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You can easily achieve peak performance and increase your productivity. All it takes is a little bit of planning. Eventually, the planning develops into habits. Here is what those habits should look like:
Prioritizing Each Day’s Tasks in Advance
Most people know their day-to-day and weekly routines. Unless you’re not one of the majority, you can easily plan and prioritize your daily and weekly tasks.
At the end of each day, go over the next day’s tasks. Once you go over them, you can decide which ones to do first and wait till later. The whole process will hardly take 10 minutes but will help you save much more time the next day and will help you increase your productivity. Since you would have already decided what to do when all you’ll need to do is get started and get things done!
Avoiding Multi-Tasking
Honestly, multi-tasking is a scam. It doesn’t save any time. It ends up taking more time as you’re never focused and spend more time doing tasks that can be done in little time with focus. You are likely to get things done quickly when there’s nothing else on your mind. Moreover, you are likelier to make mistakes if you are not paying full attention to the task at hand.
Eliminating Distractions
Distraction can come in the form of another important task, too, as mentioned above. Shut down the rest of the world once you get to a task. It doesn’t matter if that task is work-related or if it’s you cleaning your space. Once you learn to focus on only one thing at a time, you will find it an easy way to increase your productivity.
Setting Timed Goals for Every Task
Setting timers can also help boost productivity. However, it might not work in unusual activities that aren’t a part of your daily routine or activities that involve factors out of your control. Trying to control or time such activities can have the opposite effect and can make you irritated.
Removing Decision Fatigue
Decision fatigue is real and can consume a lot of your time. Eliminating it can greatly increase your productivity. While it’s not possible to completely get rid of it, you can simplify your life by removing it as much as possible. You can do that by following these steps:
- Make decisions in advance and stick to them. You are likely to spend more time on decisions when they become urgent. When the decision and its consequence are further away, they tend to be easier.
- Treat them as separate tasks. This point reiterates why deciding in advance can work well. You can think them through when you treat them as a task instead of something that comes up spur-of-the-moment.
- Think of them in terms of commitment. Can you fulfill the commitment that comes with making certain decisions? Answering this question can help make making decisions easier.
Last but not least, begin valuing your time. I know it sounds clichéd, but you can become more productive by valuing your time and not wasting it.
Be sure to let me know your thoughts in the comments.