How to Be Productive: 10 Ways to Actually Work Smarter
A while back I wrote an email to myself with my own personal rules on how to be productive. It distills all the lessons I’ve learned throughout the years about productivity and working smarter. That email serves as a constant reminder when I am feeling unproductive or things are not working out the way they should.
Focus on Systems Instead of Goals
In a system, your focus is on all the parts that you do control.
- Reward effort instead of achievement: small gains compound over time.
- The beauty of the compound effect is that small gains add up.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
List down all the tasks that you have to do recurrently every week, then find ways to automate them using apps or building your own system
- A common one across many industries is email – the “typical knowledge worker spends a third of their workweek processing email
- Create templates to reuse for standup meetings notes, one-on-one reviews, and presentations decks
Delegate the Non-Essential
Delegate everything that you’re not world-class at or that someone can do better in a fraction of time or cost.
- Unless you have to develop a new skill, it’s always better to find someone already skilled at something to complete that task.
The Struggle Is the Process
When you’re behind, go home early. Rest and come back energized the next day.
- Embrace the struggle. It’s where breakthroughs come from. Focus on systems, as per rule #1, you will make progress in the long run.
Reserve Mornings for Deep Work
Our working memory, alertness, and concentration gradually improve a couple of hours after waking up, peaking at about mid-morning
- Take advantage of this state by scheduling your most important work for this period
- Focus on performing Deep Work, meaning you get to work free of distraction for a long period of time
Leverage the Compound Effect
When you focus on developing systems and work every day, your work compounds over time, developing exponential growth
- For example, if you read a couple of pages per day, you will start making connections between books and their lessons. It builds up over time.
- A 1% gain every day compounds to almost 38x increase over a year.
Remove Distractions
Distractions can be divided into three major groups: physical, intangible, and people
- Eliminate before optimizing: the first step of effective time management is to eliminate before optimizing
- Minimize distractions in your daily life to make progress
- Be aware of your distractions and then remove them
Be Data-Driven
You should always make data-driven decisions. If you don’t, you choosing to go with your opinion with no facts to back it up.
- Start with the end goal of your experiment: find your peak-productivity time
- Design the experiment: enter data into a spreadsheet on how you feel your energy level is from 1 to 10 every hour of the day for two weeks
- Run the experiment and collect data
- Analyze data and draw conclusions
Track and Measure Output, Not Input
Focus on the output rather than the input
- Output differs from goals since we control all the variables
- Knowing the difference between outcomes and goals is key to set realistic and attainable objectives
- You need to know what to focus your energy on to be more productive
Live by the 80/20 Rule
Question yourself if your focus, time, or money is on things that generate the majority of the results.
- Are you focusing on the tasks that bring the most output?
- Do you spend time on all your clients equally? Are you reserving most of it for the best clients that bring you the majority revenue? Are most of your distractions coming from a couple of sources?
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