Unleash Your Productivity with The Top 4 Productivity Methods

 

Are you ready to supercharge your productivity and gain back 20+ hours each week? You heard that right! With these four productivity methods, you'll be on the fast track to achieving more in less time.

🍅 Pomodoro Technique:

Decide on the task at hand.
Set a timer for 25 minutes.
Work diligently until the timer rings.
Reward yourself with a 5-minute break (1 Pomodoro).
Rinse and repeat for four Pomodoros.
Take a longer break (15-30 minutes) and start anew.
This method leverages the power of focused bursts of work, ensuring you stay on track and maintain peak productivity.

📋 Eisenhower Matrix:

List all your tasks.
Categorize them into:
Do: Urgent and important.
Decide: Important but not urgent.
Delegate: Urgent but not important.
Delete: Neither urgent nor important.
By prioritizing tasks using this matrix, you'll know exactly where to direct your efforts for maximum impact.

⏰ 3-3-3 Method:

Allocate 3 hours for deep work on your most crucial task.
Have clear goals to accomplish.
Tackle 3 other urgent, shorter tasks.
These might include meetings or quick calls.
Address 3 "maintenance" tasks.
Think cleaning, emails, exercise, journaling, etc.
This method ensures you allocate substantial time to your most significant projects while managing smaller tasks efficiently.

⏱️ 2-Minute Rule:

Estimate task durations.
If it takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately—no postponing or adding to your to-do list.
If it takes longer than 2 minutes, choose to delegate, defer, or break it down into smaller, manageable steps.
The 2-Minute Rule minimizes procrastination and keeps your to-do list from overflowing with tiny tasks.

By incorporating these four productivity methods into your daily routine, you'll not only save valuable time but also optimize your focus and efficiency. So, get started today and watch those extra hours accumulate, allowing you to achieve more and stress less! 💪🕒

Content Credit: Dr Bebeka Gjoksi Cosandey

For optimal productivity, be on break for 20-25% of the workday

 

Takeaway:

For optimal productivity, we should rest for around 20-30 minutes for every 90 minutes we work. This sounds like a lot, but three separate studies back up this amount of time.

The other day, reviewing research on how long our work breaks should be, I noticed a curious connection. Three separate studies indicated essentially the same thing: we should be on break for 20-25% of our day for optimal energy and productivity.

Two studies conducted in 2014 and 2021 by Desktime (a time tracking app) found that their most productive users were on break for this proportion of the day. The 2014 study found that their most productive users were on break for 17 minutes every 52 minutes they worked—in other words, 25% of the day, in other words. Mid-pandemic, in 2021, their most productive users were on break for an average of 26 minutes for every 112 minutes of work—19% of the day.

A third study found that our energy naturally moves in a similar rhythm throughout the day. Most of the day, we oscillate between periods of wakefulness and sleepiness. We typically experience around 20 to 30 minutes of tiredness for every 90-minute period of higher energy. That’s roughly 18-25% of the day that our body naturally wants to rest. 

Taken together, these studies seem to suggest that 20-25% of the day is the sweet spot for breaks—especially if you’re trying to optimize your productivity level or accommodate the natural rhythms of your body and mind. 

While this sounds like a lot of time, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. If you’ve tried the Pomodoro technique, you’ve already worked with this rhythm. With the technique, you focus on something for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break. After the first break, you repeat the same rhythm three more times, taking an extended break after the fourth focus session—the official website recommends around 20 minutes for this longer break. This equals 25% of the day—more if you decide to take an even longer break at the end, as many do. 

Another way to look at these numbers: Being on break for 20% of an eight-hour day is equivalent to a one-hour lunch break, plus one 18-minute break in the morning and afternoon. 25% of the day is a one-hour lunch break, with another hour of breaks distributed throughout the day. That’s a good amount of time, but as I’ve written in the past, when we’re on break, our mind continues working—especially when we give it a chance to wander. 

Working with this knowledge, I’ve started to track how many minutes I focus for—and then just multiply that number by 25% to figure out how long to break for when I feel the need to—or when I can. The longer I work, the longer the break I get. 

Your mileage will vary, of course. But remember that 20-25% of the day seems to be the sweet spot for both energy and productivity.

Written by Chris Bailey

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Want to become more productive? Stop multitasking

 

According to a recent study, when you multitask, you are not being more productive – you just feel more emotionally satisfied from your work.1 That’s why multitasking is so fun. You feel like you’re getting a lot done because you jump between a large number of things, but you’re really being less productive than if you just focused on one thing at a time.

“If you’re, say, trying to listen to someone one the phone while typing an email”, says cognitive psychologist David Meyer at the University of Michigan, “something has to give”.2

There are a ton of impacts multitasking has on your productivity. Here are five of the main ones I’ve come across:

1. It makes you more prone to errors, because you devote less focus to all of the balls you’re trying to juggle at one time. When you do more than one thing at once, you don’t focus on anything to your full capacity.
2. It actually takes longer. When you switch from one activity to another, it takes time “to re-immerse your mind in one topic or another”.3 These are called “switching costs”, and you incur them every time you switch from one task to another.
3. It severely affects your performance. For one example, in a study with young students, multitasking led “to spottier, shallower, less flexible learning”.4
4. It affects your memory. Studies have shown that when you try to focus on too many things at one time, you are less likely to be able to differentiate between what’s important and what isn’t.5 Maybe that’s why you forgot why you just walked into the kitchen.
5. It adds stress to your life. Your electronics should exist for your convenience; not the convenience of everyone else in the world. Allowing other people to shatter your focus by constantly interrupting you may be stimulating and entertaining, but it will make you less productive since you have less control over your environment.

From everything I’ve read, multitasking will almost always make you less productive. That said, there are a few tips to

• Only multitask with simple, habitual tasks, like doing the dishes while you listen to a podcast. This is because your mind can lean on your habits to get the mechanical stuff done while your mind focuses on something more productive.
• Minimize distractions. Technology “creates a major expansion of the targets for your focus and a potential drain on its finite resources”.6 By minimizing the distractions around you (instant messaging alerts, text message vibrations, email notifications, and so on), you can improve your focus and become better at unitasking.
• Meditate. Meditation works out your “attention muscle”, which lets you focus better on the task at hand when you’re trying to unitask. I wrote a comprehensive guide on how to use meditation to become more productive here.
• Check your email on a schedule. Especially if you receive a high volume of email, checking it on a schedule means that you won’t be inundated with alerts and notifications all day. People can wait an hour or two for a response.
• Know that your brain can’t actually multitask. You may feel like you’re doing more than one thing at once, “but what you’re really doing is switching back and forth between activities”.7 According to one brain researcher, “there are fundamental biological limits to what the brain can pay attention to. This is a problem built into the brain”.
• Music is a-okay. According to Stanford professor Clifford Nass, music is “a little different. We have a special part of our brain for music, so we can listen to music while we do other things”.

It’s very difficult to stop multitasking – every day I have the urge to check my email, twitter feeds, and text messages when I’m doing something productive (like writing this blog post), just for the emotional stimulation it will give me. That said, I think it’s worth pushing back against it in the end because of how much more productive it makes you.

1. Source: http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm ↩

2. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

3. Source: http://redtape.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/18/18322435-students-cant-resist-distraction-for-two-minutes-and-neither-can-you?lite ↩

4. Source: http://anniemurphypaul.com/2013/05/the-epidemic-of-media-multitasking-while-learning/# ↩

5. Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html ↩

6. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

7. Source: RAPT, by Winifred Gallagher. ↩

Written by Chris Bailey

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