The Briefest “How to Be Ultra-Productive” Article You’ll Likely Ever Read
Distilling years of personal experience and research into 2 minutes
I won’t waste your time with an introduction. Let’s dive straight in:
- Turn Off All Notifications. Once interrupted, it takes 23 minutes to regain peak focus. With the average person checking their phone a whopping 160 times a day, you can imagine the insane damage.
- Every Night, Plan 3 Tasks for The Next Day. While you’d be over-committing with over 3, you’d be cutting yourself short with anything lesser. Then, as you sleep, your subconscious will kick into action and flesh the tasks out.
- Alternate Bursts of Deep Work with Leisure. While hyper-focused work can help you achieve tons, it saps your mental energy. Wield leisure activities like meditation, reading, and walking to restore your mental batteries.
- Sleep at Least 8 Hours Every Night. Forget productivity, sleep deprivation casts a dark shroud on the quality of your life itself. 3 hours of work with good sleep beats 6 on insufficient sleep.
- Manage Energy, Not Time. Time tables are recipes for burnout. Let your energy levels dictate which tasks you pick — deep ones like writing or coding when bustling with energy and shallow ones like checking emails when you’re tired.
- Play the Same Song on Repeat. Music can improve your mood, but the shifting lyrics will keep snagging your focus. Try looping one song. It’ll put you in a trance-like state.
- Pull Back Your Sleep Timings. Waking up early has an insane number of benefits. So, every week or two, pull back your sleep timings by 30 minutes.
- Utilize Distraction Blockers. Look no further than ColdTurkey blocker. It can block keywords, apps, websites, searches, etc. If you’re a writer, go with ColdTurkey writer — until you meet the set word goal, it turns your computer into a typewriter.
- Go to Bed with Your Kindle, Not Your Phone. Not only does the blue light disrupt your sleep, but you’ll also end up scrolling your phone as soon as you wake up.
- Have a Water Bottle Within Your Hand’s Reach. With the brain being over 80% water, even slight dehydration can impede your cognitive ability and focus.
- Build (and Hone) a System. If you depend on whimsical bursts of motivation, you’ll be disappointed. Build a system instead — with your willpower taken out of the equation, your productivity will go on autopilot.
- Have “Nothing” Sessions. Stuck in the spiral of “doing”, you’ll quickly approach burnout. So every day, have a time where you just let your thoughts and ideas flow freely. My go-to is leaning into my chair and devouring the setting sun.