5 Personal Hacks That Help Me Get Things Done
Conventional and unconventional ways to boost productivity
Some of us are trying to build a better mousetrap. Some of us are trying to build a better way to make a mousetrap.
It’s no surprise that we love to read about productivity hacks. We may be perfectly productive at the moment, but we wonder if there isn’t a way we could turn that up a notch. That we could improve our productivity even more.
Here are five hacks that work well for me. Give them a try, or use them as inspiration for developing your own productivity hacks.
Listen to music
Some people can work only in silence. I need something on in the background. Always have.
It often doesn’t matter what the background noise is from, but some backgrounds definitely work better than others. Music is the one that works best for me. With streaming services and customized playlists being what they are nowadays, there’s never been a better time to put together a primo Work Playlist. Mix genres and song styles. You can tweak it over time to find what works best for you.
My current work playlist includes Devo, Gorillaz, Dead Sara, Les McCann, the B-52s, Velvet Crush, Herbie Mann, Kimya Dawson, Brian Eno, Aimee Mann, and Great Big Sea. There’s no real rhyme or reason, I just go with what works and, over time, it will evolve.
Bonus tip — go vinyl
If you’re working from home, get a cheap record player and some music on vinyl.
Instead of streaming music over a device, play an album you enjoy. If you get a cheap kind record player, there won’t be features such as auto-repeat or disk stacking. That means if you want more music when that side of the album ends, you’ll have to get off your lazy ass to change it.
Getting up and moving around is a good thing.
Adopt a simple ritual
My wife has a great one. When she was having trouble transitioning from her traditional work routine to a work-from-home one, she discovered that if she got in her car and drove around for 15 minutes before coming back home to start work, she could slip into work mode much more efficiently.
For years, her morning pre-work ritual was her commute. When a commute was no longer necessary, its absence threw her off. By creating a new ritual to replace her old one, she was able to stay productive.
Simple, right? No burning sage. No twenty minutes of tantric yoga.
I mean, if those work for you, then go for it, but I’ve found that a simple ritual is all it takes to get into a productive frame of mind.
When it’s time for me to work, I change my shoes. If I’m switching types of work such as typesetting work to writing work, I’ll move from my desk (typesetting) to office couch (writing).
I have a cartoonist friend who wears rubber bands around his wrist. He’ll snap himself a few times as he gets started. He’s never come up for a rationale as to why it works. He read about another cartoonist who did that and found it also worked for him. I have a cousin who prays in her car each morning before walking into work.
If you’ve been feeling stuck or blocked, try coming up with a small, unobtrusive ritual.
Make a checklist
This is my most inside-the-box bit of advice. I include it because it’s also my most reliable productivity hack and has served me the longest.
Make a To-Do checklist.
I say checklist because I get an absolute satisfaction checking off tasks as I complete them. You could also simply write out a list and scratch line items off as you finish them. Both are fine. You could even go digital with your checklist using something like Google Keep on your desktop or smartphone.
Having a list to check off is important because it’s a visual representation of your accomplishments. The more I check off, the better I feel, the more productive I am.
And it keeps me somewhat more organized.
Some productivity gurus talk about prioritizing list items or limiting them to Big Three items. I’m much more haphazard in that I write them down as they come to me and leave it at that. I know some tasks are more pressing than others, but I like to include smaller, routine tasks just for the satisfaction of checking them off.
It’s the little things, sometimes, that keep us going.
Build a nest
Who says work needs to be uncomfortable?
Okay, this may not be for everyone. I suppose it works best for those with pretty sedentary jobs.
That said, I’ve always found that a comfortable, nurturing work environment can’t help but be a plus on my productivity. I’ve been a freelancer for a long time now, but when I worked a traditional job, I took the time to make my work area as friendly as possible with knick-knacks, personal photos, a calendar featuring dragons, and a mug that read “World’s Greatest Dad!” (This was long before I actually became a parent. I just liked the mug.)
It was a bit silly, perhaps, but the place I worked had a tendency to be a rather sterile, featureless place. My old boss wasn’t super-stoked about my “desk-orations” (as I called them), but so long as it didn’t affect my work, he let them stay.
It didn’t affect my work. It made it easier to do my work.
When new management instituted a “clean desk” policy and pretty much did away with personal effects entirely, morale suffered. Not just my own, but anyone who had done something similar.
I didn’t miss that job when I left.
My home office is a lovely place. It has a couch, a record player, art prints by Jeffrey Catherine Jones on the wall, a minifridge, and a coffee maker. I have adjustable lighting, a comfortable chair, a decent desk. I enjoy going to work.
During my transition from worker bee to freelancer, I worked at a kitchen table for a few months. I hadn’t put together my nest yet. I got things done, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. I was working more out of the quiet desperation that comes with having bills to pay.
Eventually, creating a nurturing workspace made doing my work less about quiet desperation and more about professional momentum. And productivity.
If you can, where you can, turn your workspace into a comfortable nest. Make it yours and rule it. You may find yourself doing better work than you’ve ever done before.
Take mini-breaks
I’ve been writing more or less full time for only a couple of years now. Before that, I spent nearly 25 years working in the layout and production end of the publishing business. That means I’ve had days where a lot of my work involved very tedious formatting that could not be reliably automated. Shift some lines here. Bold the only first instance of this keyword in the text. Standardize the format for all these citations. Tweak three hundred photographs for contrast and size.
Good lord, talk about tedious work. But it paid decently.
The trick to keeping from going mad when a work assignment involves intense, but tedious tasks is to break things up with regularly scheduled mini-breaks.
When faced with eight hours of mind-numbing tasks, understand that you’re going to be more productive if you don’t burn yourself out. To keep this from happening, set a time on your phone or computer to go off every 25 or 30 minutes. When the alarm goes off, take three minutes. Stand up and stretch. Get a cup of coffee. Say hello to a co-worker or, if at home, pet the dog.
Then get back to work. Keep the break short because the alarm is going to go off again in another 22 or 27 minutes. By keeping the breaks short, you’re not going to lose much if any momentum in your actual tasks. You will, instead, have taken the time necessary to quickly refresh your eyes and attitude.
If you do find your momentum being disrupted, tweak the frequency and length of your breaks until you find your optimal balance.
It’s all about finding what works best for you
All advice on productivity should be taken with the understanding that mileage varies from person to person. We’re all different. We’re working different sorts of jobs and have different things that help and hurt our productivity.
Some of my personal hacks are shared by many, some are not. I share them with you in case there are one or two you haven’t tried yet. If they don’t work for you, hey… that’s okay. Find something that does. Maybe it’s another strategy in this article. Perhaps it’s something you discovered elsewhere.
If that’s the case, please do feel free to share what you’ve discovered works for you. It may work for someone else as well.
We’re all trying the best we can. Helping each other along the way is the least we can do for one another.
Thank you for reading. I’d love to share more with you via my Bi-Weekly Word Roundup newsletter sent to subscribers every other Sunday. It will feature news, productivity tips, life hacks, and links to top stories making the rounds on the Internet. You can unsubscribe at any time!
