It is widely accepted that productivity is recognized as doing more in less time. However, this is not completely true. True productivity is the ability to create high impact results in a short amount of time. It is the impact that makes something productive, not just acting busy and doing nothing. For example, it’s better to wholeheartedly convince a client to buy your product compared to halfheartedly making the sales pitch to hundreds of clients without any results.
If you’re all up to make whatever you do productive, here’s what you can do.
If you’re all up to make whatever you do productive, here’s a list of good habits that you can adopt. These are some of the best habits that you can also find in “7 habits of highly effective people”
1. Prioritize
If I put it simply, start doing those things or spend time on those activities which are more important and vice versa.
Here’s the first thing productive people do before starting their day,
- Make a list of things they’ll do that day
- Classify the tasks in order of their importance
- Contemplate whether this is what they want to do and are these activities in accordance with their goals?
After you’re done with this, start your day with the most important things for you. Less important things can wait for later and can be removed from the list altogether.
2. Have a Balanced Life!
I can’t stress the need to have a work-life balance. Life is not solely about work, one should try to fulfill social needs as well. It is important that you take time for your friends and family, do exercise, engage in outdoor sports or read. Also, take some time off once in a while to go on a vacation.
3. Identify And Remove Distractions
In this fast paced life, we face distractions everywhere. Accordingly to most people, the major distraction we face is social networking sites. Just click on any profile and you get so deeply indulge in it that you don’t realize you have wasted more than 30 minutes opening new notifications and consuming unnecessary information. If you are a victim of distractions on social media, start by reducing your daily on-screen time to 15- 30 minutes. By actively making efforts to remove these distractions, you’ll form a very productive habit.
4. Set Timelines
Whatever work you do, assign yourself certain deadlines and push yourself to meet these deadlines. In doing so you’ll complete your work faster by staying focused. Therefore, it is suggested that breakdown your goals into months, weeks, days and even hours. This is one of the best habit found in almost all of the highly effective people.
5. Automate
Thanks to technology, it is getting easier to automate a lot of things. Where full automation is not possible, go for partial automation.
- Email. I have email filters to file my emails into specific folders. That way, my job is to read emails and respond to mail, not sort.
- Social media. Whenever I have a new blog post, it is automatically posted on my social media profiles.
- Excel Dashboards. Instead of making manual reports on a daily basis, I’ve automated the reports so that when I enter the data, it automatically displays it in the form of the required information.
When you automate recurring tasks, you can use your time for the most important things.
