8 Scheduling Tips for Extreme Personal Productivity
Regardless of how successful you already are, everybody would like to be more productive and efficient. Unfortunately, those who are busy with running a company and managing others have to deal with a lot of stress that leads to exactly the opposite – your productivity level decreases dramatically.
If you find yourself overwhelmed and counterproductive, here are proven scheduling tips that take a few minutes to implement in your daily life but may have a huge impact on your productivity.
#1. Keep a time journal
Adopt a habit to monitor your time. It’s a great way to examine how you use your time and see if there are too many distractions or if you’re doing things others should be doing.
#2. Choose one priority per day
We tend to overload our calendars with important tasks that become date-specific (but only because we made them that way). You need to learn to set priorities not just for weeks and months but even more importantly, for the immediate future.
Choose one priority a day and get done it first. And only then you can move on to the next thing which now becomes a priority.
#3. Schedule ‘do-not-disturb’ time blocks
Allocate time blocks when you turn off email and phone notifications, close the door and work on whatever your current priority is without any distractions.
#4. Schedule time when you don’t things for others
For example, if you have lots of meetings during the week, try to schedule them on specific days and allocate several ‘light’ days for yourself.
#5. Learn to perfect your work on the fly
One of the main mistakes people make is wasting too much time perfecting things before launching them. We tend to work and then rework things again and again. But instead of waiting for perfection, run with what you go, and fix it along the way.
#6. Check your email at regular intervals
Every time we hear a notification, we tend to stop what we’re doing and check our inbox that leads to productivity loss. Instead, open your email box only at the top and bottom of the hour. Emails can wait an hour and be processed all at once. If something is absolutely urgent, people will call you.
#7. Go to bed early
You can recover from an occasional late night or two. But if you stay up late regularly, it can lead to a sleep deficit that you won’t be able to repay. If you want your body and brain to function at their best, try to get seven to eight hours of sleep each night.
#8. Get someone/something else to work for you
For example, if you enjoy reading but don’t have much time to do this, use specific services that can summarise an entire book in a video or audio file and save your time.
