How I Increased My Productivity by 50% in One Single Step
And by 50%, I really mean 200%.
A to-do list longer than the Nile flowing through the desert? Check. Dragged-out working hours and little hope for taking a breather? Check.
It’s just one of those days, right?
One proven strategy tells you to plan ahead meticulously, day to day, from one meeting to another, from one job done to another job pending. Including those precious “me” moments dedicated to personal maintenance and refueling, which need to be pre-scheduled into your calendar just like anything else that requires your attention.
Because, as I always say, spontaneous self-care is a slippery fish. Each time you try to grab it tight, it springs out of your hands, and it’s gone before your body and mind even notice that it was there.
All this personal management and strategizing can be fairly exhausting. Yes.
Time-consuming? To a point.
Rewarding? Absolutely.
Especially if you not only want to get stuff done but to maintain a reasonable social life and shield your mental health from unwanted intruders as well.
So, is there something else you might have been missing all along?
If you're a time management pro, not only do you plan your tasks ahead – most probably you also prioritize them by urgency and assign them a specific time allotment. However, there's this one thing I'd personally been neglecting for a while until one day I asked myself – which of these tasks are genuinely proactive, and which ones are merely reactive?
PROACTIVE — creating opportunities
REACTIVE — solving problems
Responding to the emails piling up in your inbox is reactive. Writing an email to a potential partner in order to build a long-term relationship is proactive.
Spending your time on infinite Zoom video meetings someone else brought you into is, most of the time, reactive. Rounding up your team, so you can coach them into developing a new communication strategy, is proactive.
You’re getting my point.
Now, not always can we say ‘no’ to reactive items on our to-do list. Big goals are nothing else than a series of small steps, some more painful than others. But if you want to accelerate your progress and pump up your overall productivity, it’s valuable to keep the following on your mind when organizing your time:
1) THE SCREENING
How does the exact proportion of the reactive and proactive tasks correlate with the final outcome?
Whenever you recall the saying that the majority of our results come from a minority of inputs (in the form of our energy, time, and effort) and you’re not sure which one of your daily activities are the “high-yielding” ones, examining them from the perspective of proactivity and reactivity might help a ton.
2) THE FATA MORGANA
Could the emotional satisfaction linked to ticking off tasks lead to a false perception of a successful day?
Being busy doesn’t equal being productive. We can agree on that.
When you attend several face-to-face meetings, log into endless video calls, and respond to dozens of emails in a day, you not only end up feeling tired but most probably somewhat pleased with your work performance.
“I’ve been doing stuff all day long. I’m moving forward.”
But… are you?
Or you might be sensing quite the opposite. You spend hours and hours trying to do your job the best you can, but you can’t help but feel that you’ve actually achieved nothing that would help your project, your team, or your business to progress in a meaningful or sustainable way.
Frustration, exhaustion, anxiety, burnout. These are all by-products of unstructured working time. That’s why improving your time-management and task-management skills not only contribute to your career objectives, but they keep you in good shape – both physically and mentally – as well.
So, how to increase your productivity by 50%, 100%, or 200% in one single step, so you can “work smart not hard” at last?
It’s, in fact, rather simple. Next time you review your to-do list, your task-management board, or your old-school paper planner, try to identify the activities that bring you fundamentally closer to what you want to achieve. In the next week, in the next quarter, or this year. Assign them the highest priority, give them your best focus, or maybe even identify a new skill that you need to develop to multiply their overall effect on reaching your targets.
And most importantly, ditch ‘busy’. Being busy doesn’t separate you from the rest.
Just as Henry David Thoreau said,
