Four Easy Ways To Supercharge Your Productivity
Unless you’re first stage booster, it’s not rocket science!
What makes some of us super-productive?
There’s no grand secret, no next-level strategies and certainly nothing innate. Aside from a few specific habits, there’s nothing that distinguishes the most productive people. Instead, productivity is a habit, a practice that requires discipline! Luckily there are plenty of simple ways to become more productive. Whether you want to reach a specific goal or want to continue your path of personal growth and development, you can turn productivity into a habit.
Automate What You Can, Focus On What You Can’t
There are many unimportant aspects of my life that I’ve automated. These are parts of my day that I don’t want to spend any energy or extra time thinking. During my morning routine, I’ve automated my breakfast to ensure that I eat a bowl of oatmeal and fruits every morning. It takes me five minutes to prepare, and I don’t need to think about what I want to eat for breakfast. I can focus on podcasts, reading and learning during my morning.
While I love calendars and scheduling, I often forget to book meetings or send reminders to others. I’ve automated this entire process using calendar.x.ai. If I need to schedule something, I can send a link that integrates into my calendar while automatically generating a Google Meeting link. If the person I invite for a meeting doesn’t answer, the automated calendar will follow up with them and even send reminders. Finally, I can share a link that allows others to request or schedule meetings with me during times that I’m free. No more scheduling problems!
When I need to edit a piece of writing, I automate aspects of grammar checking through Grammarly. Rather than derailing my focus on small errors, I edit the bigger picture or concept, ensuring it’s appropriate for the audience. I also subscribe to different news outlets and press release websites so that new stories come directly to my email inbox. With no googling, I receive a plethora of ideas and news automatically.
Healthy Habits Fuel Healthy Minds
Fuel your body to ensure you have the energy to last you the entire day. You will not move those mountains if you run out of power!
Getting 7–8 hours of sleep starts your day off the right way. During this period of rest, our brain consolidates new memories, helping solidify new skills and information. Procedural memories that help us remember how to perform a task relies on proper sleep. Additionally, poor sleeping habits impact focus and performance on any work during the day. Sleep could help your body fight off an emerging infection. It is also crucial so that our brain drains away any cellular waste. All this together ensures that you don’t feel sluggish at 2:00 pm. Best of all, 7–8 hours of sleep is associated with reduced health risks!
Proper nutrition provides fuel for your brain. A diet rich in fibres, nuts, legumes, fruit and vegetables helps keep you focused. Complex carbohydrates found in some fruits like apples are slowly broken down into sugars, preventing your levels from spiking and crashing. Diets rich in fats and sugars may also impact cognitive performance. Continue with regular meals, no matter how much work you’ve got on your plate!
In addition to eating healthy, exercise or even simply walking outside helps reduce your stress and boost your mental health. There are multiple benefits of exercise and the great outdoors that contribute to a healthy, focused mind. If you feel burnt out by the work, consider taking a stroll in a park.
Do More, Click Less
I keep specific pages pinned on my web browser using the Tabby extension, ensuring easy access. I don’t need to waste any precious time or focus by typing in a URL address and tapping enter. In Firefox, I use CTRL + TAB to move between tabs and pages. To close tabs I press CTRL + W. These few seconds of precious time prevent me from diverting my attention for too long. After all, the human brain is notoriously terrible at multitasking.
Learning your browser and finding the right extensions will prevent you from being bogged down by monotonous actions while speeding up your work. If you want even more shortcuts in your browser, you can find extensions like Surfingkeys. Additionally, your email clients, your Slack, your Microsoft Teams all have shortcut keys that you can take advantage of them!
Know When To Call It A Day
The most productive people don’t spend an entire 8 hour day with their eyes glued to their screen. They make sure to work while they’re productive and take regular short breaks and occasional extended breaks.
The Pomodoro technique and its variations help users focus for some time. The timer is commonly set for 25 minutes, ringing when time runs out. During these 25 minutes, you stay laser-focused on the task at hand, ignoring your phone or anything else that might distract you. Once you hear the pleasant ringing of the alarm, you have 5 minutes where you relax, check your phone and grab a snack. After this short break, you return to another 25-minute working session. After three 25 minute work sessions, you take a 15-minute break.
The Pomodoro method helps your brain stay focused on tasks at hand while minimizing distractions by sequestering them into small chunks of time. It also provides you with positive reinforcement as you receive the reward of a break after you complete each chunk of a larger project. These small incentives add up and keep you in the flow of things.
Most importantly, productive people know when it is time to call it quits for the day and give themselves some much-needed rest.
There’s nothing stopping you from becoming a productive powerhouse. Focus on simple habits that will make it easier for you to focus on your work. Automate away all annoying, monotonous tasks to give you more time. Keep your body and mind healthy. Take regular breaks and use them as positive reinforcement after a burst of productive work. It’s time to supercharge your productivity!