like Personalized Medicine (PM). Personalized Medicine, according to Wikipedia, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease.
Productivity hacks and morning routines will work best if tailored to your individual needs. That’s what I call Personalized Productivity (PP).
So, establish a morning routine that resonates with YOU.
Recommended reading:
- Routine Series Part I. ―Morning Routines Revisited
- 7 Common Work-From-Home Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)
- Why Productivity Is All Common Sense (And Why It Works)
Step 6. Put a ban on email and social media
My number one advice about how you should spend the morning is what you should avoid in the first place: put a ban on email! This single rule can change everything. It did for me, at least.
Specify a no-social media time to ensure that important stuff gets done in the morning: your goals and ugliest tasks fall under this category.
By following this simple approach and dedicating the first two hours (replace it with what fits your schedule) of your working day to important work, you not only will play in another league but in another sport! When I say “working day” I mean it: your weekend is for fun.
Recommended reading:
- 7 Mistakes People Make When Dealing with Email
- Why You Shouldn’t Check Email in the Morning And What To Do Instead
- How to Stop Checking Your Email Constantly—a Case Study
Step 7. Don’t discriminate, just eliminate!
The next thing is that you should identify tasks, activities, and commitments that you can abandon without any serious consequence. It’s the most demanding part of your journey.
Without cutting back on the tasks and activities, however, you can easily end up where most people find themselves at the end of the year: with unfulfilled goals and frustration.
You certainly have a long to-do list… Simple physics, however, tells us that you can’t do it all.
The future of the to-do list is not what you think: it’s the not-to-do list! It’s a simple list of tasks that you, by setting your boundaries, refuse to do anymore. Make a list of things that you don’t do anymore.
I don’t discriminate, I just eliminate.
–Blaq Poet
Finally, more often than not, projects can be delivered at 95%. Working until perfection creates such a burden, that it doesn’t pay off in the long run.
I understand that you’re a perfectionist, I am too, but learn to let things go to leave space and time for the more important stuff. It’s your task, again, to identify what’s important to you.
Now that you have a solid foundation of the productivity principles, it’s time that we move on to where the rubber meets the road…
Recommended reading:
- What QB Rapper Blaq Poet Can Teach You About Minimalism
- The Future of the To-do List Is Not What You Think
Productivity boosters
If you like tech, you’ll enjoy this part. What comes below, is a short list of apps to increase your productivity. (I’ve experimented with all and found them useful. No affiliates here. These are, indeed, cool apps.) Enjoy!
Step 8. Identify the three musketeers
I recommend that you identify the three musketeers: a task management tool, a note-taking app, and a mind mapping tool.
Task management tools
We already discussed the importance of a task manager. It’s time that you choose your weapon: the post below (recommended reading) might be helpful by listing 8 criteria to aid your decision. I also made a detailed comparison of Asana and Nozbe, two of my all-time favorite tools.
Recommended tools: Nozbe, Asana, MeisterTask, Trello, Todoist
Note-taking tools
When it comes to note-taking, you have two options to consider: use a digital tool or stick with paper. Either way, there is a rule of thumb that you must put actionable items into your task manager and everything else into your note-taking app.
Recommended tools: Evernote, Notion, OneNote, Apple Notes, Bear
Mind mapping tools
Mind mapping is an underrated tool in productivity. To put it simply, a mind map is a snapshot of how your brain works; it simply pictures the brain’s radiant thinking process.
When it comes to brainstorming, mind mapping can be a game-changer, but its power goes way beyond that. Project management, note-taking, goal setting, content creation, language learning, decision-making, just to name a few, are all nice candidates for mind mapping.
Recommended tools: iThoughts, XMind, MindNode, iMindMap, MindMeister
Recommended reading:
- Choose Your Weapon: How to Find the Best Task Manager?
