What are strategies on your Productivity Go-To list that allow you to consistently maximise your focus and energy and enable you to find your state of flow?
Documenting a personalised Productivity Go-To list with tips that help you to enhance your focus and concentration, reduce interruptions, minimise multitasking and transcend procrastination is fabulously helpful and key to helping you stay on top of your game!
In my coaching and training work, I find that productivity is not one-size-fits-all. Fortunately, we are all unique and what enables one person to find their flow, may or may not work for someone else. Sure, there are fundamental productivity principles that can provide an over-arching structure; but it is still up to us to trial, fine-tune and stick to the productivity strategies that enable us to be our best.
Here are the top 10 tips and strategies that participants of iMastery’s productivity workshops and coaching consistently rate as the most useful to maximise their productivity:
- Using an up-to-date, all-encompassing to-do list
- Staying out of their email inbox; checking emails at specific times in the day (and less than six times a day)
- Turning off new email and other alerts
- Single-tasking instead of multitasking
- Purposefully minimising external distractions (e.g. wearing head phones and listening to music designed to increase focus, working from a quiet place, etc.)
- Removing clutter from their workspace
- Timeboxing: allocating time in their calendar for completing high-priority tasks
- Planning at the end of each day for the next day
- Completing high-priority activities early in the day (Eat that Frog strategy)
- Taking a rejuvenating lunch break.
Life has a way of pulling us in a million different directions and before we know it, another week has passed, and we forget to do the things that best support us. Once you know the productivity strategies that work for you, committing them to writing helps build sustainable habits.
How to build your Productivity Go-To list
Ideally, you want this to be a simple one-page manifesto that is meaningful to you and quick and easy to review. You could create a quick bullet-point list of the top 10 things that enable you to consistently get things done in an energising and sustainable way. Or you could mind-map your list and include images that represent your strategies, or you could even include a productivity goal and an accountability chart for the next 6–12 weeks.
How to use your Productivity Go-To list
Now you have clarified the productivity tips that really work for you, you want to place this document somewhere visible where you review and continue to refine it. You may even be inspired to set a specific productivity goal and/or habit. See here for more information about how to accomplish your goals.
When feeling tired and stretched, most of us will get off track. This is when our personal manifesto can help us quickly return to the strategies that we know will work for us. To quote Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” It’s worth investing the time and attention to enhance our focus and concentration, reduce interruptions, minimise multitasking and transcend procrastination.
Thanks for reading and sharing this post!
Wendy
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