UNDERRATED PRODUCTIVITY HACKS
Have you ever felt that although the whole to do list was on paper and it did not even look gigantic, but still the passes by in the blink of an eye and hardly we are able to finish the list. Although, we do almost similar tasks day in day out week after week but still we are not able to perfect this art of bringing tasks to completion. We end up struggling by the tail end of the day. There can be multiple reasons to it which depend on people to people like multiple parallel threads going on Teams/Slack or any other channel, multiple emails coming back to back, multiple ad-hoc asks which can never be planned and last but not the least our uncontrollable urge to browse through Social Media which eats up much more time than we can possibly think about.
There are few simple and easily doable hacks which can exponentially increase the productivity on daily basis. I came across a short video By Ankur Warikoo and to my surprise I was following all these and could vouch for the results.
HACK # 1:
DESIGNATED TIME SLOTS FOR SOCIAL MEDIA:
Have designated time slots for Social Media. Instead of browsing time to time, fix time slots distributed throughout the day. For eg. 11 am in morning, 4 pm in evening and then 7:30 pm. It helps us to curtail the time which we end up spending unknowingly and also when we designate a time we look forward to do it but time box it at the same time.
HACK # 2:
TAKE NOTES OF DISTRACTIONS:
We have multiple sources of distraction and I can write on and on about those. What we can do to optimize or distraction time is to keep a note as and when they occur and within a couple of minutes we can get back to our work. Once we are done with it, we can go back to our distraction notebook and address it one by one. This way, our flow does not break and distractions become helpless in the only job they have i.e. distraction.
HACK # 3:
TAKE A POWER NAP:
Take a power nap. It can range anytime between 15 min to 30 min but it should not last long because if that happens it defeats the whole purpose. Put an alarm and wake up. It can prove very effective specially when we are working from home. The catch here is refrain from taking the nap in your cozy bed but instead prefer your bean bag or desk is also fine to serve the purpose.
BONUS POINT: We can club the to do list with our distraction list and by the end of the day we can review, what have we achieved in terms of completion. This makes the whole day truly agile and we get to know the correct of how many tasks were actually planned vs how many tasks we ended up accumulating during the whole day.
I am sure these hacks will prove fruitful to your daily routine as well. It is said that it takes 21 days to convert a habit into a routine. Let me know how has it helped you and also if we can improvise it further. At the end of the day, our goal is to improve the productivity.
Thanks for reading! Cheers!
