5 Easy Tips To Supercharge Your Productivity

Posted on Mar 5 2014 - 9:43am by Jan Marciniak

Productivity

No matter what you do professionally, you have the same goal as everybody else: Get work done. We all have those days where you had so much at your plate in regards to meetings, phonecalls and so on, that at the end of the day you have not finished anything substantial to your business.

Here are five easy tips that you can incorporate into your routine in order to supercharge your productivity.

1. Time Slots

Create time slots for tasks that you need to get done. Everybody schedules meetings and even phone calls. But for operational tasks that need your full attention most of the time you do not bother to map out a timeframe and block it in order to complete the task. This will give you and internal deadline and put you under a little bit of pressure to assign full attention to this task during your scheduled timeframe.

2. Track your Tasks Time Slots

Time tracking is always a good thing if you want yourself to be accountable for the deadlines and time slots that you set. Use a time tracking application that let you track time on a task level. On the end of each week you can compare your scheduled time slots with your actual time slots and see where you hit your goals and where you missed them. You will see how much time you use on success specific/goal related tasks and how much time you waste with administration, meetings and phone calls. With time you will get better at estimating your needed time slots for certain tasks and become more productive due to your exact scheduling of tasks.

3. “Max 30” Meetings

Most meetings last an hour or longer. In many cases a total waste of time. Only because Outlooks default meeting length is one hour, do not stick to it. A shorter meeting will let you go through the agenda faster and do not let you waste time along the way. Schedule your meetings to 30 minutes, if you need more time you can always go beyond or reschedule. Most of the time it will save you precious minutes of the day.

4. Quit Multitasking

Stop trying to solve several tasks at once. Like the time slots trick you should always focus on one specific and important task and stick to it 100%. Do not write emails during a meeting. Your emails will be sloppy and you will only get 50% of the meeting.

5. Set the tone for the day

Get a daily morning routine that prepares you for an energetic and productive day and stick to it. It should be like a ritual. Here is how my routine looks like:

  • Get enough sleep (8h to 10h min per night)
  • Get up and check mails
  • Workout (30 minute functional workout)
  • Commute to the office
  • Get a coffee
  • Make a prioritized to do list
  • Cross of one easy task as a productivity booster

This sets the tone and mood for the whole day and I feel fresh, energetic and 100% focused to tackle every task.

Set yourself up by getting some supporting software for tracking your productivity now. A todo lost app like wunderlist and a time tracking tool like tempotrac and implement the tips starting today.

About the Author

Jan is the co-founder of TempoTrac time tracking, an application that helps you get your work time under control and blogs on business, social media and productivity hacks.