Boost your Productivity

I don’t know how you feel but I love the feeling of being productive. It is every time very satisfying to finish a day with all tasks completed. Maybe even I did some tasks in advance and I can finish earlier tomorrow.

I also know the feeling if you feel very unproductive and I couldn’t finish a single task. This can be very frustrating. The goal of my article is to motivate you and to boost your productivity. Here are some methods and techniques I use to be as much productive as possible.

Traffic lights

The first thing you have do is to separate your tasks into three different categories. The three categories are red, yellow and green just like a traffic light. Red marked tasks are very important tasks you have to do. For example, if there is an upcoming exam, learning for this exam would be a red task. Or finishing a presentation for the next day.

The next category is the yellow tasks and these are medium important tasks. These tasks are not red yet, but they become red within the next two weeks. It would be very helpful to do these tasks but they are not as important as red tasks.

The last category is the green tasks, which are not really important and can wait. Green tasks can become yellow tasks by time, but at the moment it is not really important.

Eat that Frog

Now that we have categorized our tasks we need an order we want to work on our tasks. What would happen if the first thing in the morning you do is to eat a frog? Well yes, that is disgusting but can it get worse? No of course not, so everything else seems very simple and not that disgusting. That’s how we order our tasks now.

You have to take your biggest and most disgusting frog and eat it at first. What does this mean? You have to take the task which is the most important and hardest one. This is your frog. If you finished your hardest task, what can now stop you?

So choose your most disgusting frog (task) and don’t stop until you finished. If you have finished all your red tasks continue with the yellow tasks.

Before I used this method I tended to make my hardest in the end. But there you don’t have much of your energy left and the task will be even harder. So it is much better to work on the hardest task when you have the most of your energy.

No multitasking

No matter if you are a man or a woman, only focus on one task. Often people say that they are much more productive doing two tasks at the same time but that is not true.

There are several studies about that and they all have the result that It is much more productive to focus only on one task. If you finish task by task you will be much more productive.

Eliminate disturbances

In order to be as much productive as possible, you need to be focused on your tasks by 100%. That means you have to eliminate all the possible disturbances.

The first thing you need to do is to have on your desk only the things you need to complete your task, so you don’t have to interrupt your work to search for a book or a report or anything like that.

The next thing you need to do is to put away all the things you don’t need this will only disturb you. So put away all the paper from different projects/exams and focus only one on task.

Put your smartphone on silent and close your email application. You can answer your emails and messages later, now you only have to focus on your task. It can take a lot of time to come back to a task after you answered a short message.

Get more energy

I feel the most productive when I feel awake and I have a lot of energy. There are several different factors which can give you more energy. You should include regular exercising to your daily schedule and try to eat healthier. This will also affect your sleep and you will feel better rested the next day.

Try running, bodyweight workouts or whatever makes you happy. By eating healthier you need to avoid junk food and drink water instead of soda drinks. You should drink more than 2 liters of water every day!

Also, it is very important to work not more than 8 hours per day. The rest of the day should be activities that relax you and give you more energy, like exercising or taking a bath. Also, there should be one day in the week (often Sundays) where you don’t work, you even don’t think about your work/tasks.

If possible try to travel one weekend in a month, this helps you to get away from your work so you can relax much better.

Sometimes less is more. If you feel relaxed and awake you will be much more productive, what makes you happier and gives you more free time.

Social pressure

If that all didn’t help you can set yourself under social pressure. At first, you have to search for a good friend or partner. Now you show this person all the tasks you want to complete and also this person shows you all the tasks he/she want to complete.

Now you have to control, whether your partner/friend completed all the tasks. This is usually enough pressure. It can be hard if you have to say to your friend that you couldn’t finish your tasks.

If that isn’t enough, you can also agree on a punishment. For example, if one didn’t finish his tasks he has to post an embarrassing photo on Facebook. You can be very creative here!

As you can see it isn’t very difficult to be productive. Do you have different techniques or method? I would love to hear from them so please leave a comment below 🙂

I wish you a very productive day! 🙂

Fabi