3 Habits That Will MakeYou More Productive

Less but better

If you want to seriously improve your productivity, your guiding principle should be:

Less but better

Most people who want to be more productive waste their time and energy on cheap productivity hacks and silly time management techniques.

Like the writer who spends hours reading articles and books about how to be a writer instead of sitting their butts in a chair and writing, it’s all too easy to get addicted to productivity porn — constantly tinkering with a never-ending stream of tips and tricks that may feel good in the moment, but it ultimately lead nowhere.

What you really need is better habits.

If you’re ready to get serious about becoming more productive, here are 4 psychologically-sophisticated habits that will dramatically boost your productivity and focus.

1. Stop fighting procrastination and learn to use it.

Everybody feels the urge to procrastinate — it’s how we respond to that urge that separates the wannabes from the truly productive.

The desire to procrastinate is normal, healthy even. It’s your mind expressing its natural desire for novelty and curiosity. And no matter how committed to a particular task or piece of work, you will occasionally feel the urge to put off getting to work in favor of something more immediately enjoyable or interesting.

To stay productive, you must change the way you think about procrastination.

Often the people who struggle the most with procrastination have harsh, judgmental beliefs about what it means to even feel like procrastinating. And these beliefs come out in the form of negative self-talk toward themselves:

• What’s wrong with me?! Why can’t I just get my sh*t together and focus!
• There I go again… I wish I wasn’t such a procrastinator!
• Look at Tom. He’s such a machine. He just sits down and gets to work. I wish I was as disciplined as he is.

The trouble with all the judgmental negative self-talk is that it adds a second layer of negative emotion onto your experience: Instead of just feeling like you don’t want to work, you also feel ashamed or angry or disappointed in yourself.

Now the urge to procrastinate is even stronger because distracting yourself with some cheap pleasure or entertainment is also a quick way to avoid the negative feels that came from your nasty self-talk.

The way out of this vicious cycle is to fundamentally change the way you think about and respond to the urge to procrastinate:

1. Simply observe and notice your urge to procrastinate. Also, watch for any thoughts and feeling that automatically spring up in response to it. This is called meta-cognition — thinking about your thinking. It’s beneficial because it slows you down and helps short-circuit the default behavior of negative self-talk or immediate distraction.
2. Label and accept your urge to procrastinate non-judgmentally. Simply acknowledge that you are in fact feeling the urge to procrastinate. But distinguish for yourself that just because you feel the urge doesn’t mean you have to act on it.
3. Validate the urge to procrastinate. Remind yourself that it’s normal and valid to feel like procrastinating. You can also tell yourself that everybody feels the urge to procrastinate and that you’re not alone. Finally, if it helps, remind yourself of a time when you successfully got to work despite feeling like procrastinating. This will increase your confidence and self-efficacy and make it more likely that you choose to get to work despite your desire to procrastinate.
4. Invite your procrastination along for the ride. Literally tell your urge to procrastinate that you’re willing for it to stick around as you get to work. By approaching (rather than avoiding) the desire to procrastinate, you’re training your brain to see it as something neutral rather than a threat. This will help lessen its intensity in the future.

By habitually criticizing yourself for your tendency to procrastinate, you’re making it harder to resit and training your brain to treat it as something dangerous in the future — both of which make it that much harder to simply get to work.

Instead of fighting with your procrastination, practice validating it and be willing to live with it.

2. Build a deep work routine.

Cal Newport coined the phrase deep work in his book of the same name and describes it like this:

Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.

Deep work is your mind in high-gear.

It’s when you are working at close to your full potential, producing creative, high-quality work in a way that’s efficient and prolific. It’s the holy grain of productivity.

The problem is, because it’s so mentally taxing, it’s very hard to do. And it’s extremely hard to do consistently. Which is where the term routine comes in…

Routines solve two big problems when it comes to deep work:

1. You can’t just sit down and expect your mind to jump to 100% capacity and crank out an hour of highly-focused, creative work. You have to build up to it gradually. You need to train your mind to adjust to deep work, which is a very different way of operating than our standard, semi-distracted way of working.
2. You need a system for keeping you consistent with your deep work. If you’re constantly being interrupted by coworkers or tempted to procrastinate by social media, you’ll never stay consistent with deep work.

A solid deep work routine solves both of these problems.

Here’s how to get started creating your own deep work routine:

1. Decide on a consistent time for your deep work. Ideally, it’s a consistent time several days per week. First thing in the morning when I get to the office, for example. Whatever you chose, you must make that time sacred.
2. Start small with a duration and gradually work up. Initially, I recommend doing deep work in 20-minute bursts. After a week or so, you can up it to 30 minutes. Ideal results tend to come when you can work in stretches of 45 to 60 minutes of focused, distraction free time.
3. Ruthlessly eliminate distractions. See section #2 above. Importantly, it’s not enough to simply remove the distraction itself (e.g. Twitter notifications turned off). You should try your best to remove even the temptation to get distracted (e.g. leave your phone in your car or another room).
4. Track progress and reward yourself. Create a simple tracking system to measure progress and reward yourself. I like the Seinfeld Strategy, which involves marking off days on a calendar after I’ve completed my deep work and trying not to “break the chain.” I also, reward myself for finishing by making a fancy cup of coffee afterward.

Deep work is a productivity superpower. But to harness it, you need an airtight routine to stay committed.

3. Harness the power of forcing functions

A forcing function is a mechanism that forces you to take some kind of action. It’s the antidote to inconsistent willpower or motivation.

When a pop-up takes over your screen and asks if you want to save 50% on this month’s newest styles, it forces you into one of two decisions — click the big green “YES” button or spend 3 minutes hunting for the tiny, barely-visible “x” to close out of the popup.

Marketers and salespeople use forcing functions all the time to increase the odds that a potential customer becomes an actual customer. But forcing functions can be just as useful for personal productivity.

Suppose I really wanted to get this article done by Monday, but I kept procrastinating on writing it. I could write a check for $100 and make it out to my buddy Todd, telling him that if I hadn’t emailed him a completed draft of this article by Monday at 5:00 pm, he should immediately cash the check and buy himself something.

That’s a forcing function. By putting $100 dollars on the line, I’m forcing (or at least strongly encouraging) myself to follow through on my goals instead of getting distracted by short-term desires.

Exceptionally productive people are masters of self-imposed forcing functions.

They have the humility to realize that distractions are prevalent, motivation sometimes wanes, and in general, we’re all a lot less disciplined than we’d like to be. So, instead of hoping for the best, they assume the worst and plan accordingly.

Here are a few good examples of forcing functions you can use to improve your productivity:

• If you want to get a lot of work done quickly, take your laptop but no charger and work at the coffee shop.
• If you want to get more work done in your home office, remove the TV and uninstall all apps from your computer that aren’t directly related to your work.
• Hire a coach and pre-pay for several months worth of sessions.
• Tell you assistant or spouse to change your social media passwords until beginning of each month and not tell you the new ones until you’ve completed a particular goal or project.

Never rely on motivation. Design systems that incentivize you to do the work no matter how you feel.

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