10 best productivity tips to boost your working efficiency (from 3 books)
“We always have time enough, if we will but use it right.” — Wolfgang Von Goethe
I read the above three books on productivity and here are the top 10 practices that can increase your productivity in your professional area:
1.Start the day with critical work
Find your most important task for the day and tackle it first. This task should be the one thing that creates the most impact on your work.
Continually remind yourself that one of the most important decisions you make each day is your choice of what you will do immediately and what you will do later.
2. Minimize interruptions
Turn off notifications: shut all notifications down on your phone, computer, and any other gadgets you use. If it’s truly important, people will call.
Decline meetings: don’t agree to a meeting unless there is a clear agenda and you know the expected outcome; if possible, use email instead.
Work remotely: a noisy office means distractions, whereas working from home is done in silence. You can even go ahead and quit some of the social medias which have no vital impact.
3. Apply the 80/20 principle
Also known as The Law of the Vital Few.
For example, it might be the case that 80 percent of a nation’s wealth is held by its richest 20 percent of citizens.
Assuming that you could probably list somewhere between ten and fifteen distinct and potentially beneficial activities for each of your life goals, this law says that it’s the top two or three such activities that make most of the difference in whether or not you succeed with the goal.
So why don’t you concentrate your limited time and attention to these few vital activities?
4. Schedule
The most productive people work from their calendar instead of a to-do list. Calendars are finite and give you a better sense of time.
And make sure that you schedule everything: checking email, calling clients, lunch, and meetings. Everything goes on your calendar.
5. Use feedback loops
Constantly think about how you could be doing things better and questioning yourself.
In hiring the best people in any field that can provide consistent and truthful feedback. Shortening the feedback loops lead to increased efficiency, faster implementation, and a better-finished product
6. Prepare thoroughly
Before you begin: have everything you need at hand before you start. Assemble all papers, information, tools, work materials and numbers so that you can get started and keep going.
This will help to reduce unnecessary distractions and hence peak concentration in your activity.
7. Take it one oil barrel at a time
You can accomplish the biggest and most complicated job if you just complete it one step at a time. Divide the big goal into small doable chunks so that you can actually do them and feel the progress.
Resist the urge of doing a bigger task in one day or within a short time. You will feel exhausted quickly and the results will be poor.
8. Maximize your personal powers
Identify your periods of highest mental and physical energy each day and structure your most important and demanding tasks around these times.
Determine if you’re a morning person or a night person or whatever time you find yourself mostly productive. Get lots of rest so you can perform at your best in those hours.
9. Identify your key constraints
Determine the bottlenecks or chokepoints, internally or externally, that set the speed at which you achieve your most important goals and focus on alleviating them.
This can also be a certain important skill that you need to acquire in order to keep up with your profession or it can be possessing a tool that proves to be useful; make sure you get it. That way you can only focus on getting the work done
10. Practice creative procrastination
At the end of the workday, shut down your consideration of work issues until the next morning — no after-dinner e-mail check, no mental replays of conversations, and no scheming about how you’ll handle an upcoming challenge; shut down work thinking completely
The implication is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges.
This means the next day your brain will be fresh enough to concentrate and focus. Also you will come up with better ideas to perform your work easily.
Conclusion
The above tips are just a few among many others. For more tips on productivity I highly recommend these three books:
1. Eat that Frog by Brian Tracy
This book will help you to move past procrastination and to actually start doing the work in less time
2. Deep Work by Cal Newport
This book will aid you into accomplishing major tasks with impacting results by working deeply
3. Essentialism by Greg McKeown
This book will aid you in prioritizing and sticking to only few crucial matters in your life
I hope my article was of a great value!
