5 Productivity Hacks: How to Increase Productivity

There are only so many hours in a day, and you only have so many resources at your command. Luckily, there are a number of productivity tips you can embrace in order to get more done. Learn how to save time, increase productivity, and take control of your day. Incorporating these five productivity hacks into your routine can make all the difference in achieving your goals.

1. Give Yourself Deadlines

It’s fairly common knowledge that it is vital to create long term goals for yourself, to give yourself something to strive for. What you may not have considered is that giving yourself a deadline to work against can actually improve productivity! If there is an end date you need to have a project completed by, it’s much harder for you to procrastinate.

2. Start the Day Before

To get an early jump on your day, start planning for it the evening before. You should examine your schedule for the upcoming day to start planning out how you are going to organize work hours. Do all of your appointments make sense as they are scheduled? Do you have any materials you need to review ahead of time?

Set aside blocks of time to make phone calls or to complete tasks between meetings. Once you have the general shape of your day mapped out, write out your to-do list for the day. Capture all the important tasks that you want to complete the next day and rank them by level of priority. Choose your outfit and set it aside. You may even want to take 15 minutes and make your lunch ahead of time. That way you can get up and go immediately without any lost time.

3. Own Your Workspace

It’s easy to get caught up in the mentality of working wherever and whenever you can manage to. Time management and being productive when you’re working from home is just as important as workplace productivity. While a stop at the coffee shop to knock out a few items on the to-do list may be helpful, it’s important for you to make your home workspace your own.

Start by decluttering your space. A space free of clutter sets the appropriate mental tone to maintain your focus. This should also help to minimize distractions that may take you off task. Consider using a program to block social media and other websites where you like to spend personal time. It can be really easy to get lost in your friends’ vacation pictures when you should be taking care of business.

4. Take Back Your Email

The first thing many of us do when we wake up is check our email. Don’t! Break yourself of this time draining habit. Stay on top of your correspondence, yes, but don’t let it dictate your schedule. Part of learning how to increase productivity is to taking control of your time. Set aside a predetermined amount of time early in the day to address emails. Start with the most critical ones, and work downwards by level of importance. If you don’t get to a lower priority email during your allotted time, it can wait until later in the day after you have completed your most crucial tasks.

5. Give Yourself a Break

You may be tempted to go full force without stopping to achieve your daily goals. However, in order to be more productive overall,  MIT Senior Lecturer Bob Pozen suggests that a bit of a break allows your brain the opportunity to take advantage of one of our body’s built-in productivity hacks. That time lets your brain switch modes so it can actually process and organize all the information that has been flowing through it.

Try setting aside a period of time once a week for to conduct a review of all of your activity from the previous week. This can give you the opportunity to clean up any lingering action items, get up to date on your progress towards your goals, and gives you some time to think creatively about how you want to invest your energy going forward. Giving yourself space to breathe and collect yourself is an important step in learning how to increase productivity in a sustainable manner.

In order to truly master your life and your time, it’s important to stay focused on what you need to do and how you need to do it. These productivity hacks will help you master your own potential and stay in the present moment. Practice them every day, and soon you will be unstoppable!

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