For those facing a daunting To-Do list, technology offers the promise of effortless productivity. There are hundreds of apps that promise to help you organise, focus, remember, and produce with ease. There are also dozens of systems and courses designed to help you become your most productive you.
All too often, however, productivity technology and system fail to deliver. They are too complex, they take up too much time, and they don’t help us the way they are meant to. Elaborate list-keeping systems and time management tools can become a productivity drain in their own right.
In my experience, the best productivity tools are the simplest ones – tools that create time rather than filling it up and are easy to integrate into your daily routines. Here are my top three productivity tools.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
The humble To-Do list
The idea of the To-Do list is so banal as to seem almost irrelevant. In this era of sleek productivity apps, a simple list seems inadequate. Yet the beauty of the To-Do list is its simplicity. It’s an adaptable and flexible tool that can help you prioritise, manage, and monitor what you need to accomplish.
Here’s how to make a To-Do list work for you:
- Consider multiple lists – I find it easiest to maintain two lists, one for work tasks and one for personal tasks. Thus, when I’m focusing on work, I am not distracted by worries about personal tasks and vice-versa.
- Prioritise and break tasks down – A digital list – even a humble Word document – can be a great option because it allows you to easily reprioritise tasks as you go by moving them up and down the list. It’s also easy to break tasks down into sub-tasks using bullets and sub-bullets. This can give you a quick, at-a-glance overview of what you have to do next.
- Keep it handy – I keep my work To-Do list in a Word doc on my desktop and open it up first thing in the morning. Throughout the day I add to it, reorder it, and update it to make sure I know what I need to focus on. My personal To-Do list is kept in a Note on my phone. I usually check it in the morning to ensure that I am on top of any personal errands that need to be handled that day.
Email and social media rules
One of the biggest thefts of productivity these days is time spent checking email and social media. Checking these platforms breaks your concentration, which makes it much harder to finish tasks that demand focus. It also wastes time that you could be using more productively.
The simplest way to deal with these time wasters is to confine them to designated periods. For example, you may set up three email checking periods during the day – first thing in the morning, before lunch, and mid-afternoon, for example. Set aside 15 to 30 minutes to go through all your emails and assign them to one of three categories – reply immediately, add to the To-Do list, or ignore. Make sure to turn off all your email notifications so that you aren’t tempted to check your inbox during the rest of the day.
When it comes to social media, research suggests that the optimal dose is zero. But for most of us, completely eliminating Facebook and the rest isn’t realistic. What you can do, however, is avoid pointless scrolling and time-wasting by allocating yourself a maximum time per day for social media. Your phone will probably allow you to set limits on apps or websites, so you could easily limit yourself to just 5 or 10 minutes a day to catch up on your social feeds. Make sure to sign out of all social media on your computer to avoid the temptation to check-in outside of those few minutes.
The Pomodoro technique
This last tool is a little more formal than the others, but it is genuinely one of the most time-tested and proven ways to get things done. In a nutshell, the Pomodoro technique involves using a timer to break your work time into intervals. You set a timer for 25 minutes and then, for that period, you focus completely on a single task. When the timer buzzes, grab a piece of paper and make a tick. If you have fewer than four ticks, take a five-minute break and then start another 25-minute work period – either on the same task or on something new. After four work periods, take a longer break of around 30 minutes, then start the cycle over again.
You can adapt this technique for your office hours and environment, saving your longer breaks for lunchtime and so on. There are plenty of apps that help you track your Pomodoro work periods, or you can go old-school and buy a ticking, mechanical kitchen timer. Whatever approach you take, this is an excellent and flexible way to knuckle down and work on a task. Remember, just getting started can make even the most intimidating task seem more manageable.
With these three simple tools, I am able to organise my work, minimise distractions, and focus on tasks that need to be done. They may help you do the same. Do you have a favourite productivity technique? Let me know what works for you at [email protected].
