10 Smart Productivity Techniques you Should know About
“Make yourself productive”
A phrase so popular in the history of societies. We’ve all heard it. Sometimes shouted blatantly at us by seniors, perhaps parents during our teenage years or college professors.
The science behind productivity has never been so fascinating than with today’s modern workspaces. Students also want to be productive members of the society. Millions of them crowd time managment applications and technology just to hack their way into long study hours. Besides time, individuals must learn how to focus their inner energy to stay productive.
An entire industry has grown around this nortion, spawning a plethora of professional coaching, minimalist documentaries and workplace productivity tech. Coaches have also come up with different philosphopies for governing how workplaces should be. There is a whole set of techniques and hacks for remaining productive today. And in this article, we are going to look at 10 smart productivity techniques you should know about.
1.The Rule of Three
The rule of three lets you focus on three important tasks that you should complete by the end of a workday. Particularly, people who have a problem with completing to-do lists and ambitious individuals who want to slice big projects a day. This rule simply entails outlining three major things to achieve each day. Mostly, these shouldnt be tasks but results. Once you have this list, it is easy to focus on what’s important.
2.Deep Work
Fall into a state of intense concentration for a prolonged period of time. Ensure you remain focused, present and entirely engaged with the task at hand. As a result, you will be able to reap maximum benefits of your cognitive capacity. Deep work involves eliminating all kinds of disruptions or multitasking between shallow tasks. Multitasking will only exhaust your attention. Therefore, train yourself to concentrate longer with one measurable task and slowly hack your way into more deep work durations and frequency.
3.The 2-Minute Rule
The purpose of the 2-minute is to focus our attention on immediate execution of small tasks that would only take 2 minutes to complete. This technique will help you overcome procrastination. Place all small tasks into one or two Pomodoro sessions and work on them. Such tasks include responding to emails, setting ads, reading through articles or making a call. The rule will eventually make you achieve a feeling of accomplishment, which will inadvertently boost your motivation and enthusiasm. As this motivation builds up, your workplace momentum grows even more.
4.Apply Einshower’s Principle
Former US President Eisenhower prioritised projects that were important rather than those were urgent. The technique involves frontloading tasks and taking those tasks you deem important. Regardless of deadlines, select at least 1 -3 goals that are genuinely important and work on them. The Einshower principle attempts to help people achieve something more substantive and work that is truly valuable.
5.Task Batching
This rule goes hand in hand with the 2-minute rule. Batch or group together low value tasks and complete them at once. While task batching could easily switch you into a state of interruptions, it helps you build a momentum. For instance, someone would request you to do a task you never intended to while responding to emails.Task batching will help you reduce procrastination, multi-tasking and context switching during your workday.
6.Journaling
This productivity technique is usually enjoyable to people that love writing. It is a slow, long hand form of reflecting the productive things you want to achieve and those that you would love to achieve. Essentially, you write about your goals, activities and your achievements descriptively. As you approach the end of the week, you read through the journal and reflect on your successes and failures. Using this information, you can easily make decisions and see where you went wrong. Enabling you to improve in future. As much as journaling is a productive technique, it is also pretty therapeutic.
7.DRY Principle (Don’t Repeat Yourself)
Try as much as possible to reuse and recycle work that you have already done. Create a workflow that eliminates repetition. This is because repeating work is inefficient and unproductive. Hence, you can work on templates that minimize what you have to do. Rather than writing a similar email all the time, create email templates and tweak them when necessary. Work such as writing, design and coding utilizes some form of templates. So save yourself some time by creating templates. The business side of working also involves creating things such as reports, invoices and documents. Create templates of this as well.
8.Time Blocking
Time blocking is limiting the amount of time we have to spend on a task. According to the Parikinson Law, work will expand with the time we allocate it – rather than the time it actually takes to complete it. Hence time blockcing prevents a task from stretching out a limitless schedule. Break your daily schedule into controlled and timed units. Say you will spend 10 minutes with emails, and maybe 4-hours on a new project. Simply, limit the time you spend on a task.
9.The Pareto Rule
Also referred to as the 80/20 Rule. This productivity trick encourages you to do more high-value tasks. The rule outoines that at least 80% of output comes from a meagre 20% of effort. You therefore reap 80% of your income from 20% of your projects. Hence, identify high output tasks on your to-do lists and prioritize it. Spend more energy doing the right things and avoid wasting time and resources on minor tasks.
10. Single Tasking
Concetrate on one task and give it your ultimate focus. Simple, avoid multitasking, limit destructions and allow yourself space and energy to work on a single task.
