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Everywhere you look, people are trying to get more done in less time. Productivity tips, books like Get Things Done and the 4-Hour Workweek litter our libraries, and productivity tools like lists, diaries and intense calendars to ensure we do more. The problem is, despite our organization, we still tend to be less productive than we’d like to. Below are a few additional things you can do right away to achieve maximum productivity.
Start your day early, or end it late
People generally fall into two sleep cycles. You get ‘night owls’, who typically go to sleep around midnight and wake between 8am and 9am. ‘Larks’ are people who typically go to sleep earlier – between 9pm and 10pm – and rise earlier, too, between 5am and 6am. Find out what your body’s cycle is, and plan accordingly, doing either a lion’s share of your work in the nighttime if you’re a night owl, or a massive proportion first thing in the morning if you’re a lark.
People’s work is cyclical, and functions in bursts where there’s no interruption. The way to ensure maximum productivity is to schedule your workday around your sleep cycle.
Limit distractions
While diaries have risen to prominence as and to-do lists to prompt us on what we should be working on at any given moment, not enough is done to limit being distracted from performing and completing those tasks.
Make sure you work in a distraction-free, uncluttered environment. This means there’s nothing physically around you that could be a distraction, nor any window on your PC but the one you’re working on open. Harder said than done, but this is the solution to maximum productivity.
Useful tools
No doubt you know the value of having a smart, reliable laptop in your arsenal. We find going old school and using post its and whiteboards for task management is far more efficient than using smartphones (because that pretty smartphone has a million distractions just dying to get its hooks into you).
Maximum productivity requires you do, as opposed to constantly planning to do. Be careful not to fall into the trap of the latter, as a way to make up for your shortcomings in the former.
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