- The Battle of the Giant and the Small: Asana vs. Nozbe
- Nozbe Teams Review: First Look and Impression
- 18 + 1 Good Reason Why I Can’t Quit Nozbe
- 27 + 1 Good Reason Why I Can’t Quit Evernote
- Is It Time to Leave Your Old Elephant? – Evernote vs. Notion
- What’s on Your Mind: 7 Reasons to Learn Mind Mapping
Step 9. Identify your assistants
Tons of apps could have been listed here, but I only want to highlight three more tools.
Cloud service
A reliable cloud service is a perfect place to store your documents. Cloud storage helps to work remotely, easily share documents, and have automatic backups so that you’ll never worry about data loss. Compromising your privacy isn’t a valid risk anymore―two-factor authentication and other security tools will ensure that your privacy is protected.
Recommended tools: Dropbox, Google Drive, iCloud, MS OneDrive
Text expander tools
A text expander app allows using abbreviations (pre-defined snippets) that will unfold into complete text. A text expander tool will seriously eliminate redundant action: you don’t have to type many of the common phrases anymore. Just create snippets for all email templates, frequently used phrases, links, and addresses to automate your work.
Recommended tools: PhraseExpress, TextExpander, Breevy
Calendar tools
A calendar is a secret weapon in your toolbox. Use your calendar to schedule time-specific action, day-specific action, and day-specific information.
Recommended tools: iCal, Google Calendar, MS Outlook
Experts would say that it doesn’t matter the tool you choose. I think, however, that it’s important that you find the tools that you love to work with. Avoid the pitfall of switching between tools multiple times, though, because it can seriously undermine your productivity.
Recommended reading:
Step 10. Experiment like crazy
Remember the Personalized Productivity (PP) approach from step 5? All productivity tips will work best if tailored to your individual needs. And the only way to address those needs is to experiment, experiment, and experiment.
Notice that most of what productivity promises to deliver are breakthrough results while most of the methods seem all common sense. Something is wrong, isn’t it?
Gently acknowledge that many of the productivity tips sound common sense, but they work. Others don’t work.
Your job is to figure out what works for YOU.
It’s time now, to reveal the secret sauce to productivity…
The secret sauce to increase your productivity
Below, I summarized the steps discussed earlier. Please note that I complemented the list with two items: step 0 and step 11. Although they’re nice candidates for serving as the secret sauce to productivity―and are indeed very important―you’ll soon figure out what I’m talking about…
Step 0. Acknowledge that productivity is often based on common sense
Step 1. Build up your very own and trusted productivity system
Step 2. Choose your weapon―find your task manager
Step 3. Maintain and customize your system―do a regular review
Step 4. Develop the happiness habits
Step 5. Establish your morning routine
Step 6. Kill email and social media in the morning and do the important stuff instead
Step 7. Don’t discriminate, just eliminate―cut back on tasks, activities, and commitments that can be abandoned without any serious consequence
Step 8. Identify the three musketeers―a task management tool, a note-taking app, and a mind mapping tool
Step 9. Identify your assistants―a cloud service, a text expander app, and a calendar
Step 10. Experiment like crazy
Step 11. Stay in the game and experiment
If I were to give one, and only one, piece of advice you can do to increase your productivity, I’d say that you honor your calendar and capitalize your morning hours.
When you have no control over your mornings, harness your dead time. Make no excuses!
Sounds common sense, hah? However common sense as it sounds, that’s the secret sauce to productivity as I figured out to date. Full stop.
Top 10 recommended books to increase productivity (not in the order of importance)
- The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan
- Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt
- Deep Work by Cal Newport
- The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch
- The Four-hour Work Week by Tim Ferris
- 10 Steps to Ultimate Productivity by Michael Sliwinski
- Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy
- The 5 am Miracle by Jeff Sanders
- The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod
- The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg
Acknowledgments
I’m indebted to Claire Kellems, author of My Life In Order, Lilla Liptak, author of Lillaliptak.com, and Michael Sliwinski, CEO of Nozbe, for giving feedback and improving the manuscript.
Photo credit: Bram Naus on Unsplash
