How to be more productive and get more from your time

Start by answering these questions.

1. Have you ever felt that you could be doing more than what you are doing currently?
2. Do you believe you are unable to focus on a task continuously and getting distracted regularly?
3. Do you think you are not giving 100% attention to anything you do in a given day?

If you answered yes to these questions (most likely you would), you are not alone and very much part of the the significant majority of people today.

Based on my reading and research on this topic, here are the top 3 reasons, in my view, on why we are not productive as much as we would like to be. For easier recall, i coined the term SPAM.

1. Social Media distraction (no surprises here!)
2. Procrastination
3. Multi-tasking

Lets talk about each of them.

Are you conscious of the amount of time spent in checking 'screen' notifications all the time eg., email, social media, instant messages and so on. During the day, for example at work, email notifications are the biggest productivity killers. We have the tendency to immediately respond to emails while we are actively engaged in a task. Similarly are social media notifications and instant messages pop ups on the phone. Our curiosity to check and respond immediately has become part of our conditioned response. For instance, a friend inviting you for weekend dinner and pinging to let you know something interesting that he or she came across, may prompt you to reply and deviate from what you were doing.

Second comes procrastination. Imagine that you have been told to work on an interesting project but needs to be completed much later or you are preparing for an examination. How do you go about completing it. Look at the below illustration on what we plan and what actually happens in terms of our ability to manage time. Tim Urban's TED Talk on 'Inside the mind of a procrastinator' gives an extremely simple and humorous message on how our minds function and why we need to control our 'monkey brain'. Tied to that is another concept of 'Parkinson's Law' (no connection to the disease by the same name!). It says "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Take a moment to think about this. Once a deadline for completion is nowhere near, we tend to take things easy and end up not being focused or become easily distracted while at it. Why do you think we are most productive at the 11th hour always?

Last but not least is multi-tasking. Dr. Mavin Chun, who is a professor of psychology at Yale illustrated why our brain is not wired to do multiple things at the same time with a couple of quick exercises (worth checking this on youtube, if you are interested). Lets assume that you are a master of multi-tasking and you believe you have been productive on account of your multi-tasking abilities. You may not like what scientific evidence proves. One research conducted at Stanford on multi-tasking found out that frequent multitaskers were challenged in terms of structuring their thoughts and eliminating the 'noise' from information, slower to switch from one task to another and overall affecting productivity. The researchers concluded that our brains lack the capability to perform more than one task effectively at the same time.

Lets come to the collective list of solutions.

1. Get deep with mindfulness: developing the ability to fully immerse ourselves in what we do and experience it fully in all our senses eg., eating your breakfast - feeling the crust and the crunch of that toast, relishing the texture of the meat and the smelling the freshness of the salad and so on. Cal Newport in his book Deep Work talks about a number of techniques to achieve focus and to deliver extraordinary outcomes as opposed to shallow work that is prevalent in current times.

2. Have a morning ritual: Almost all successful people that we know of have a morning routine and what differentiates them is that they are disciplined. Eg. You may have come across the 5AM Club comprising world leaders, celebrities and tycoons who are able to achieve more in a day, since they start early. A good mix of meditation and exercise, learning something new, journaling and reflecting etc. appear to be the strong common threads in such morning rituals. I personally would strongly recommend morning meditation for 5-15 mins. I have been doing it for the last one year and I could feel that i am a lot more composed to deal with stress and able to focus better. Also, doing the most difficult tasks, those that are termed as 'cognitive strain' by neuroscientists helps in sailing smoothly for the rest of the day. Mark Twain's famous words sums this up well - “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

3. Schedule everything - work, fun, learning and family: To do lists are ok but nothing beats scheduling. Some of the busiest people in the world are known to schedule blocks of 15 mins and ensure that they are completely 'zoned in' during that time. Some of the other popular techniques include a) Pomodora technique: allocating 25 mins to a task followed by a 5 min break, allocating 50 mins for a task followed by 10-15 min break and so on (no phone calls, no notifications during that slot. have a 25min block for notifications, if you will) b) scheduling for the weekend : making our personal time productive by planning and scheduling time in advance will help us do more for ourselves - eg., getting our minds to look forward to the positive experiences during the course of the week (same as planning for that well-deserved holiday 4 months later) c) making non-productive time productive eg., listening to audio books or podcasts or practice 'productive meditation' suggested by Cal Newport where you think through something while engaged in a daily activity like taking a shower.

4. Focus on 80/20: The famous pareto principle is worth reiterating here. 80% of the outcomes (results, rewards) come from 20% of the inputs such as time and resources. Therefore, identify the 20% first and apply 1 to 3 above in that.

Thats all folks!

Would love to get your comments on my very first post on steemit!. Cheers.