How do you become more productive? Our guide outlines strategies to boost your productivity and work a path towards your goals and dreams.
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Do you have big plans? Then procrastination is your enemy. We’ll show you 4 strategies to become more productive! So that your dreams will finally become a reality.
There’s something in the air: drive, hope, motivation. Everyone has started to set their personal goals very high. Unfortunately, we often stand between us and our dreams. We postpone important things because we are not pressed for time. After all, nobody is pushing us to play sports or to finally write the book. We’d have to do that ourselves. However, there are a few things you can do to trick your own mind. This way you can become more productive and do all the things you have been dreaming about for so long.
Strategies to become more productive
1. Use an analog appointment planner
The smartphone has displaced many analog devices: alarm clocks, clocks, calendars, diaries, books. Slowly but surely, some things that were believed dead are returning. Light alarm clocks are a modern version of the alarm clock, but they are more popular than ever. Another analog device that is gaining in importance again: the organizer.
In an increasingly digital world, an analog planner is a refreshing change and, as numerous studies have shown, it even helps to reduce stress. By writing down our appointments and to-dos, we turn our gaze away from the screens and focus only on writing on paper. This not only relaxes the eyes, but also the mind, because it slows down our everyday life a little. You might also want to use a calendar template to do this more easily.
But how does it help us to become more productive? By writing down our thoughts, we sort out the clutter in our head. This alone helps to filter out what is really important and what connections there are between the tasks. So we can better set priorities.
The visualization of the tasks and the act of writing them down also ensure that we don’t forget things so quickly. We still know it from school: if we write down content and look at it afterwards, we learn it. What helped you learn vocabulary also helps you think about deadlines and to-dos.
Tip: If you find the stress-relieving aspect of the analog appointment planner particularly exciting, you should perhaps buy a bullet journal. You can find out what it is and how you can even save time with it.
2. Color code your planning
Even the best bullet journal becomes confusing at some point when one to-do list follows another page by page. Between the whole black, dark blue or gray font, more important to-dos or appointments get lost – simply because they don’t stand out from the rest. However, there is an easy way to make important to-dos stand out: color.
You don’t have to get hold of an arsenal of different pens and create a color legend in the planner. Too much color has the same effect as no color: It becomes confusing again. But a highlighter or two for specific purposes can be helpful.
For example, you can mark important to-dos for the work in neon yellow so that they immediately catch the eye. Or you can use small post-its for appointments and stick them to the corresponding day in the appointment calendar.
This can help us become more productive because we can be sure that we are meeting deadlines. We can also see right away what is prioritized and do that first. Sometimes it is precisely these small changes that increase our productivity enormously.
Tip: If you want to become more productive, you also have to analyze the areas in which productivity is suffering. Take a certain color for this and at the end of a week (or even at the end of a day) mark all to-dos in that color that you haven’t done.
So you can see straight away how long you have been putting off certain things. You may even be amazed to find that what is most important to you is what you put off the longest. Or that you postpone the most important to-dos until the end of the day and then don’t have enough time to finish.
3. Modify the “Eat the frog” method
Whoever leaves the big chunks until the end of the day actually demands something very difficult: You have to do the most difficult task of the day when you have the least energy. This is where “eat the frog” time management comes in. The most important task of the day is done first.
The background to this is the belief that one should do the most difficult when strength and motivation are at their highest. This is to ensure that the task gets done.
But let’s be honest: very few have their motivation high in the morning. Most belong to the morning coffee drinker category. For many, the greatest feeling in the morning is that they have managed to check their emails.
That is why a modified time management method works better. The process then looks like this:
- First you take care of a simple task that you can quickly tick off. This motivates you and sets a good rhythm for the rest of the day.
- Second, you take care of the biggest and most important task of the day. This is the infamous chunk that you don’t really feel like eating. That is why you do this task early enough in the day so that motivation is still high.
- Then comes the second most important task of the day. Here, too, you benefit from the motivation and energy you still have.
- Then you do the remaining to-dos at your own discretion, because you have already checked off the most important things – and often a few, important things have a much greater impact than a lot of small ones.
4. Just do things…
If we are completely honest, we have to admit that we don’t put off many things because we don’t have the time for them (as we always say), but because we don’t feel like doing it. Netflix is just more fun.
Most of the time, it is the to-dos that cost us effort or effort that we postpone until tomorrow. In the hope that the next day we will experience a sudden change of heart and have fun jogging. This is exactly the moment when we shouldn’t listen to our gut feeling. We won’t feel like it the next day either – and the day after that either.
After a long day at work, the sofa will always seem more inviting than the gym. So the most important thing you have to learn in order to increase your productivity is that motivation doesn’t matter at all. It doesn’t matter if you are motivated to do something. You just do it anyway.
For this you need very specific targets. So you are not saying you are going to exercise, you are saying that you are doing 20 pushups, 10 burpees, and 30 sit-ups. Or that you write 500 words a day for your novel. You need concrete actions that specify what you have to do and when you will be finished.
The background is that in a moment when you don’t feel like it anyway, you don’t have to think about what the steps are. In addition, you can not waste time or break off prematurely. You have previously defined what is important to you and you can then implement exactly whether you feel like it or not.
