Psychological Tips

How to stay productive?

1. Write it down. As cliché as it may sound, write down tasks on paper. This will reduce your anxiety level and prevent you from forgetting anything.

2. Prioritise. There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. While we can’t control time, we can manage our energy and decide how to spend it. An effective planning system, the Eisenhower Matrix, where you divide tasks according to importance and urgency, will do the trick.

Start your day with important and urgent tasks. Then pay attention to important but non-urgent tasks. You will usually be able to delegate the latter and ignore the rest.

3. Incorporate rest into your schedule. It’s very important to remember to recuperate for further victories. Even if we are productive in the morning, concentration wanes over time, focus dissipates and it takes time to regain energy.

But when we are distracted from our work, we feel guilty, which is unlikely to help us recover. So make the rest legal, allow yourself a little break, or better yet, put it on your to-do list. That way, you can replenish your energy reserves without feeling guilty, because it was a planned break and it didn’t last the whole day.

4. As you embark on a new task, think about why you’re doing it. Sometimes we fall into the ‘to-do list’ trap of crossing off tasks in the diary as an end in itself. Ask yourself: “If I don’t do it now, what happens?” It might be worth crossing it out or coming back to it later.

5. Use the two minute rule. If the task can be completed in two minutes, do it immediately. It will take much more time and effort to write it down in a planner and get into it again.

6. Work at productive times. Everyone has their own peak productivity time. Analyse your efficiency during the day and try to plan your schedule so that the most important and responsible tasks are at these times.

7. Turn off notifications. All of them. Or almost all of them. SMS about discounts, mailing lists, messages from friends on Facebook . Every notification you pay attention to not only steals precious seconds of time, but also takes you out of your “flow” state. Slowly, it leads to stress.