Start Doing These 3 Things
To quickly boost your productivity
How happy are you with your productivity? Are you ridiculously productive for several days in a row and then run out of steam? Do you have a hard time getting started so that procrastination becomes a hard-to-kick habit? Maybe you’re just not motivated. Whatever the reason, when your productivity suffers, you feel guilty and frustrated that you’re not getting things done, and you’re tempted to just throw up your hands. Bottom line: If you’re not productive, your business and income are going nowhere fast.
Put your priorities front and center
I’ve always struggled with establishing priorities and often my list of things to do included a 1-a, 1-b, 1-c, and so on. Slicing and dicing levels of importance are challenging for me since so many items seem equally important. Then I discovered the Eisenhower Matrix, and it made all the difference. While it resembles what Stephen Covey developed decades later, the Eisenhower Matrix came out of World War II.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States and the Allied Forces Supreme Commander during World War II. He is credited with saying: “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” He used the Matrix when planning the campaign that helped win the war.
When I’m juggling major writing or editing projects, I use the Matrix to help me stay focused on my top priorities across all the projects. This lets me make continuous progress in moving each project toward its deadline. I recently planned my projects for 2022 using it.
Check out this article by Amardeep Parmar for more information on how to use the Matrix.
Beat procrastination with the Pomodoro technique
We all have tasks and projects we don’t want to do. Maybe they’re so big that we don’t know where to start. They could be mind-numbingly boring or just plain distasteful. Whatever the reason, we put off getting them done.
The Pomodoro technique is the perfect, easiest remedy when we’re procrastinating. You see a timer for 25 minutes and work on the task you are avoiding without distractions or interruptions until the timer goes off. That’s a doable goal. When the 25 minutes are up, take a 5-minute break and then repeat for 3 or 4 more rounds. Then, take a longer break. It’s surprising how you accomplish in short chunks.
Check out this article by Jari Roomer for more details.
Kick the multitasking habit
Once bragging about your ability to multitask was a mark of success and accomplishment. It meant that you were super productive and capable of juggling conflicting demands. This idea has been debunked by a growling volume of solid research: Plain-old multitasking isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Multitasking is like turning a light switch on and off quickly and expecting to have enough steady light to do work with; however, it's only by turning the light on and leaving it on that you can get enough steady light to accomplish your work. But that’s not the only downside of multitasking. It might be bad for your brain. A study at the University of Sussex’s Sackler Centre for Consciousness shows that “….people who used a higher number of media devices concurrently also had smaller grey matter density in the part of the brain known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the region notably responsible for cognitive and emotional control functions.”
The antidote to multitasking is mindfulness, so try building mindfulness practices into your day or using the Pomodoro technique to replace multitasking with productivity.
Take action
Choosing just one of these 3 things can immediately improve your productivity. So, which one will you try: the Eisenhower Matrix, the Pomodoro technique, or kicking the multitasking habit?
