Most productive people: 6 things they do every day
1) Manage Your Mood
Most productivity systems act like we’re robots — they forget the enormous power of
feelings.
If you start the day calm it’s easy to get the right things done and focus.
But when we wake up and the fray is already upon us — phone ringing,
emails coming in, fire alarms going off — you spend the whole day
reacting.
This means you’re not in the driver’s seat working on your
priorities, you’re responding to what gets thrown at you, important or
not.
Here’s Tim:
I try to have the first 80 to 90 minutes of my day vary
as little as possible. I think that a routine is necessary to feel in
control and non-reactive, which reduces anxiety. It therefore also makes
you more productive.
Research shows how you start the day has an
enormous effect on productivity and you procrastinate more when
you’re in a bad mood.
Studies demonstrate happiness increases productivity and makes you more successful.
As
Shawn Achor describes in his book
The Happiness Advantage:
…doctors put in a positive mood before making a diagnosis
show almost three times more intelligence and creativity than doctors
in a neutral state, and they make accurate diagnoses 19 percent faster.
Optimistic salespeople outsell their pessimistic counterparts by 56
percent. Students primed to feel happy before taking math achievement
tests far outperform their neutral peers. It turns out that our brains
are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are
negative or even neutral, but when they are positive.
So think a little less about managing the work and a little more about managing your moods.
(For more on how to be happier, go
here.)
So what’s the first step to managing your mood after you wake up?
3) Before You Try To Do It Faster, Ask Whether It Should Be Done At All
Everyone asks, “Why is it so impossible to get everything done?” But the answer is stunningly easy:
You’re doing too many things.
Want to be more productive?
Don’t ask how to make something more efficient until after you’ve asked “Do I need to do this at all?”
Here’s Tim:
Doing something well does not make it important. I think
this is one of the most common problems with a lot of time-management or
productivity advice; they focus on how to do things quickly. The vast
majority of things that people do quickly should not be done at all.
It’s funny that we complain we have so little time and then we prioritize like time is endless. Instead,
do what is important… and not much else.
But is this true in the real world?
Research shows CEOs don’t get more done by blindly working more hours, they get more done
when they follow careful plans:
Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a
firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more
intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven
entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to
mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with
employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a
limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated
increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.
(For more ways to save time go
here.)
Okay, you’ve cleared the decks. Your head is serene, you’ve gotten
the email monkey off your back and you know what you need to do.
Now we have to face one of the biggest problems of the modern era: how do you sit still and focus?
4) Focus Is Nothing More Than Eliminating Distractions
Ed Hallowell, former professor at Harvard Medical School and bestselling author of
Driven to Distraction, says we have
“culturally generated ADD.”
Has modern life permanently damaged our attention spans?
No. What you do have is more tantalizing, easily accessible, shiny
things available to you 24/7 than any human being has ever had.
The answer is to lock yourself somewhere to make all the flashing, buzzing distractions go away.
Here’s Tim:
Focus is a function, first and foremost, of limiting the number of options you give yourself for procrastinating… I
think that focus is thought of as this magical ability. It’s not a
magical ability. It’s put yourself in a padded room, with the problem
that you need to work on, and shut the door. That’s it. The degree to
which you can replicate that, and systematize it, is the extent to which
you will have focus.
What’s the best way to sum up the research? How about this: Distractions make you stupid.
And a flood of studies show that the easiest and most powerful way to change your behavior
is to change your environment.
Top CEOs are interrupted every 20 minutes. How do they get anything done?
By working from home in the morning for 90 minutes where no one can bother them:
They found that not one of the twelve executives was ever
able to work uninterruptedly more than twenty minutes at a time—at
least not in the office. Only at home was there some chance of
concentration. And the only one of the twelve who did not make
important, long-range decisions “off the cuff,” and sandwiched in
between unimportant but long telephone calls and “crisis” problems, was
the executive who worked at home every morning for an hour and a half
before coming to the office.
(For more on how to stop procrastinating go
here.)
I know what some of you are thinking:
I have other responsibilities. Meetings. My boss needs me. My spouse calls. I can’t just hide.
This is why you need a system.
(TheLadders.com)
