9 Surprising Productivity Hacks Improving Time at Work

Here are a couple of productivity hacks, which surprised me first time I saw or tried them. Some are from the “4-hour work week”, peppered with my own experience as developer. All vetted with my personal experience :).

1. Reduce Information Input

Don’t watch or read news. Consume as little irrelevant, negative and random information as possible (if it’s not for the task you are working on just now). Avoid television. No unnecessary reading of content you don’t need right now. Especially news are mostly irrelevant to you. You can update yourself once in a week or month shortly on the most important things and still stay up to date.

2. Prepare Just-In-Time

Don’t prepare for something weeks or months in the future. Prepare, when you need it = consume information just-in-time. Otherwise you will need to re-read it again. Most information will be forgotten, if there is a big gap between consumption and execution.

3. Don’t Finish It

Don’t finish something, if it’s not contributing to your goals. Stop reading a boring book, article, blog post, etc, if it doesn’t provide useful or entertaining information. Don’t finish something just because you have started it.

4. Just Ask

Ask people specific questions, who went through it what you want to achieve. Don’t be shy to cold-call or cold-email more famous or achieved persons. Not all will respond, but some will. But make sure not to ask dump questions you could have googled in 2 seconds.

5. Close Your Email Client, and Slack too

Don’t check emails, statistics, analytics and or instant messages throughout the day. Check them only in a specific time slot a day. Some data like your stock portfolio or your page views don’t have to be checked even daily, maybe weekly is enough. Close your instant messengers and your email app or email browser tab. Otherwise you will look at it all the time, instead of focussing. Point is to reduce checking things to a minimum.

6. Batching

Batch similar tasks into bigger time-slots instead of spreading them over day or week. For example write all articles on Monday, do interviews on Tuesday, meetings on Friday, etc. This way you get the stuff done faster, since your brain loaded already all the required meta-data for this specific task and you save time in setting up things. Like if you record podcasts, you have to setup the microphone and other gadgets just once to record multiple sessions.

7. Set Impossible Deadlines

Set hard-to-achieve or even unrealistic deadlines. This will force you to focus and prioritise. Otherwise you tend to procrastinate and do small, useless and unimportant tasks, which you don’t need to do to achieve the same goals. See Parkinson’s Law or the Law of triviality. Yeah those deadlines can be arbitrary as long as they put you under fire. And everybody tends to procrastinate or blow up small issues.

8. No Meetings

Avoid meetings and calls. Mostly they are not necessary, have no agenda, no goals and include lots of socializing. If you make calls or meetings, then with a clear purpose and end them early. Keep things to structured emails whenever possible. Writing emails requires to think about the problem and doesn’t encourage chit-chat or other social time wasters.

9. Close Everything You Don’t Need

Close all tabs in your browser window an close all open apps, except the ones you need to have right now for your work. Once a task is done close the tab immediately. Save the link somewhere, if it’s useful. Unnecessarily opened tabs and apps are in your way operating the required ones.

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— by Eduard Metzger, creator of NotePlan. Read more about NotePlan here:

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