5 daily habits to increase your productivity

“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

According to research an employee is interrupted more than 55 times per day and needs to consume around 2 hours to recover from these interruptions. Pinger in 2019 and Vardhman in 2021 were talking about an overall productivity of the average employee is only of 2 hours and 53 minutes per day. So….

What is productivity?

Productivity is the skill that supports people to manage more efficiently and effectively their time, complete their tasks and accomplish their goals. I have talked about productivity on this blog correlated with mindfulness and how this is a great technique to be present and increase productivity on a daily basis, not just in coaching but also in your work and personal life.

Here are 5 habits to bring focus on increasing your productivity in your life:

1. Start your day with a purpose

   A person with greater productivity can complete more with less time or effort making that a great way to create space for hobbies and other things that are important for you. One way to measure this is the number of the tasks you finished, the quality of the work or the amount of product you have made.
   So start your day with a goal in mind - today I want to finish 3 tasks, deliver one product and have 20 emails archived. Be specific and add a number or create a list that will help you visualize how are you doing with your day.

   To make sure you start your day focused you can journal (downloading your ideas), have a mindfulness session for a few minutes to bring your attention to here and now or visualize how your day would look like when all the tasks are done.

2. Prioritize Task with the Eisenhower Matrix:

   Known as Urgent-Important Matrix, it was popularized by Stephen Covey in his best-selling book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The name is given by the 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower that was famous for his high output and organization. President Eisenhower was said to have arranged his obligations so that only the important and urgent matters came across his desk.

   This tool you can be downloaded from the resources area and is useful in case you feel that you are procrastinating, you are running around all day feeling that you did nothing, struggling to say ”no” or have hard time delegating tasks.

   Urgent tasks are time pressured and they are screaming for your attention. These are the tasks you feel the need to address. Your focus on an urgent task will create a reactive mindset - that can make you feel defensive and always in a hurry creating a breach in your focus.

   Important tasks are connected to your mission and goals. These are tasks that might not be needed asap or hold your immediate attention but they are supporting your values and mission on the long run. Bringing your focus on what is important on your task list will create a responsive mindset - that can make you feel calm, at peace, open to explore new ideas.

   Start a habit of doing this matrix on a daily basis with the tasks, things or projects you have to do.
   Important and urgent are done first thing in the morning, put in this quadrant the ones that also consume a lot of your energy. Here usually I put the articles that have a close deadline or newsletters for my job or for this blog.

   Urgent and not important - these are usually the urgent tasks that might be mistaken with those that are important - so you need to spend some time on this to make the difference them. These tasks can be done later in the day.

   Important and not urgent with a big impact on your long time goals. Strategic things should be here, health and relationship things should get on this quadrant of the matrix. Might not be urgent but when it comes to your mission and vision - these should have a higher up position on your list of things to do.

   Not urgent and not important enter the domain of things you do but that are not serving you, like social media, watching TV or other tasks that you do to keep our focus away from the things that matter, as a subtle art of procrastination.

How to use this with your classical ”To Do List”
Move all the items from the roster into the four quadrants.

Those in quadrant four are to be deleted.
Those from third quadrant are to be delegated - who or what can do them for you? Might be a colleague, a family member and app or an automatisation system. Make a plan to delegate them.

Those in the second and the first quadrant - put them in your calendar to make them happen. Schedule a time for them - be specific so you can keep your focus.

3. Incorporate Regular Breaks:

Research show that working in bursts of focus with breaks help our brain and increases our productivity. So put them in your calendar / on your agenda and in your matrix - they are not urgent but they are important. Here you can use Pomodoro Technique or any other tool that works for you to plan efficiently and also include the breaks.

4. Practice Single-Tasking:

There is an ”urban legend” that people are multitasking in corporations - my truth is that we are but we are not productive or efficient while we multitasking. The seconds you spend switching between tasks, the time you need to bring your focus to the new task, then the minutes to move back to the first one and gain your focus are lost minutes. Instead if you stay long enough until you finish the first task and then move to the next one, you will notice that you are more efficient and you have time to spare at the end of the day.

Notice when a distraction shows up (it might be your mind, your chat or your phone notifications) and choose to keep your focus on the task at hand, the one that you booked a slot in the calendar for. Once you finished it move to the next one that is urgent and important.

5. Reflect and Adjust:

It is important to taylor the matrix and the habits you have to support your wellbeing, goals and vision. This can be achieved by reflecting on what needs to be done, what matters to you, what is important in the long run versus the short and quick wins that will not help you with your dream life.

Make a habit of reviewing your daily routines from time to time and see where you can improve and adapt. This is important since life changes, and with it you need to adjust your habits - because what got you here won’t get you there.

If you read until here, here are 3 things you should take: the matrix, try mindfulness for focus and adjust to what serves you in the now.

Photo credit: Andreas Klassen