It seems appropriate to follow up my last blog on motivation with some thoughts on productivity. Being busy and productive are not the same! Our habits have a huge effect on our productivity, and since 40-45% of our daily activities are habits it’s worth taking an honest inventory of habitual activity that is perhaps getting in the way of us being truly productive.  As we have perhaps started to enjoy more flexible working arrangements it makes sense to be as productive as possible, to prevent working time merging into our personal time and to potentially free up time to do other things (such as working your Forever business).

I’d suggest that for one week you actually make a log of how you use your time. Imagine being a lawyer where during the day you are logging hours and minutes to different client accounts. It’s important that we know clearly what we are actually doing every hour, as compared to what we think we are doing every hour. You could be in for a few surprises when you drill down into this level of details those minutes each day spent looking at social media, may well in fact be hours. It’s important to recognise the habits, and measure how much time they take.

So here are my top tips. 

Choose three high value activities to focus on and set a deadline for their completion. The brain loves a deadline.  These can be things that you may finish in a day or they may in fact take several weeks.  Forget the ‘busy’ work and eliminate time-wasting activities; you really do not have to respond to an email the moment it lands in your inbox, stay away from distractions that you know you’re susceptible to such as social media, and if you’re working on something that requires creativity and focus (I would hope most of your work falls into that category) then switch your phone to silent and turn off your email notifications.

Manage your energy through the day by moving your body every hour. Get up, drink some water, and move around before returning to your place of work.

Working in a cool room stops you feeling sluggish, sit up straight – if you’re hunched you are not able to breathe properly as your diaphragm will be pressing against the bottom of your lungs, this restricted breathing really does impact your focus.

Stop multi-tasking as this interferes with the quality and quantity of your work. A 2003 study published in the International Journal of Information Management found that the typical person checks email once every five minutes and that, on average, it takes 64 seconds to resume the previous task after checking your email.In other words, because of email alone, we typically waste one out of every six minutes.  That’s quite shocking isn’t it?  Studies show that professionals check their emails 15 times a day – that’s every 37 minutes, this sounds like addiction would you agree? There are some who suggest that we should only check our email twice a day.  Would you be able to go cold turkey on that one?

What about using time travelling or cooking, doing chores etc to listen to a podcast or audio book? It’s what Tony Robbins refers to as ‘No Extra Time’ NET time.

If you aren’t confined to office hours then work when your energy levels are best, some tasks are better suited to different times of day and we should honour our natural rhythms when we can; we really do fall into camps of larks and owls it seems. 

Be accountable to someone, if you don’t have a line manager, find someone who you are prepared to be accountable to – we all produce more when there is some form of reporting back, taking stock. It also feels good when we are able to acknowledge the things we have completed – it makes us feel valuable and boosts our self-esteem.

Fall in love with the process of your daily work.  We really do get to choose how we feel about any given task, we can ‘shift’ our mood or thinking if we take the time to find a positive thought about doing something, what it will bring us, the satisfaction of completing it.  That we did what we said we were going to do.

Spend a few minutes each evening organising your tasks for the next day it’s thought that this can potentially save hours the following day. 

Read up on increasing your productivity, there’s a host of books and audiobooks, ‘Getting Things Done’ by David Allen, ‘How to be a productivity Ninja’ by Graham Allcott and the classic by Brian Tracy ‘Eat That Frog’.

Let me know how you get on…..