Some people are productivity ninjas. They make the most of their day. Have you ever wondered about what makes them amazingly productive?
My friend, they have mastered to manage their time efficiently, they follow right habits, and they execute the right activities to accomplish their goals for the day.
You cannot have more than 24 hours in a day. So If you have a busy schedule, you are more likely to wish for getting the most out of your day. Aren’t you?
It’s not rocket science, and you can achieve it through simple adjustments in your daily routine.
Here are seven smart ways to make your day more productive:
1- Start Your Day Early
Your morning routine determines how you are going to perform later in the day. It’s true to a major extent.
Suppose, you missed your alarm and overslept for 30 minutes. You skipped your breakfast to reach office on time. In a hurry, you misplaced your car keys or rammed by a traffic jam. What would happen? You would be angry, and this would affect your productivity adversely.
For a body to be in a productive state, it needs to be calm and composed. Getting up early would provide you with extra time, and you would be able to do early jog sessions, cook a hefty breakfast and prepare yourself for the rest of your day.
2- Stop Checking Emails All the Time
Are emails wasting your time and limiting your productivity? Researchers found that most of us are addicted to our inboxes — we check our inbox 36 times an hour and it takes 16 minutes to get back to work ones we left our inbox.
Hearing notification pings every five seconds all around the day is quite distracting. It can boost the anxiety level and adversely affect the performance of a person. To get rid of this, you can switch off your notifications or turn off your emails when you are at work or doing something productive.
You can schedule a fixed time to check emails from your inbox to maintain your workflow without any distraction.
3- Limit Your Time on Social Media
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms can make you lose focus.
According to a survey by Social Media Today, an average person spends 40 minutes watching YouTube, 35 minutes on Facebook, 25 minutes on Snapchat, 15 minutes on Instagram and 1 minute on Twitter every day.
Social media is undoubtedly a great medium to connect with friends and hot social buzz, but it can be a cause of stress and distractions.
If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, you need to limit your time checking Facebook or Twitter unless your work heavily depends on social media.
Social media can often fuel the feelings of inadequacy, making you cranky at the beginning of the day. Instead, you can focus more on meditation, yoga, exercise, or listen to a song. Doing so will set the tone of your day right, and you will be able to make your day more productive.
4- Take Small Breaks
To hustle continuously towards making the most out of every minute is not humanly possible.
You can’t be 100% productive all the day if you continuously work.
Our brain, like our body, needs rest to work optimally. Researchers found that the most productive people generally spent 52 minutes’ work followed by a 17-minute break.
However, you should not check Facebook or emails bearing in mind that you are taking breaks. These are not productive breaks.
To relax your mind and body, you can listen to slow music, go for a quick walk or look out for the birds creeping outside.
The agenda of taking small breaks is to energize your brain to boost productivity.
5- Stop Multitasking
You might think that engaging with more than one task at a time can help you do more in less time. But this is no true. Multitasking dilutes our focus and responsiveness so even the normal tasks become much harder and take longer than usual to complete.
Studies found that when we are in the stages of multitasking, our attention switches between two or more pieces of work that depletes the energy resources of our mind. That’s why, even though if you have done little or no physical activity, you might feel exhausted and not in the mood to do anything.
Avoid multitasking, and this will help you do more in less time.
6- Budget Your Time
Time is precious, especially when it comes to making the most out of the day.
For a successful entrepreneurial life, time management is the need of the hour to stay productive. That’s why you should budget your time.
Budgeting time allows you to know how much time you are spending on each task. You could even write down on a piece of paper the tasks you want to complete in the day and allocate time in front of these tasks. Also, this will help you understand how you can better manage your time.
7- Prioritize Your Next Day Before
One of the biggest productivity killers is to start a day with no clear idea about what needs to be done. You should never do it.
Instead, you should always plan ahead and make the to-do list the day before if you want your day to be productive. It hardly takes 15 minutes of yours to make a to-do-list for the next day, but it can drastically improve your productivity.
It’s always better to stick to optimum goals that you can achieve instead of a long-tailed schedule that is impossible to complete.
A little planning goes a long way and can boost productivity in the workflow.
Final thoughts,
As Tim Ferriss said it right,
If you win the morning, you win the day.
If you starting your day early, stop checking emails every minute, limit your time on social media, take small breaks, stop multitasking, budget your time, and prioritize your day before, there is no reason why you wouldn’t be more proactive.
What about you? Do you want to share any other productivity hack? Please leave it in the comment section.
