4 ways to increase your productivity (and get more done!)

So we all want to be more productive. We all want to get more stuff done but we all only have the same amount of minutes in a day.

We all only have 1,440 minutes in a day. So why is it that some people seem to get a lot more stuff done than others?

I ran a mentoring session a couple of months back called how to be a productivity ninja and I shared some of the things that I'd come across and implemented to get more out of the working day.

Now you will have come across Covey's four quadrants:

• Urgent and non-important
• Urgent and important
• Non-urgent but important
• Non-urgent and not important

The problem is that most of us spend our time in the urgent and important, i.e. firefighting, dealing with queries that come our way from clients and team members that we don't actually get to spend time on the stuff that's gonna move the needle in our business. So i.e., the stuff that might not be urgent but is very important.

So here are four ways that you can adopt to try and get more stuff done in your day by working in what non-urgent but important quadrant:

1. The first is to create a stopping list. Yes, not a to-do list but a stopping list. It's very easy to say yes. It's not very easy to say no but the thing is you have to say no to certain things if you want to give time to the stuff that matters. So stop requesting all requests for any Zoom invitation that you get. Stop saying yes to all the client queries or employee queries that come your way and delegate more out to your team. That way, you allow yourself the space to work on what's important to you, to what's gonna drive your business forward to enable you to work on the business.
2. The second one is to have focused bursts of work. So our brain is like any other muscle. It gets tiring. It cannot run for hours and hours on maximum output. Researchers say that it takes about 25 minutes of optimum use before the brain gets tired. So working 25-minute intervals, get your focused work done in those periods. Don't let anything else distract you until you've got what you want out of the way. That's the second idea.
3. The third strategy to getting more stuff done is to turn off notifications. We're all guilty of this. How many notifications do we get on a given day? Facebook pings, WhatsApp group pings, LinkedIn is pinging, Twitter is pinging, everything is pinging and those red symbols appear on the apps urging us to press the button and see what is waiting for us. There's a reason that that little number in the corner is red and it's because our brain is attracted to the color red and makes us want to open up the app. But if we want to make time and do the stuff that's important, we have to train ourselves to not look at the notification as soon as it comes in. Turn off notifications on your phone so you're not distracted at everyone that comes in because it's natural to be attracted to it but it causes us to move away from what we're working on and then it takes us, on average, 23 minutes to actually get back into our flow, into what we were doing. So get rid of the notifications.
4. The last one is the build good habits. There was a great book written by James Clear called "Atomic Habits." It's one of my favorite books and in that book, he teaches you the science behind a habit and how to develop good habits. One of the things he talks about is to actually create an environment that is conducive to you building good habits because when you build good habits, you're more likely to get the results that you want so rather than focusing on the goal at the end, focus on your trajectory, focus on what you are doing each and every day and by doing that, you will achieve your goals in the long run.