When I was in my twenties, I used to lie awake at night thinking about my ever-growing To
Do list. I wondered how I’d get through it all the next day without getting fired.
I’m far from alone. According to the Health and Safety Executive
in the UK, 526,000 UK workers reported they had experienced work-related stress, depression
or anxiety in 2016–17. In this video, I’ll give you seven proven
productivity strategies that will help you take charge of your time and do more of what
you want to do.
It’s easy to spend the day on busywork: long meetings, lengthy email chains, an endless
stream of notifications and more. Instead, clarify what you want to have accomplished
by the end of each week. Then work toward that.
Depending on your priorities, these steps might include a set number of sales calls,
a newly launched marketing campaign or a series of customer interviews.
Only then, make room for smaller activities that sap your time and energy.
As a writer, for example, my output includes one to three finished articles per week. I
can make time for Twitter and Instagram after I’ve finished writing those articles.
This productivity strategy comes from the author of Getting Things Done David Allen.
The psychological burden that comes with postponing tasks and writing them on your To Do list
often takes far more time than if you’d attended to the item immediately.
You’ll be surprised by what you can accomplish in 120 seconds, but if the activity takes
longer, write it on your To Do list. In Getting Things Done, Allen wrote,
“The rationale for the two-minute rule is that that’s more or less the point where
it starts taking longer to store and track an item than to deal with it the first time
it’s in your hands — in other words, it’s the efficiency cutoff.”
Your calendar is one of your most valuable assets; guard it wisely.
Elon Musk, for example, plans out every minute of his day including when he eats and sleeps.
That’s an extreme example. Still, at the end of day, review your calendar
to see who you met with and how you spent your time. Consider what meetings or activities
energised you and which ones ran over. If you’re on a key project, block book an
hour or two in your calendar for working on this project before the demands of the day
take over.
Have you ever sat down at your desk first thing, read the news, checked your email and
thought about doing everything but work? Then when you finally feel guilty enough to
start, you spend another thirty minutes opening up your work and looking for your notes and
a place to begin. Instead, prepare your work the night before.
Arrange your tools and research in one place. Leave a note to yourself about exactly where
to start. You might, for example, record the phone number
of a customer next to a list of questions to ask.
The trick is to make it as easy as possible to start work when you sit down the following
day. You don’t want to have to spend any time looking for what you need.
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion states: An object at rest stays at rest and an object
in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon
by an unbalanced force. This applies to accomplishing more each week
too. In other words, if you gain a little momentum
on a project by working on it for just 30-minutes, you’re far more likely to sustain this momentum
for the working week. Alternatively, if you attempt to power through
a project during a single three- or four-hour block of work, it will take a lot more of
your energy and time.
The old productivity maxim “What gets measured gets done” is attributed to Peter Drucker
among others. You can track yourself by recording how long
you spend on tasks for a couple of days. You don’t need to do this in the long-term,
but if you know how you’re spending your time, you can decide what activities to purge
and do more. An app like Harvest is useful for tracking
how you’re spending your hours. Or you could simply record your working day for a week
in a spreadsheet. Then on Friday, you can see what’s taking
longer or less time than you imagined. You can also see if you’re spending enough time
on key projects and too much on less valuable activities. This knowledge will enable you
to plan for the week ahead.
The weekly review is an effective productivity strategy for the overwhelmed.
I also learned about the weekly review several years ago from Allen, and it’s helped me
avoid feeling stressed over the weekend. He wrote:
“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s
not because of the vacation itself.” What do you do the last week before you leave
on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate
all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead
of yearly. Once a week, spend 30–60 minutes reviewing
what you worked on, what lessons you learned and what you want to accomplish next week.
Remember, it’s natural to feel a little stressed while working on a big project, but
lying awake at night feeling overwhelmed is a sign that you need to reprioritize.