Do you ever wonder what it would feel like to have just ONE completely productive day?
To feel like you’re on top of your to-do list, a master of your time and household while kicking ass at work?
If you’re nodding your head, you’re not alone.
Whether you’re juggling your new home office set up, looking after your kids and household, or find your career overwhelming, the good news is – there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
By adjusting your habits and incorporating productivity hacks into your daily life, you can squeeze those precious extra hours to spend taking care of your own needs, or spending quality time with your family, without sacrificing anything else.
Productivity is sometimes thrown around a bad word, as something that only workaholics aspire to. It couldn’t be further from the truth.
I’m here to show you that small changes, applied on a consistent basis, will lead to habits that will have a massive impact on any area of your life.
I’ve been a bit of a productivity geek for a few years now and have read over 20+ books on the subject. I’ve tested all the methods, studied the gurus, and applied the principles to experience firsthand which ones will give you the ultimate productive day, every day.
I’m very excited to share what’s been working for me and I’m positive it will work wonders for you too. But first, let’s get to the root of the problem.
Habits as the No 1 Culprit
You can work smarter, not harder, and the solution is very simple – adopting new habits that will slowly build up and lead to the most productive version of yourself, in any area of your life.
I truly believe that the main culprit behind a lack of productivity and success in most areas of life are bad habits established over a lifetime of repetitive small actions.
Like the habit of checking emails 25 times a day, picking up your phone every time a message pings, dealing with the easiest tasks first thing in the morning, because it makes you feel better.
They don’t seem an issue on their own, but if you look at the bigger picture and add them all up, the impact is massive and goes beyond just the individual activity. In most cases, you’re not even aware that it’s a habit.
To become the most productive version of yourself, you need to deal with your bad habits head-on and make no excuses.
With that out of the way, let’s look at the 7 principles that will guide you to eliminate all the productivity-draining habits in your life.
7 Principles of a Productive Day
1. Define Your Daily Goals (a Day Ahead)
Every successful day starts with clearly defined goals that need to be accomplished – those could be both professional and personal.
This is something that you should not be doing first thing in the morning. Planning your day should be always done on the previous night, so you can start the day knowing exactly what’s expected of you.
Where do you start then?
What works best for me, is to have a rough draft of a to-do list for the full week ahead first.
I usually do this on Sunday – the list is just a way to capture anything that needs to be dealt with, and almost works as your incoming mailbox – everything gets captured and then distributed later. Don’t worry whether the tasks are important or not, just capture everything on paper and get it out of your head.
Once you make sure everything is already included in the list, go through it and allocate the tasks to individual days of the week, depending on how urgent they are. The most time-sensitive tasks should get done on Monday and Tuesday, stuff that’s ongoing or can wait can be distributed throughout the week.
When you have your tasks allocated to each weekday, it’s time to do your first-day plan.
Look at tasks for Monday (if you’re doing this plan on Sunday), and select the most crucial task or tasks that should be completed on that day.
If you’re not sure what you pick, you can use the Getting Things Done framework which divides tasks into 4 categories, in order of their importance:
- Important and urgent tasks
- Important but not urgent tasks
- Urgent, but not important tasks
- Not important or ugent
Still not sure what should be your priorities for your day? Ask yourself this question: ‘completing which of these tasks would make the most significant impact on my life / career / family’?
2. Plan Your Day in Detail
Now that you have successfully selected your priorities for your day, it’s time to get planning.
A lot of successful people and entrepreneurs swear by having an item-by-item daily planner written for each day of the week, where no hour is unaccounted for.
A variation of this has worked absolute wonders for me too!
I used to have my daily planner only as randomly allocated tasks to different projects, with no indication in which order they should be completed, how long they will take and when to take breaks.
It was chaotic and I ended up skipping a lot of the stuff on my daily list, because it was impossible to plan properly what I can realistically accomplish in the day.
Now I use my weekly to do lists to manually write down a detailed daily plan, for each day of the week.
How to Do Your Daily Detailed Plan:
- In a diary, or a clean notepad, mark the date and your top 2 priorities for the day on top of the page (I find a physical paper and pen works better for me)
- Define your morning routine and the timing for the routine (see following section for details)
- Outline the tasks for the day, allocating an hour and a check box for each item – start with your most important priority tasks first thing
- As you go through your day, cross off all the tasks that you complete – I can’t describe the immense satisfaction I get from doing this. Checking off tick boxes is sort of a reward mechanism for your brain, which helps a lot to keep this habit going
- On anything that you run out of time to do, circle it or mark it in red, with a note to explain why it was left out and not completed. At the end of the week you can review these notes and make adjustments when you plan your following week.
- Finish your daily planner with an evening routine – as part of the routine, you should include creating a new daily planner for the following day. My evening routine also includes reading a book, doing an evening journal (gratitude, recap of the day wins, lessons etc) and zero television time.
Keep your daily planner handy where you work, or mostly hang out at home, and I can guarantee it will change the way you work and get things done!
PS – Plus points if you use a fancy notepad and cute pen for this – I found that it helps to keep the habit going if you use beautiful tools for the job.
