7 productivity hacks I rely on

katayah (57)in #busy • 7 years ago (edited)

I woke up today and realized there is a bunch of tasks for me to do, and if I don't get them done, I'm gonna have to postpone some things that are really essential for me till next weekend. Negotiating with my dreams is something I don't want to do, so now I'm writing this post seated comfortably in sweatpants with a cup of coffee and all my stuff is taken care of. What's important is that I feel it's time well spent. Using these techniques I was able to get two degrees, write two books, get involved in a lot of activities that were interesting to me and achieve a great deal of goals I set for myself in the preplanned timeframe. Although I'm no time management and productivity expert, I think I developed a system that works for me, that I wanna share with you Steemians.

Don't do things you don't want to do.
This one is my rule of thumb and it's pretty self-explanatory. If you're out of school, what you do is in your hands. You no longer need to do things you don't enjoy doing. So don't. It will be easier for you to spend a night working on something you believe in, and to ignore stuff that gets you nowhere close to where you wanna be in life.

The 15-minute rule.
The 15-minute rule works for me with no fail. If you have a task which will take 15 minutes or less to do, do it immediately. When you get more fluent using this technique, you will be a pro at prioritizing and organizing your work. So reply to that e-mail, unsubscribe from that newsletter that's been pissing you off for ages, write that comment under this post, as soon as you finish reading it. ;)

Get easy tasks done first.
You may argue that if you have a lot of easy tasks, you may never bite into what you've been slacking to do because it seems too difficult. However, here is the key: if there are some easy tasks that you do not need to do or you can give someone else to do for you - cross them out of your list. Now that your todo list looks a little lighter, see item above. Spend an hour getting easy tasks off your list. By the end of the day you'll find yourself chopping that bad boy from the back of your head into smaller tasks and getting rid of it.

Learn to optimize.
In my opinion, around the time when you finish your studies, you should already have established the general combination of things that work for you in all areas of your life - your beauty routines, diet, exercise, relationships, productivity, stuff that help you relax and so on. You just gotta know. It will be useful on the days when you really have no time to experiment.

Make on the spot decisions
Any decision is better than no decision. Most of the time you are able to fix it later. I learnt this one from Andrzej Tucholski and it turned out to have more benefits than expected:
1. you learn to know yourself better, so with time your decision-making gets better,
2. you don't have the time to worry and stress out about making the right decision,
3. you end up getting things done, and often you find yourself outside of your comfort zone, doing excellent.

Change your environment
I'm extremely effective when I'm working in a cafe. Most of the design issues I ever had I solved while working by a cup of coffee. Close to all of my translation work has been done in a cafe (my favorite place in Riga for a vegan meal and a cup of excellent coffee is Miit). According to this research ambient noise can give you a boost in productivity. There are apps such as Coffivity that you may try out on your headphones at work, however, for me it's the combo of the relaxed atmosphere, music, slight noise and staying anonymous in a neutral environment is what gets the work done.

Lots of down time
Allow yourself to be bored from time to time. I was never forced to learn or go to school. I had years in primary school when I skipped almost half of the classes and it's when my results were the best. This way I did and learnt a lot of things I really wanted to, and my interest in them was growing without me being overwhelmed. I learnt my discipline later on. In other words - don't get overworked doing mechanical things, keep your brain capacity for doing things others can't.