Beyond Habits: Productivity Ideas to Implement Today
Photo by Johnson Wang on Unsplash
Much of what is discussed in this section comes from “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky and from “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey. Check those books out if you want to learn more about time management and being productive (among much more)! Similar to the habits path, I’m going to summarize some of the main lessons on how to be productive and effective with your time that they teach in their books.
Create weekly agendas
Organizing your time will allow you to optimize your schedule and purposefully place your priorities in your calendar, so nothing important gets forgotten. My preference is to do this on a weekly frequency. Trying to set your monthly schedule in advance is too difficult: you don’t always know what you want or need to be doing 3 weeks ahead, new tasks and goals will pop up, and you don’t want to be too rigid. On the other hand, setting a fixed daily schedule can also be too rigid. A weekly agenda is the Goldilocks middle ground that lets you set highlights to focus on daily while also adapting to new tasks that may come up. It also matches the week format that much of modern society is based around, with a full “work week” and the weekend at a time.
image from the Make Time blog
So at the start of each week, I’ll flip to the next page of my planner notebook and write down the upcoming week’s agenda. I like to create my weekly agendas in the same form as the above graphic, which Knapp and Zeratsky call “the burner list”. The idea is that you divide your to-do list of tasks into three main sections: the front burner (most important project), the back burner (next most important project), and the kitchen sink (other, typically smaller, projects or tasks you want to get done that week). I like this structure because it lets you truly prioritize one or two focuses for the week, while reserving space to list other to-dos or objectives that may come up. As always, feel free to make your own version. You can prioritize however or whatever you want, as long as you’re doing just that - setting your desired priorities ahead of time.
2. Set daily priorities each morning
In addition to the weekly agenda, I also like to start each day by going over what I want to get done that day. It may be the same things that I already have written down in my agenda, or it may be select tasks that I want to get specifically done on that day, or it may be some new priorities that have come up. While this may feel somewhat redundant, consciously going over what you want to get done that day and setting your schedule can help keep you on task and motivated!
Knapp and Zeratsky also recommend setting one highlight at the start of each day, which they define as “activities that fall between long-term goals and short-term tasks...the key to slowing down, bringing satisfaction to your daily life, and helping you make time”. Your highlight will be what you center your day around achieving, though it doesn’t have to be the only thing you do that day. It’s simply a task or object that you want to “highlight” your attention on for that day. However, they do recommend picking highlights that are a blend of urgent, satisfying to complete, and/or will provide you joy. Setting and completing highlights can make you feel more productive and happy, since you have some basic direction day-to-day.
image from the Make Time blog
3. Minimize distractions (and set up barriers on what the ones you can’t remove)
This is a point I’ve already touched on in the habits discussion, but one I wanted to reiterate and also discuss in the context of productivity. It also ties into the focused vs. diffused thinking discussion - you cannot maintain focused thinking if you are constantly being interrupted by distractions. And each time you get distracted, even if it’s just quickly checking your messages or watching a single YouTube video, results in the need to re-establish that state of focus. The other issue is that what often starts as answering one message or watching one video turns into hours spent scrolling social media or the Internet. Many of these apps and websites are designed to be “infinity pools”, in which new content continues to appear no matter how much you scroll down your feed. The best way to minimize these distractions is to either completely remove them, change your defaults (as described in the link in the previous sentence), or to set-up desired habits and get rid of phone and Internet using habits.
There are other distractions besides those created by technology, and it’s up to you how you want to minimize them. If you know that studying with friends will result in you chatting with them instead, then set aside time to study on your own or find friends who will hold you accountable. If you turn on the TV every time you study at home, then go out to cafes or libraries to study. Ultimately, you know yourself best, and if you want to be a more productive person then you need to minimize or completely remove the factors that you know will distract you from getting done what’s important.
4. Envision end goals, but focus on the daily priorities
I’ve talked much in this map about the need to focus on the daily tasks, the work itself, the systems you create...basically everything besides the goals that you are doing all this work for. But that does not mean you should toss goals aside - goal-setting is just as important for being productive. It is very easy to get lost in the day-to-day shuffle of everything you need to do and your most pressing problems and concerns. By keeping in mind what really matters to you, the values that you care about, you ensure that you are moving in the right direction. Stephen Covey recommends to begin each day by affirming your values to yourself. If you “begin with the end in mind” - see your goals, feel them, mentally experience accomplishing them before you actually do - that helps keep them fresh and inspiring. You can integrate these values and goals reminders with your daily priority setting mentioned above, or integrate into other parts of your day as well. Other possible insertion points are during meditation, working out, on the commute to school or work, or any other part of the day where you are able to think clearly.
Of course, there is still the process of actually choosing the goals themselves that you wish to envision. As for that, all I’ll say is that whatever goals you choose, make sure they are things that motivate you and that you enjoy.
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