I’d like to say that I live a productive life; why that’s important to me because time is our most valuable resource. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again today. What can you do in your day-to-day to feel as if you’re living a productive and satisfying life? Let’s chat about seven habits to improve your productivity and life.
Habit One: Track Your Time to improve your productivity
Why is this important? Tracking your time allows you the ability to look back and know where your time is spent. You must be wondering, what’s the advantage of tracking your time?
Let me tell you, keeping tabs on where your precious time is going allows you to see your patterns.
When you are the most focused or distracted.
Even better, when you know where your time is going, you can answer the question, what did I do today?
You’ll know if the items you’re spending your time on are moving you forward in your life or distracting you from feeling as if you're living a satisfying life.
Habit Two: Create Systems to improve your productivity
The point here is that creating systems helps you eliminate the number of decisions you have to make, stop procrastination, and possibly even an overwhelming amount of sticky notes with random thoughts and tasks.
I can almost hear you thinking, create systems. What does that even mean? Systems are finding easier ways to do things.
For example, create a system around meal planning. By far, this is one of my favorite systems that I’ve created. Recipes new and old are gathered in Notion. When I’m on Pinterest and discover a recipe I want to try, it goes into Notion under my Recipes. The name begins with **New**, allowing me to quickly find new recipes I want to try.
Once I make the dinner, I ask everyone to rate the recipe on a scale of 1 to 5. If the recipe average score is three or higher, it will be assigned to a week in my meal planning.
As I said, this is one of my favorite systems because, at the end of the day, the last decision I want to make is what’s for dinner.
Oh, and I should mention that meal planning is done mostly on Sundays.
Let me walk you through one more system. Everything has its place, whether that be a physical item or information.
I’m not as bad as I used to be, but I love my label maker. Label the home for the physical items around your house. Let me elaborate; it’s not enough to label the home. After all, the item must be put away for the system to work properly.
Besides physical items, having a system for information is also important. I’m a big pen and paper person. Doubtedly, information will gather up in my bullet journal. Not everything needs to be kept; however, what does goes into Notion for safekeeping. Once it has been put into Notion, it will be noted in my Bullet Journal with a / on the page number. The page number will be crossed out with an X if it's not needed.
Habit Three: Create Lists for a Productive Life
Accordingly, the next area to improve your productivity is with lists. Not only writing the lists but knowing where you put the list. In truth, you’re not very productive if you spend too much time looking for your lists.
Lists include not only your to-do list, but also you’re not-to-do list. Let me guess, you know what I’m talking about, the not-to-do list of things to delegate. Or perhaps a list of reasons why you’re not eating sugary treats. Yes, this is a true not-to-do list. What type of not-to-do list will you create?
While this one will require your family to get on board, it will improve your productivity. Without a doubt, using Google Keep (my husband doesn’t have an iPhone) for a family shopping list.
Stick with me here; you’re out running errands, and pop into the grocery store to get a few things you know you need to pick up for dinner. Your running grocery list is hanging on the side of the fridge; no one is home to tell you what’s on the list. So you stand in the aisle racking your brain, trying to remember, do we still need ketchup? C’mon, I can’t be the only one.
That’s why having your shopping list in Google Keep or something similar helps to improve your productivity and cut down on buying things you may not actually need. Does it take a bit of training for your family, yup and it’s worth the effort!
Habit Four: Map Out Your Work to Improve Your Productivity
Your time is valuable; we’ve already covered that. Therefore, not having a map of the work that needs to be done will cause you to be unproductive, procrastinate, and possibly miss deadlines.
When you map out your work in advance, you’ll know when you need to do something and when you need to ask others for items they are responsible for.
To put it another way, create a project plan for your big and little projects. David Allen’s book Getting Things Done states that anything with more than one task is considered a project.
If you struggle with chucking your work down, start with the big items and break them down from there.
Habit Five: Improve Your Productivity with Daily Goals
What are your top three, or create good, better, best goals if you’d like to look at it from that standpoint?
Let me explain; it would be a good day if you did ______. What is one goal? If you achieve that today you’d be happy. This one should be totally achievable.
Next, what would be a better goal? It would be a better day if you did ____ and ____. What are two goals that, if you achieve, you’d be excited?
Finally, what would be the best goal? It would be the best day if you did ____, ____ and ____. What are three goals that, if you achieved them, would be the BEST day?
Here’s an example, let’s say you’re working on drinking more water. Because water is good for your brain and your productivity, a good goal, drink 1 quart of water in the first hour you're awake.
A better goal may be to have 3 quarts of water drank by 3 pm.
The best goal would be to have 4 quarts of water drank by 6 pm.
Habit Six: Batch Like Items to Improve Your Productivity
In reality, I’m sure this is not a new one. When you batch like an item, it improves your productivity because you’re not bouncing from one thing to another thing.
You’re keeping your brain focused on one thing. When batching, using focus music with headphones keeps you from getting distracted by all the noises going on around you.
What tasks could you batch to improve your productivity?
These include setting a timer for social media engagement, batching and scheduling your social media post, and creating your pillar content.
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Habit Seven: Schedule a Hard Stop for a Productive Life
Set boundaries around your time to improve your productivity. Schedule hard stops, that regardless of what you’re doing, you must stop at this time.
This is one that I personally struggle with; not going to lie to you. If I’m on a roll, it can be difficult for me to stop in the middle of it. If this is the case, I look at what I can adjust to keep going.
Or, if it’s the end of the day, is what I’m working on more important than my daily exercise? Because I know myself, I tend to have wiggle room at the end of my day. For example, I schedule one hour to get ready; however, I know that if I absolutely need to, I could take a shower and get ready in twenty minutes. At the moment, I’ll get to choose what’s more important.
While I could go on with a few more ideas to improve your productivity, I’ll end it here.
If you like this be sure to watch here Time Wasters | Be Mindful Of Your Time
Or
read it here…. Time Wasters | Be Mindful Of Your Time
- Track Your Time
- Create Systems
- Create Lists
- Map Out Your Work
- Set Daily Goals
- Batch Like Tasks
- Schedule a Hard Stop
