Part of the guide: Personal Brand
A couple of years back; I had a really hard time getting things done. I would wake up at random times, slouch on the sofa for hours and maybe work 2-4 hours in a single day. The truth is soon after I realized just how much I was “slacking”, I decided to work on my productivity…
Two months down the line…
I was working a good 8 hours a day barely yielding 2 hours of results. Most people do it… They work for 8+ hours, yet they produce what they could in 1 to 2 hours of SOLID work. What’s the main culprit?
…Distractions
So I put together 21 simple tricks for boosting productivity:
- Plan Your Day
- Time Every Task With A Timer
- Kill Distractions
- Complete Boring Jobs In The Morning
- Cut Off Internet
- Check Emails Twice A Day
- Take A Stroll
- Blog
- Plan Your Meals For A Week
- Exercise
- Get An Office
- Organize Your Stuff
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts and questions in the comments below. Also put your name and email in the form on the right for more cool productivity boosting tips, tricks & secrets.
Comments
Michael Burns, January 17, 2012, 02:05
I agree except that I couldn’t plan my meals for a week. I have no idea what I’m going to want to eat tomorrow, let alone a week from now.
Michael Burns, January 16, 2012, 23:04
Intelligence is not fixed. It is forged.
Most brain games are toys. This is a structured protocol built on thirty years of published research, and you can measure your own progress as you go.
Start free →Based on published cognitive-science research. Not a medical product or treatment.
I still struggle with this. But I’m working on it.
Mike, January 16, 2012, 22:18
I agree with everything except doing the boring stuff in the morning. I use my mornings when I am refreshed and full of new energy to create or do the things that inspire me. That is where I want my strongest energy to go! So for me, I focus on art, music, and morning walks with nature! However, everyone is different and you have to find what works best for you and this post is full of absolutely wonderful ways to boost your production. Thanks for sharing David! 🙂
Laura Perez, January 18, 2012, 11:45
Thanks for the tips, David! I’ve been struggling with distractions and your advice is really helpful.
Chris Martin, January 18, 2012, 14:32
Great post! Planning my meals for the week has made a huge difference in my productivity. Keep up the great work!
Susan Lee, January 19, 2012, 09:20
Love the idea of cutting off the internet. It’s so easy to get distracted online. Thanks for the tip!
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‘Blog’ sitting on a productivity list between ‘take a stroll’ and ‘plan your meals for a week’ is a genuinely strange item, like the post forgot for a second it’s aimed at bloggers and started treating blogging itself as one more chore to schedule alongside laundry. It sent me thinking about my shop actually — I only became efficient there once I stopped doing paperwork on the counter and got a proper back office, tiny as it is. Maybe the real trick buried in ‘get an office’ isn’t about a room at all, it’s about your brain being able to tell which activity it’s supposed to be doing right now. Sorry, went from bullet points to real estate philosophy there.
Declan’s brain cue idea has a real mechanism behind it if it’s what I think it is — context-dependent association, the same reason people who study at a desk and only ever watch TV on a couch report better recall doing the former in the same spot. Whether that transfers to ‘blogging’ as a category rather than a specific task is the part I’d want tested before crediting the office itself rather than just the discipline of only blogging in one place.
Ran a diner for nineteen years, and if there’s one thing I learned about a week’s worth of meals it’s that the plan only survives contact with a Tuesday. You’d have your prep list, your walk-in stocked exactly right, and then a delivery would come in late or three regulars would all want the special at once and the whole week’s rhythm would shift by six hours. Meal planning helped, don’t get me wrong, it just never worked the way a tidy list makes it sound. It worked because we adjusted it every single day and never once followed it exactly as written.
Birdie, this is exactly it — I think what’s being missed when people dismiss meal planning as rigid is that the plan was never meant to survive contact with Tuesday unchanged, it’s meant to give you a default so you’re not deciding from nothing when the delivery’s late and three regulars want the special. I’ll concede the post doesn’t say any of that, it just says ‘plan your meals for a week’ like the list itself does the work. It doesn’t. The adjusting does.
Ade conceding the post doesn’t actually explain the adjusting part instead of just defending it anyway — that’s a good instinct, most people dig in instead.
‘Get an office’ is a city-sized solution. Around here that’s the spare room over the feed store, and everybody who walks in still expects you to look up and talk to them, office door or not, because they’ve known you since you were a kid. The part of this list that actually translates to a town this size is ‘kill distractions’ — you just do it by turning off the radio, not by hanging a sign nobody local would respect anyway.
Lonnie’s right. ‘Get an office’ assumes a commute worth escaping and a household that leaves you alone once you’re behind a door. Neither is universal. The list reads like it was written for exactly one kind of life and never checked against any other.
This is a helpful list, thank you. I am curious about ‘check emails twice a day’ — in my market most business communication happens through messaging apps, not really email. Does the same discipline apply there also?
From what I’ve observed on the field side, messaging apps erode a ‘check twice a day’ boundary faster than email did, because the fast-reply expectation is built into the app, not the person’s habits. Whatever replaces it for messaging probably needs to be a boundary you state to the other person, not just a private rule.