This week’s 7 List is looking at 7 ways to upgrade your productivity. In the digital age life is moving faster and faster. In order to stay ahead and on top, you need to have a strategy to keep you as productive as possible. By the end of this article you will have 7 tools and techniques that will significantly increase your productivity and massively increase your output…

1 – SET YOURSELF UP TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE

It’s a massive cliche but also very true, “healthy body, healthy mind”. There are four pillars of health, that if you stay on top of, then clear thinking and optimised productivity are just around the corner…

• Eat well – Like a car needs fuel, your brain needs nutrients to operate optimally. This is nothing radically new, but a balanced diet rich in nutrient dense foods as well as plenty of water is key. Particular foods of value include oily fish, greens and berries. Consider fish oil and greens supplementation as an “insurance policy”.
• 8 hours sleep – Again obvious and challenging in certain circumstances (I have three kids under 5 – the struggle is real…) but insufficient sleep can result in dramatically impaired cognitive performance while high levels of good quality sleep is proven to result in improved learning and problem-solving abilities, improved memory and an elevated mood. Switch Netflix off, switch your phone off and get an early night, it’s worth it.
• Exercise – A mere 30 minutes a day of exercise is all you need to benefit from improved blood flow to the brain, the production of new brain cells and significantly decreased risk of depression (not to mention the plethora of physical benefits).
• Meditation – The mainstream is slowly coming round to the positive benefits of meditation. Even if it is a very short session, the benefits are huge. I liken it to a system reboot for the brain. It’s made so much easier now with some great guided meditation apps, such as Calm (Available for iOS in the following App Stores – UK – US – Canada – SA – Australia)

Look after yourself and the rest all becomes so much easier.

2 – MULTITASKING IS OUT

As has been written about conclusively, Multitasking simply does not work. You end up taking longer over the combined group of tasks, and the output is inevitably poorer quality compared to focusing exclusively on a single task.

Rather than multitasking, try the Pomodoro technique instead.

Cognitive output is cyclical (Cycles known as Ultradian Rhythms), meaning that you physically cannot sustain high levels of concentration without intermittent periods of rest. The Pomodoro technique capitalises on this concept. Simply pick one of the most important tasks from your checklist (covered in Point 7) and set a timer for 25 minutes, switch off all distractions and focus on the task at hand exclusively (it can be as long as 90 minutes – but 25 minutes is optimal for concentration). Once the time is up take a short break and then reset and start again. You will be amazed at how quickly you will blast through your tasks.

3 – OWN YOUR E-MAIL, DON’T LET IT OWN YOU

The ping of the e-mail, there are few more intrusive blockers to your personal productivity. If your e-mail is always open, then the temptation is always there to respond immediately, but in reality, is it really that important that you reply immediately to every mail? All the constant flow of e-mails in your inbox is achieving is the continual distraction of your mind from the tasks at hand, and this will inevitably lead to longer time spent on your tasks.

Rather than being a slave to e-mail, control it through batching. Set aside some time two or three times a day to switch on your e-mail and work through all the mails in one hit, then close your e-mail. This still gives you plenty of time to be punctual in your responses and if there is something particularly urgent, then the sender should find a different way to contact you.

4 – FOLLOW IVY LEE

Ivy Lee may not be a familiar name to most but exactly 100 years ago, one of the richest men in the world at the time, Charles M. Schwab called on Ivy Lee, a productivity consultant, to help him get things done. Schwab was highly successful, he was president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, and was a man Thomas Edison called the master hustler. Ivy Lee however provided him with a game changing technique that made a huge impact to Schwab and his executives.

His process for achieving peak productivity could not have been simpler…

1. At the end of each workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Do not write down more than six tasks.
2. Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance.
3. When you arrive tomorrow, concentrate only on the first task. Work until the first task is finished before moving on to the second task.
4. Approach the rest of your list in the same fashion. At the end of the day, move any unfinished items to a new list of six tasks for the following day.
5. Repeat this process every working day.

So simple, yet still to this day, so effective…

5 – BREAK YOUR EPICS DOWN

It’s good to have big goals and it is great to want to achieve ambitious targets, but when it is there written on paper it can be extremely intimidating and often the sheer scale of the task can cause procrastination and can prevent you from even starting the task. Take a lead from the world of Agile project management and take your “epic” (your big goal) and break it down into smaller more manageable “user stories” (smaller micro tasks). For example, if there is a book that you’ve been meaning to read for months or even years, set a small daily target of 10 pages a day or 20 minutes a day. You’d be amazed at how quickly you will achieve these previously perceived unreachable tasks.

6 – PLAN AHEAD

The positive effect of planning on your overall productivity can not be underestimated, always plan your days and week. On a Monday morning, look ahead to your week ahead, work out what you need to achieve, look at your calendar and work out when you are going to do it. By planning ahead you will be subconsciously priming yourself to achieve your goals.

7 – CHECKLISTS

In the above points we have extolled the virtues of planning ahead, breaking your goals down into micro tasks, writing down your 6 most important things to achieve every day and focusing on a single task at a time. Bringing all this together is point 7, always maintain a checklist. This may not be right for everyone, but for me it’s been an absolute gamechanger.

There are several tools that can help you achieve this. Personally I use Evernote, but other things like Trello, Todoist and Wunderlist are equally effective.

My general technique for maintaining a checklist is to plan for the next week on a Friday on my commute. My current workflow is…

1. I’ll add the standard weekly tasks (things I know I’ll need to do every week without fail)
2. Then any standard monthly tasks that fall into that week (for example, I do a monthly personal spending and budget review on the first weekend of each month)
3. Add any left over tasks from the previous week
4. Then add in some of the micro-tasks broken down from my longer term goals
5. I’ll finally consult my calendar and mails for any other outstanding tasks and assign them all to dates that week depending on how busy each day looks.

I then have a plan for the whole week ahead. Things obviously change quickly so if I need to reassign tasks that are not achieved then that’s fine. As the week goes on, if anything comes up that needs to be worked on I just add it to the list (one of the big benefits of using software like Evernote, which allows you to seamlessly work on both Mobile and Desktop). I keep my list both for personal and work tasks, but there is nothing to stop you from maintaining separate lists for both.

It doesn’t work for everyone, and you need to be disciplined in managing it (this is where a lot of people fall down), but if you are looking for a highly effective way to level up your productivity, there are few better ways than managing a checklist.

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