Are you looking for ways to start your day off right and set yourself up for a productive and stress-free time? Building a strong morning routine is the key to achieving these goals. In this installment of The Productivity Box monthly series, we will explore ten morning habits that can help you lessen stress and boost productivity. Each habit plays a vital role in setting the tone for your day and ensuring that you are in the right mindset to tackle whatever comes your way. So, let’s dive in and discover these transformative habits together!
Procrastination is the archenemy of productivity. Some people waste hours and hours just avoiding the task they will eventually have to do anyhow. This goes from students who delay the moment they start working on their homework, up to top professionals who are overwhelmed by the amount of work in front of them. The purpose of this article is to provide helpful advice to better understand procrastination and how to overcome it.
Prioritizing your work life might not seem very easy, when everything you have to do feels important. Taking things as they come, without having a strategy, usually throws you into chaos, where you running a race against time day after day. Eventually, this continuous fight is likely to lead to burnout and dramatically affect your life.
Here are 7 “safety measures” that will hopefully help you fight the chaos and reclaim your productivity.
1. State your core values
Write down the most important things in your life – those that you wouldn’t give up for anything, no matter what.
A simple way to do that is by designing a chart of the most important areas of your life:
personal time
family time
career
school
Next, you should write down your top three priorities for each area.
Once you do that, make sure to invest 80% of your time and most of your efforts into accomplishing the items on your chart. The rest of the time should be allocated to completing other tasks that need to be done.
2. Organize your schedule to reflect your values
Simple and intuitive, your schedule should be focused around your non-negotiable core values.
The amount of time you assign to each of your tasks reflects your true priorities. Very often people dedicate more time to less important tasks, losing sight of what truly matters. Avoid taking on menial tasks and learn to delegate those assignments that don’t necessarily require your expertise.
3. Schedule each day efficiently
One of the easiest strategies for efficient scheduling is the 1-3-5 method. This means that your daily schedule will feature one very important task; three tasks of medium importance; and five little things.
Filling your calendar chaotically usually leads to unbalanced situations when you have accomplished tens of small things, leaving to the end of the week the most important tasks. That will make you frustrated and unhappy, putting you in situations when you have to give up on some areas of your life for the sake of the others. Usually, you end up sacrificing personal life in favor of your work. Yet, achieving a healthy work-life balance is the only way to live a happy and fulfilled life.
4. Identify urgent tasks
I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. – Eisenhower
Eisenhower inspired productivity experts to create what is called The Eisenhower Matrix for prioritizing tasks. The matrix uses the urgency and importance values to make your work life easier, as shown below.
Focus at work is under siege. Everything can interrupt your focus. Coworkers asking you out on a break. A nearby call ringing its way into your focus. And most of all, the myriad distractions new tech put on the table. The buzzes, the dings, the rings. The trouble is, if you don’t focus at work, work doesn’t get done by itself. Hence, focus at work matters.
Prioritization is simple to understand: first things come first. Yet, taking it to the next level is both challenging and rewarding. There’s nothing quite like prioritization when it comes to achieving goals. Here are 5 ways in which you can master prioritization and unleash your productivity.
Productivity right after the holidays is tough and can surely be quite a stretch. The kind of stretch that, in brief, rips through your hard-earned rest. Indeed, it may be hard to get everything back in gear. The absence of work is easy to adapt to, in time.
