Hacking your productivity (8 steps)

Below, you can find a list of things you can do to boost your productivity. If you will follow those steps, results are assured. I follow them myself and they are proven to work.

1# Write to do list
First thing I would recommend you to do, is to write down what needs to be done. Once you have your list written down, put things in order. Decide what is the most and what the least important thing. Write them down in a nice order and follow it.

2# Email can wait
Don’t scramble your priorities and plans for the day. Do the most important task early in the morning. Email and other stuff that doesn’t require much focus, can wait. Check it after you have completed at least one of your crucial to-do items.

3# Avoid meeting
As I wrote in one of my previous blog post, meetings are one of the worst interruptions. They are usually about words and abstract concepts, not real things. The amount of information they convey (per minute) is low. On a top of that, they drift off-subject every five minutes and often include at least one moron, who inevitably gets his turn and waste everyone’s time with nonsense.

4# Stop using Facebook
Facebook is a big and very time consuming distraction. Your news feed is always full of new “important” and “interesting” things you need to see (drunk videos of your friends, what other people eat, were they in gym or not, who is in relationship with whom etc.), not to mention notification bar, you cannot leave unopened. When doing that, you lose track of time. Minutes feel like seconds and before you know you end up scrolling up and down for fifteen minutes, if not more. Sometimes you get so distracted that you even forget why you opened Facebook in the first place. Therefore, I would advise you to stop using Facebook and other social media platforms while working. In case you use it as part of your work or in case you communicate through Facebook messenger, start using app or extension to block your news feed. I personally use Google Chrome extension called “Kill news feed”. Give it a shoot and you’ll be surprised how much time will it save you.

5# Get to the point
When someone calls you, stop using phrases like “Hey, how are you?”, “How’s it going?” etc. If that’s not what you really want to know, don’t ask, it’s a waste of time and it usually leads to a five minute chit chat. Cut the crap and stick to “What’s up?”, “How can I help you?” or “I’m in the middle of something, what’s going on?”.

6# Don’t answer calls from unrecognized number
Those calls are unwanted and usually unimportant interruptions. Also if it takes you just a minute to answer the call, don’t do it. You will lose your focus and need at least five minutes to get back to your work. Let the call go to your voicemail and consider using service like GrandCentre to listen to them later or receive them as a text message.

7# Don’t check your inbox every five minutes
We all have this problem and check our inbox thirty times a day. Every time we do that, it takes us at least one minute of our time. In a day this can easily add up to thirty minutes or more. Now it’s time, to change things forever, set up a strategic autoresponder and check your email twice daily. I would recommend you to do it after finishing your top to-do item and an hour or thirty minutes before you leave the office (depending on how many emails you get).

8# Get rid of high-maintenance low-profit clients
As Tim Ferriss wrote in one of his book, “there is no sure path to success, but the surest path to failure is trying to please everyone”. Always apply 80/20 analysis and identify which 20% of your customers are producing 80% of profit and which 20% are wasting 80% of your time. Get rid of clients that are hard to please, especially if they are not crucial for your business. Instead of dealing with them, find new, less demanding customers.