Boost Your Productivity: Work Less, Achieve More

Boost Your Productivity: Work Less, Achieve More let’s just imagine I’ve already covered all of the typical cliché self-help guru life hacks about How To 10x Your Output While Working Fewer Hours.

If you enjoy waking up at 4am to brew matcha green tea, do a polar plunge followed by 30 minutes of red light therapy before you start your day, then more power to you.

But those are not the kind of productivity tips I’m about to share. Instead, I’m sharing a few things that have helped me increase the leverage of my time and put myself in the position to consistently deliver my best work.

Without further ado, here are my tips.

1. Figure out how you work best and adapt your schedule to account for your style. For instance, I work best when I’m under the gun. So I’m most productive when I manufacture pressure. But not everybody works best that way. Maybe you like to work on things as far in advance as possible, to give yourself the maximum freedom and creative capacity — without the interruption of a time crunch. Regardless your style, it’s useful to figure out how you operate before you set out to optimize.

2. Orient your schedule around deadlines. Even if you’re not a pressure-person, like me, orienting your schedule around deadlines is still useful. I like to think of deadlines as the absolute last day something can be completed (rather than the day I’m supposed to have something completed). This helps me plan more effectively, especially when I have multiple deadlines floating around for projects that require different levels of focus and effort. Use the deadlines to work backwards when you’re planning your months, weeks, and days. When you can beat deadlines, do it.

3. Commit to completion. Similarly to deadlines, putting some skin in the game is a sure-fire way (at least for me) to keep myself accountable to finishing. Telling a co-worker (or my wife), “I’m going to do XYZ by ABC date”, transfers the pressure from the project itself to your own self-respect and desire to maintain a good reputation. In other words, it creates a social cost for failure. This works well for me, though it might not work for you if you don’t like pressure.

4. Allow yourself to productively procrastinate. I’ll be honest, I don’t always roll out of bed in the morning eager to eat an elephant. I’ve found it’s often easier to start by eating a frog. And what I mean by that is sometimes it’s easier to start with a small project, or several, and then parlay the momentum from those into the big, hairy problems waiting on my to-do list. Energy creates energy, you know? So sometimes give yourself the freedom to knock out the small items first. Similarly, if I find my train of thought continually drifting off toward some other problem, I’ve found it useful to stop what I’m doing and go address that other thing first before returning to the problem at hand.

5. Clear your cognitive balance sheet. If anything on your to-do list takes less than five minutes, do it now. This is a huge lever for increasing productivity. It’s like eliminating static from your own mental airwaves so you can enjoy a crystal clear signal. Don’t let a long list of tiny projects accumulate. Similarly, don’t keep “mental notes” about what you need to do. Get those out of your head and onto paper or your calendar so you can free up some mental RAM.

6. Reward yourself. We’re simple creatures, really. So remember, sticks are good motivators but carrots work, too. Often, I like to create little incentives for myself. “When I get done with [XYZ project], then I’m going to do [ABC fun thing].” This is a useful way to manufacture some excitement and urgency to sit down and grind it out — especially for the monotonous little projects that are easy to put off.

7. Stop once you know where the story is going next. A tactic Ernest Hemingway used to use for writing was that he’d never stop until and would always stop once he’d figured out where the story was going next. This was a sure-fire way to set himself up for success the next time he sat down to write. It enabled him to avoid the blank page — where you waste an hour or two trying to get back into a project to figure out what you should do next. This is an especially useful strategy when you’re working on a bigger project that will require multiple blocks of time. When you hit a stopping point, spend 5–10 more minutes jotting down a quick outline of the next steps on your project for when you return to it later. This has saved me countless hours of my life getting back into the groove.

8. Treat yourself like Pavlov’s dog. I have 3–4 playlists that I rotate between every time I’m tackling a big project. Any time I’m struggling to stay on task, I’ll flip one of these on. It’s seriously like magic. I’ve been using the same 3–4 playlists for 5+ years. So it’s almost as if I’m programmed to be productive when I listen to those. This is a little hack that’s entirely personal. But I recommend you find your own version of it.

9. Remove friction. This is the low-hanging fruit tip. Adopt routines. Keep a clean work space (unless a mess energizes you). Work during your most creative/productive hours. Get enough sleep. Eat healthy. Exercise. Truth be told, I’ve never really considered these things to make me “more productive” so much as they make me less unproductive. These are simple ways to remove hurdles from out in front of yourself.

Okay, so there are a few of my favorite productivity tips. But what about you…what would you add?