There is nothing more frustrating than setting aside hours of your day to complete work or other tasks, only to find that the hours are flying past without you getting anything done. Many people respond to this by trying to cram as much work into future sessions as possible, but just busying yourself with work for the sake of it doesn’t lead to good productivity in the long run.
Below are four techniques for being productive and getting things done instead of just being busy and getting nowhere.
Prioritize Your Workload
One key skill that every productive person has is the ability to effectively prioritize their workload and focus on spending their time completing their most important tasks first and getting everything done with plenty of time to spare. Sometimes, the order in which you complete the tasks can make a big difference in how long it takes you to get through them – learning to prioritize your workload better will help you to work with maximum efficiency at all times.
Just blindly working through things that you need to do with no prior planning or purpose will only slow you down in the long run. A key difference between being productive and just being busy is that being productive means acting with purpose. If you are just keeping yourself busy without thinking about your priorities, then important things get overlooked and you end up taking the path of least resistance, causing big jobs to pile up.
Learn the Magic Of ‘No’
You might be a superwoman capable of tearing through to-do lists at the speed of light, but if you are constantly adding new items to your to-do list, you’ll never get to the end of it. Sometimes, you need to be able to say no. Taking on more work than you are capable of doing is only going to stress you out and take up valuable time that you could otherwise use on your most important tasks.
More importantly, taking on an excessive volume of tasks or a bigger workload than you can cope with will mean that you have to spend time on tasks that shouldn’t really be your responsibility, and will reduce the amount of time that you are able to dedicate to more important objectives.
Set Yourself a Schedule and Stick to It
Once you have learned to prioritize your workload and identify the most important tasks on your to-do list, you can then set yourself a schedule for getting them all done. Planning out your time in detail enables you to ensure that you are using every available hour as productively as possible.
If you set yourself a realistic schedule, you might be surprised by how much free time is available to you when you use your time efficiently. Instead of trying to cram as much work as possible into a single day, try to break down your to-do list into a series of daily tasks.
Staying Focused
One of the most common obstacles to being productive is staying focused. If you are someone who automatically switches the TV on when they sit down to work, or who can’t do anything around the office without some background noise, you could be hampering your own productivity. Avoiding distractions and staying focused is one of the most difficult aspects of being productive for many people.
There are a number of tools out there now such as Blocksite that can help you to focus on being productive and minimize the opportunities for distractions to intrude on your workflow. Once you learn to focus on one thing at a time and stay focused on it, your productivity will go through the roof.
Whether you are working from home, trying to write your first novel, or just generally trying to keep your house in order, there is a difference between being productive and just being busy. Learn to prioritize your workload and break down larger tasks into more manageable chunks that you can then work into a schedule.