I received a text message from a former colleague and friend about how I stay productive and avoid procrastination. This colleague is not the first to notice my strengths in this area and ask for tips, tricks, and book recommendations. So here I go.
First things first, there is no silver bullet to doing things right. Many things that work for me might or might not work for you. Ultimately, you need to design a system that works for you. Staying productive in my work and private life comes down to building habits, being consistent, and optimizing what needs improvement.
Building habits
Building habits to become more productive and procrastinate less starts with knowing your strengths and working towards them as much as possible. By working towards your strengths, you will generally feel more productive and much happier. When you feel productive and glad, dealing with tasks that don’t play to your strengths becomes easier. As a result, you procrastinate less. Once I figured this out, things got so much easier for me.
Feeling more productive leads to being more productive.
But it’s not only about feeling; it’s also about doing, and that’s where habits come into play. Once certain things and working on tasks becomes a habit (it takes more than 21 days) it is much easier to do them.
Some examples of habits that I’ve created for myself.
- I exercise 3 days a week, every Tuesday morning at 07:00, every Friday morning at 07:00, and every Sunday at 10:00. The moments on which I do sports have changed throughout the years, but the amount of time I do sports hasn’t. Working on my physical and mental health helps me keep my energy up. When my energy is up, everything is more manageable.
- I write down everything I need to do in my notebook. When I say everything, I mean everything; I do this throughout the day and end every working day by going over all these to-dos before I go home. Any task I haven’t done yet gets transported to my task manager for me to follow up on.
- I follow up on tasks at regular intervals during my day. To do this, I carve out 20% of my calendar time into four blocks of 30 minutes that get moved around the day depending on other meetings.
- This first block in my calendar is always in the morning before business meetings start.
- I open up my task manager and look at everything listed. I order the tasks on the due date and pick them up individually. Things that can be done in a max of 2-3 minutes need to be done immediately; things that need 30 or more minutes get planned in the calendar. Anything between 2 and 30 minutes gets done in the already reserved 20% of my time. I do the work based on due date and priority, which is not what I like to do.
Being consistent
Creating habits is one, and sticking to them is another. Staying consistent and holding yourself accountable works best for me. Examples of things I do consistently so that I keep up with everything that I need to keep up with:
- Use the last two hours of your workweek as reflection time; reflect on the work you have done in the past days and the work you need to do in the next five days.
- Ensure everything that needs to be on the task list is there.
- Ensure you have 20% of the time planned for the work you must do between your regular meetings next week.
- Please be sure to stick to your personal health and resilience plan. I play sports three days a week and read every evening.
- Quit Outlook when you don’t need it. Outlook is the worst application there is. Work and other stuff in there can always derail your focus.
Optimize where needed
Stay open to trying new things and adapting or optimizing those that work and don’t work for you. Be very aware of how you use a to-do list. Please don’t use it only to write things down for the sake of it; do it because it works for you. If it doesn’t work, could you try something else? It’s never about the following excellent digital tool or app.
Book recommendations
These are some management books (on different subjects) that I have enjoyed reading in the past few years.
