3 Productivity Hacks You’re Doing Wrong
Follow the principles and not the practice to increase your productivity 10x
It’s the one thing we all want: the ability to produce high-quality work but at a much faster rate.
There are hundreds of productivity hacks out there ripe for the taking. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry has some kind of solution for your inefficient ways. I’ve tried them all, what can I say — I’m a procrastinator. Or am I?
I suddenly started thinking the other week, what if I’m not a procrastinator and I only think I am because I do things differently from what I’m told productivity should look like.
I’d been adopting productivity hacks for as long as I could remember but I didn’t seem to be any better off, if anything I was less productive. I realized very recently what I was doing wrong.
“I was adopting the practice and not the principles.”
I realized that if I was making this mistake then other people probably were too. So, let me show you 3 examples of ‘hacks’ where you’re probably following the practice rather than the principle and what you can do to change it.
The Practice: What you do now: Get up early
You hear it all the time — get up early and you’ll be more productive. Every rich person that there ever was in the world rises at 5 am. There are a gazillion studies that have proven this and blah, blah, blah.
If I wake up early then I’m bleary-eyed and mushy brained. I’m lucky if I can dress myself properly let alone do any work. I’ve spent years being guilt-tripped by family and friends and bloggers because I rise later than everyone else. I am clearly a lazy person with absolutely no self-control if I can’t get out of bed before the sun rises.
Actually, research shows that 1 in 4 people are natural early-risers and 1 in 4 are night owls. This means that 2 in 4 of us actually fall somewhere in the middle (this is definitely me). So, for anyone adopting this practice of getting up early, it is only going to work for 1 in 4 of you. FACT!
The Principle: What you should be doing instead
At the core of this practice is actually the principle that if we utilize the best time of the day then we’ll get more done.
We are led to believe that the morning is the best time of the day because it’s before everyone else rises which means there are fewer distractions — this, in turn, leads to us being more productive. However, it’s your circumstances and body clock that actually dictate what time of the day is best.
My circumstances — living alone in the countryside — means that I have no physical distractions, there is no one waking me up early or keeping me up late at night. This means that my circumstances dictate that I can work at any time (lucky me!).
So, I now look to my internal body clock. Naturally, I rise somewhere between 7 am and 8 am which means I’m neither a morning bird nor a night owl. I find that even though I’m awake fully soon after rising, I don’t actually feel that productive until about 10 am. This lasts for 3–4 hours before I have an afternoon slump and then I’m raring to go again at about 5 pm, and I can easily work until 9 or 10 pm without feeling tired.
This routine makes perfect sense if we look at circadian rhythm which says rise at 7.30 am, we’re most alert from 10 am, and least alert in the afternoon. The best time to exercise is 5 pm, which I do, and this clearly gives me the energy in the evening to keep working. We naturally start to feel sleepy around 10 pm, which again, is around the time I do start feeling tired.
I started listening to my body about 10 days ago. I fell into the routine I’ve just described pretty quickly and I have been so much more productive because of it. You’ll see the huge rise in my productivity at the end of this article.
Put the principle into practice
- Look at your circumstances. How does this dictate what the best time of the day is for you? Can you get more work done in the morning, afternoon, or evening? Make sure you utilize that time.
- What does your body clock tell you? Listen to it more over the next few days or weeks. When do you naturally feel more alert and when do you feel sleepy. Use this to plan your day wherever possible.
The Practice: What you do now: Pomodoro method
For those of you that aren’t aware of the Pomodoro technique, it’s a time-management method that utilizes 30-minute segments: 25 minutes of work which ends in you ticking a task off your list followed by a 5-minute break, and then repeat. My issue isn’t with this technique specifically but the idea that we need to work in blocks of time.
If I set myself a task to complete in 25 minutes or an hour or another random amount of time then all I’m going to be doing is clock watching. I’ll be panicking that my time is running out and in the process probably mess up whatever work I’m doing in the rush to get it done before the timer goes off.
While the idea of time-management is good, you should definitely have some kind of system in place to ensure you get work done, carving out blocks of time is often (especially with creative people) counter-intuitive. If you are in a productive mindset then a timer going off could be disruptive and actually cause you to lose concentration.
The Principle: What you should be doing instead
The quite obvious principle behind this process is better time-management. Organize your day into segments of work and rest and you will be more productive.
For this to actually work though you need to consider two things.
- How you respond to time pressure.
- The type of work you do.
If, like me, you panic under pressure then using the Pomodoro technique is probably the worst thing you can do. Longer segments of a couple of hours may work better as you will have a deadline to work towards but not feel stressed when trying to complete the task at hand.
If your job involves lots of small tasks or big tasks that can be split into steps then it will be easy to plan your day with these goals in mind. However, if your work is unpredictable or you work on big projects that can’t realistically be broken down then it may be demotivating if you have nothing to tick off your list at the end of the work interval.
