What are the productivity tips used by successful people that gets them so far in life?
Nowadays, it sometimes feels like the world is rushing by. Each day you scroll on social media, it seems like even more people your age have entered the millionaire category while you’re still just watching them.
What’s worse is that you’re working hard on your dreams. Late nights, very little time for social life, and job after job is stressing you out, tiring you out, and making you lose hope.
It can be frustrating, it can be infuriating, it can be disheartening. It can be all of those at once.
I don’t blame you, it’s hard. But I truly believe that hard work and dedication along with a strategy or plan in mind will lead to success, so keep trying!
But if I go back to those people on social media, or even other successful people around you (they can even be your peers), it may make you wonder, how are they doing all of that? How do they manage to fit it all into their schedule?
The key question you must then ask yourself is: How can I get more work done in less time?
The reason why these people are able to achieve so much is because they are smart with their time, they are efficient, and they believe and act on the philosophy of ‘work smarter, not harder.’
They cut half of the time people usually spend on a given task because they have a system of techniques and strategies in place.
Working loads of hours doesn’t make you better than them, because in all that extra time you use to get to where you need to, they’ve already done it and have moved onto something else to better their life.
In this 2-part series, you’re going to learn about how to get work done efficiently and also, how to achieve more in less time.
This first post will focus on the time management techniques you need to implement in your life to cut work time down in half, and the second will give you actionable steps to take to get more done in a day.
How to manage time with 8 productivity tips that work
1. Pomodoro Technique
The Pomodoro technique involves working for a period of time with no distractions and taking short breaks in between.
The most common way of doing this is by working for 25 minutes where you solely focus on the task at hand.
After this, you take a 5-minute break, and after you have completed four 25 minute blocks, you are allowed to take a longer break (15 minutes – 30 minutes).
The reason why this technique is in this list of productivity tips is because success doesn’t come from non-stop work, it comes when you use time to your full advantage.
Giving yourself no time off and not rewarding yourself for your successes will make you lose motivation and will also lead to burn out, so make sure to have breaks.
2. Time blocking
There are loads of productivity tools and resources online to help you with this, and if you’re in need of productivity tips that takes care of multiple things and helps you make time for everything, time blocking is your answer.
Time blocking is essentially breaking down your day into blocks of time (for example, 9am – 10am or 7:30pm – 8:30pm).
With each ‘block’ of time, you assign a specific task to it.
The key here is to again, give yourself plenty of breaks, but also to be realistic with the amount of time you think a task will take. Don’t block in one hour for writing an essay which you know is going to take three hours.
Another good tip for time blocking is to also make each block as specific as possible. If I use the essay as an example, don’t write down 12:00pm – 5:00pm: Write history essay. Instead do something like this:
12:00pm – 1:00pm: Plan essay
1:00pm – 1:30pm: Organize structure
1:30pm – 2:00pm: Write introduction etc.
This will make the task seem a lot less daunting and more achievable.
Related:
Productivity Hack: The 5-Minute Rule
8 Realistic Tips to Make Your Morning Routine Immediately Better
5 Steps To Control Stress When You’re About To Have A Meltdown
3. The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule is perhaps the most important out of this list of productivity tips, and it will help you achieve more in less time. It will allow you to have productivity at work, and is also great for increasing your productivity working from home.
The 80/20 rule (or the Pareto Principle) follows that you can get 80% of output with just 20% of input.
I’m not going to get too technical in this post so I’ll link an article on the 80/20 rule here.
Think about everything you do during work, does all of it lead to outcomes? Or when you really think about it is it just passing time?
With the 80/20 rule, what you want to do is to put in 20% of effort to get 80% of results. So look through all aspects of your work/ business, and figure out the areas that don’t bring you any outcomes and stop wasting time on them. This rule can also be applied on a personal setting too to bring more minimalism and simplicity in your life.
Before you know it, you’re going to see that there are a lot of things you do that really don’t need to be done (organizing papers constantly, checking emails every hour, working hard on income streams that have not been giving you money for years etc.).
4. Batch Your Tasks
Batching similar tasks together is a great way to get work done efficiently.
Batching tasks together basically just means grouping similar tasks together and getting them all done in one go.
For example, if you’re a blogger, you may need to write blog posts, create some pins for Pinterest, and write some emails for your email list.
To batch these tasks, what you could do is take a few days to write and schedule the posts, take another few days to create the pins, and another few days to create the emails.
You’ll find that as you are doing similar things for a consistent period, it limits distractions because you’re not jumping from one task to another.
5. Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s law states that work expands to fill the time it is given.
In other words, the longer you give yourself to do something, the longer it will take to do it.
For example, if you give yourself 2 hours to write a blog post, you will write it in that time, but if you give yourself the entire day, it will take you the entire day.
Think about all the times that you had a deadline the next day and hadn’t even started yet but somehow managed to pull through.
That is Parkinson’s Law at work.
So use this to your advantage to get more done in a day.
Coupled with the 80/20 rule, these two productivity tips will save you hours and hours of time.
First, figure out what is essential work (and what is not) with the 80/20 rule. This will free up your time to focus on a limited amount of tasks that will give you maximum outcomes.
Then, with the Parkinson’s Law allot specific times to each of these tasks, and get them done in that time.
6. Learn from your mistakes – trial & error
Making mistakes is better than giving up. Making mistakes is what makes you better, it’s what makes you learn so that you don’t make it again. In a sense, it makes you stronger.
Don’t feel down when something you worked hard on didn’t have the results you wanted, there was a reason for that. From now on, you’ll know that that idea won’t work, and you can move on and try another something else.
Trial and error is something everyone needs to go through but once you’ve figured out what works, you’re set for life.
7. Build different routines for separate areas of your life
If you’re a student studying different courses or subjects, you might have different study methods for each topic.
Similarly with your business or with everyday life, develop routines that can help you make the most out of time.
This doesn’t just relate to personal projects or work but even household work or other chores.
Building routines is a great way to manage time at home and work.
Routines cut down time wasting because there is a set structure to follow.
Related:
What Successful People Do To Get Rich and Stay Rich
Tips for Work Life Balance To Make the Most Out of Your Twenties
Motivation Is The Key To Success (Why You’re Not Achieving Your Goals)
8. Minimise, minimise, minimise
Having this online schedule, and that productivity system, and having multiple accounts on different websites that are supposed to make you more productive will do the opposite.
For you to get a lot of work done in a short amount of time, you need to strip your work time of all the excess things that make you waste time, this includes fiddling around with all of these systems and constantly ‘organizing’ what you need to do.
I want you to do this right now. Create a quick list, whether it be on your phone, on a paper or even just in your head: if you were only allowed three hours a week to work on your project what would you do? You only have three hours for the entire week.
This is the type of thinking you need to get into; you want optimum results with minimal effort.
So, how do you get a week’s worth of work done in a few days?
The people who you look at who seem like they do so much in such less time implement strategies like this into their life even if they don’t know it.
The main thing to note is that they do absolutely what is necessary, they don’t waste time creating schedules all the time or putting important work off to organize what they need to do. They just do it.
If you put these techniques to practice and also the actionable steps in the next post of this Productivity tips series you could even get more done in 3 hours than most do in a week.
