People, I would like to convey one message: collecting thousands of productivity tips on blog posts, books, articles, essays, motivational videos, books, podcasts, productivity programs each year are tremendous but… Are you sure you aren’t wasting more time than you would benefit from those learnings? ⏲️
Of course, you need to inform yourself and read articles and maybe even one or two books. But…
You probably don’t need to read such a pile of books to learn how you work with the most efficiency.
What I mean is that spending too much time on how to be productive is not productive. And just because we are in 2019, that does not miraculously change the laws of productivity. If in 2018 you did not need to read five hundred page books, buying expensive courses, ridiculously-expensive mentorship or perform satanic rituals, maybe you still don’t need it. What you need is:
- A long-term goal ⚡: what do you want to achieve with the task you are doing? Think in the long term. For instance, acquiring a client is contributing to your future millionaire.
- A bit of focus and a bit of self-discipline 🔍: try to isolate yourself from the environment, if necessary.
- To be extremely honest with yourself ☀️: try to think why you are avoiding your task. Are you bored? Are you missing some spice in your life? Would you prefer not to have responsibilities and being on the beach? Confront yourself. Be mean.
With those three points in mind, we are ready for a simple procedure:
Plan ahead:
- Dedicate five minutes at night to plan next days’ tasks. Dedicate one minute in the morning to review those.
- Allocate blocks of time for each task. During a block, you should not focus on anything else.
During your task:
- Turn of your phone. Disconnect from social media. Go offline. I’m serious. Flight mode is not enough; you have to turn it off.
- If you smell any signs of procrastination, kill it right away. Most likely, you are not offline. If you are falling into temptation, don’t despair, there are some solutions:
- Direct your distraction to something productive, but short. I.e., I was writing my master thesis, but now I’m writing this article. When you finish, come back to your task.
- Make a quick 10 minutes pause. Probably your brain is bored and screaming you to stop doing whatever you are doing. Stop for a few minutes. But first, remind yourself at the long-term goals of the task you are doing.
- Listen to this (only once, and go right back to work).
After the task:
- Check if those tips worked well for you. If they didn’t, tune your strategy. You can try more complex methods.
- Keep track of what you achieved that day. Keeping that track helps to motivate you, and can provide valuable information.
Typically, it is not very wise to waste lots of time on complex frameworks and that kind of crap before trying the most straightforward approach:
Respect yourself and listen to your needs. Maybe you like sleeping your 8 hours per day. Adapt. In the end, what matters is getting 💩 done. Save time, by avoiding wasting time on time-saving advice. Oh, and by the way, the year we are in doesn’t count for anything, even if that is a part of a fancy article title.
Those are my five cents. Liked it? Nice! Now it’s time to get back to work! Stop procrastinating!
Time to get back to my master thesis!
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Cheers, Keep Rocking 💪P.S.: If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to my mailing list.Here 👇. It would mean a lot.