Put the principle into practice
Consider the two points above and whether putting time constraints on the work you do is actually helping you. This will involve actually paying attention to how productive you are when working to different time scales. Try short intervals first of 30 minutes and then longer ones of 2 hours. Which worked best or neither? If neither helped then it may be that you work better having a goal for the day instead and you can work towards this in any way you like.
The Practice: What you do now: Start with your most important task
In theory, like with many productivity hacks, this appears to make a lot of sense. The Eat the Frog strategy or the Eisenhower Matrix method are two techniques that work on the basis of prioritizing important tasks.
The problem is that this can actually deter a lot of procrastinators to even start their day at all if they don’t like what their most important task is. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve struggled to sleep worrying about an important task I had to tackle first thing in the morning.
The way I see it is if you’re going to lose your job because you didn’t do the important task first, then definitely make sure you do it first. Otherwise, there are so many other ways to organize your day.
The Principle: What you should be doing instead
The principle behind this practice is prioritization and motivation. Prioritization because then you get the most important tasks completed first and motivation because by completing an important task first it motivates you for the rest of the day.
As I’ve already mentioned though, unless there is a serious consequence to you not doing your important tasks first then why does it matter what order you do them in. As long as they are done by the deadline you/your boss has set then you should be able to complete your tasks in any way you want.
Motivation can easily be gained by doing your favorite task first or by doing whatever else you know does motivate you.
When I first met my partner several years ago he had a habit of jumping out of bed in the morning and making the bed straight away, even if I was still in it. It used to annoy me because I didn’t understand what the urgency was to make the bed. He explained that it motivated him for the day because within seconds of waking up he had already achieved something. I found it funny but I couldn’t deny his reasoning.
Put the principles into practice
- Consider how important it is to prioritize tasks. If it doesn’t matter what order you do them in as long as they are completed that day/by the deadline then you should order them in whatever way best suits you.
- Adopt a motivation strategy that you know works. Whether this is doing all the easy tasks first or actually doing a hard task that you want to get out of the way. Motivation can even come from something else, for example, taking the time in the morning to make your favorite breakfast or like my partner does make the bed before you do anything else.
How this all had a massive effect on my productivity
What I learned was that I had been blindly following hacks without actually considering whether they worked for my specific lifestyle. As I mentioned at the beginning, I had been following the practice and not the principles. The one tiny change I made was to actually apply principles that would work based on my personality and the type of work I did rather than adopt practices that were considered to work by others.
In the past I had been:
- Getting up at the wrong time of day because I thought that was what I needed to do. This resulted in me being more tired and less productive.
- Following time-management techniques that worked on the basis of completing tasks in small time-frames. This resulted in me feeling pressured and stressed and actually producing lower quality work.
- Tackling tasks in the morning that I didn’t want to do. This resulted in sleepless nights worrying about the task I had to complete first as well as causing me to procrastinate in the morning.
What I changed 10 days ago:
- I woke up naturally with the sunlight. This resulted in me being happier in the morning and less tired. I was more productive during the day as a result.
- I set a goal for the day rather than dozens of small goals. This resulted in me working at the times of the day I felt more productive and resting when my body told me I needed to rest. I met my daily goal every day without fail and felt less stressed too.
- I had a long bath in the morning or I practiced yoga. This resulted in me sleeping better the night before because I had something to look forward to in the morning. This, in turn, motivated me to complete tasks that had to be done but that I wasn’t looking forward to doing because I was in a good mood having done something I’d enjoyed first.
One thing I didn’t change was how many hours I worked in the day. My average working day amounts to about 8 hours. Not all of this time is spent ‘producing’ work, as I spend about an hour or two on admin tasks like emails, updating various spreadsheets, and finances, plus, I’ll take regular breaks too.
Take a look at the results for yourself
This is how much I was writing per day when I was following productivity hacks. Each line represents 1 day's worth of writing.
- 3 min read (433 words)
- 5 min read (1018 words)
- 2 min read (469 words)
- 4 min read (942 words)
- 5 min read (1120 words)
And after I made the change this is what I’ve produced each day since.
- 11 min read (2640 words)
- 8 min read (1935 words)
- 10 min read (2348 words)
- 7 min read (1711 words)
- 11 min read (2606 words)
- 8 min read (2007 words)
- 7 min read (1782 words)
- 9 min read (2023 words)
It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it? If I take my least productive day before the change which is 469 words and compare it to my most productive day after the change which is 2606 words, then that is a massive difference of 2137 words per day.
Final thoughts
We can get so caught up with what productivity should look like that we forget about actually assessing what works best for us. The one simple change I made proves that you don’t need to follow productivity rules or hacks to actually be productive. Listen to your body and you can increase your productivity 10x.