3. Craft a Productive Morning Routine
The way you run your morning will determine how the rest of your day will turn out – this has been proven over and over, and it’s well documented in Miracle Morning book by Hal Elrod.
Start your day feeling sluggish, grumpy and taking a few shortcuts along the way, and your day will turn out very similar.
Just the simple act of making your bed each morning represents a quick win that sets the tone for the rest of the day – I know it sounds simple, but it works!
Nobody is expecting you to wake up super enthusiastic and full of energy at 6am, but it’s more what you do after you wake up that matters, now how you feel when you wake up.
No matter what time you wake up or go to work, or wake up your kids, make sure you have some time for yourself, to start the day on the right note.
It could be simply 15-30 minutes of quiet time, that will allow you to sit down with a cup of coffee and read a good book, listen to some morning affirmations, do meditation or exercise.
If you carve out the time for yourself, avoid your phone or laptop as a plague. Interacting with technology the first thing in the morning is one of the worst things you could do.
4. Create a Distraction free environment
There is no productivity in an environment that is full of clutter and distractions.
If you want to be productive at work, remove everything that’s not directly needed to do your job – get rid of books, magazines, remove your phone from your sight.
If you want to get productive at home, pay attention to what’s normally diverting your attention and remove those things from sight.
If you have to work from home and feel like you’re getting interrupted a lot, set out clear business hours and hang a sign on the door. Build blocks of time where your family knows they cannot interrupt you and only can engage without you once you’re outside of that room.
5. Eliminate All Digital Distractions
Digital distractions are the top offenders when it comes to productivity.
It’s so easy to start writing an email, getting distracted by a text message, voicemail or a friend on facebook commenting on your latest post. The cost of these distractions is immense.
Once distracted, it takes our brain on average 23 minutes to focus again on the task at hand.
We are so addicted to our phones, and the instant rush we get once we hear that notification sound, that we find it absolutely impossible to resist the temptation to check the phone – all the time.
The funny thing is, these distractions are actually easy to avoid.
But not all of us realize that they are a problem and look for solutions elsewhere.
Let me make one thing clear – you have no obligation to respond to emails and messages as soon as they arrive. Even if they’re work-related.
Let’s get started and clear your mind and mental space once and for all.
Prepare for some drastic action!
- Go to your phone settings and switch OFF notification on all apps that you use, apart from the absolute essentials
- On the essential apps (calls, messages, facebook messenger or other), leave the notification on silent – not even vibration
- For checking emails, establish 2 time frames in a day, giving yourself a 15-20 minutes window each, in which you check your emails. That’s right – 2 times a day (thanks to Tim Feriss’ 4 Hour Work Week for this life changing hack!). You can set up an automated message that explains you only check your email at certain hours and if there is something urgent, people can call you directly.
- Keep your phone off your table, somewhere that’s hard to reach – ideally outside of the room that you work in. If you’re in an office, keep it in your bottom drawer.
Now that sounds scary, doesn’t it?
Don’t worry, you will get used to it pretty quickly, just be prepared to battle the fear of missing out for a few days.
6. Work in Time Blocks
Struggling with concentration? Do you feel like you’re taking breaks every 10 minutes?
You need to learn to work with time blocks!
It’s been scientifically proven that our brain can’t focus on a task for longer than 90 minutes, after which it needs about a 20 minutes break.
What does it mean? If you tried to work over 2 hours uninterrupted, it’s almost impossible to focus for that long.
As you plan your day, allocate time blocks to each task at hand. Be religious about sticking to these as they are detrimental to your productivity.
You can use the pomodoro technique, and install a simple browser extension that will act as your 20-minute block timer, or use an actual kitchen timer. The extra added pressure of having to finish the task within your time block is just the extra boost to get your brain working at extra capacity.
7. Do Not Multitask
I’ve seen this many times and been an offender myself.
When there are many things to juggle at the same time, we tend to try to nibble at each a bit before focusing on another, hoping to get them all done, while not dedicating full attention to any of the tasks.
There is no such thing as multitasking. Our brain can’t concentrate on two things at the same time – this is different from learned behaviors which do not require any brain input (think riding a bike or brushing your teeth).
Multitasking as such does not exist, and people who claim that they have mastered it, actually refer to task switching.
If you follow the steps outlined above, multitasking will be easily avoided by having your day properly planned by the hour, and having individual time blocks assigned to each task.
I know it sounds like a lot of work to start with, but trust me – once you get the hang of it, you wouldn’t look back.
Final words
The tips above are not my personal innovations or discoveries. These methods have been proven by experts and top performers, and they have done miracles for my own productivity.
No matter what your situation is, or what obstacles you face in daily life, I’m confident that if you follow the steps and guidelines, it will work wonders for you too.
If you want to dive deeper into the methodologies that I’ve only scratched the surface in, below are recommended books that will give you a deeper understanding of why those principles work.
Get to work and start planning!
Recommended Reading:
D. Allen – Getting Things Done
T. Ferris – The 4 Hour Work Week
N. Eyal – Indistractable – How to control your attention and choose your life
