My top three productivity tips
I was asked recently—on a data science-themed YouTube show called Weekly Supervised—what my top three productivity tips were. I’ve written a lot about productivity. But it was surprisingly hard to pick just three. I gave a fairly convoluted answer. I thought deeply about it afterward and settled on these:
Keep a daily journal
Do one thing at a time
Schedule and batch your tasks
These have all had a large positive impact on my productivity. But before I expand on them, remember that pretty much all advice—especially advice about productivity—should be read as “This is what worked for me,” and never, “This is the only way to do it.”
So, here is what worked for me:
1. Keep a daily journal
Productivity does not mean squeezing more work hours into the day. In fact, it’s the opposite. To steal a cliché—productivity is about working smarter, not harder. It’s about using your time more efficiently.
The first step towards using your time more efficiently is awareness. How can you optimize what you’re not measuring? The benefit of keeping a daily journal is that it helps foster an awareness of how you spend your time.
Take some time every day (it’s easier if you pick a consistent time of day) and write a sentence or two. Write about what you did today or how you’re feeling. It doesn’t really matter what you write, just that you write. I find it important to keep expectations low— it should be easy enough so that you will actually do it every day.
The point here is to build a daily habit of reflection. Reflection on how you spend your time, how you’ve been feeling, what has you stressed.
From a blog post I wrote a couple of years ago about journaling:
The act of writing, in general, leads to better clarity of thought. Writing about your day forces you to convert raw emotions to coherent sentences. It can lead to insights about yourself and your behaviour that you might not have considered otherwise.
2. Do one thing at a time
One might expect that multitasking would increase productivity. Wouldn’t doing more things at once result in higher efficiency?
In my experience, multitasking takes a big toll on productivity. Sustained focus is your number one tool when it comes to getting things done. And sustained focus requires minimizing context switching. Just Google ‘context switching’ and you’ll get pages of blog posts telling you how bad it is.
Cal Newport talks about this a lot in Deep Work:
[W]hen you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task… even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.
This is the tip I have the hardest time following. It’s very easy to get distracted these days. Especially when working on a computer. I find it very tempting, for example, to check my inboxes quickly while I’m in the middle of another task. Particularly if there is a natural lull—like waiting for some code to compile.
But that quick check can have a big impact. It’s easy to get distracted by something in your inbox, feel the need to reply, and leave that original task unfinished. You’ve then destroyed all your momentum. When you return to your original task, you’ll have to build it back up again. This can be a serious time-suck. Especially for tasks that require a lot of sustained focus, like coding or writing.
I wrote about my approach to sticking to one task at a time in an old blog post on habits:
Write down your current goal. The thing that you want to pay your full attention to. Write it down somewhere obvious where you can access it as easily as possible. When you find yourself distracted (e.g. you reach for your phone, or navigate to your inbox), refer to that goal and ask yourself if what you’re currently doing is related. If it’s not, stop doing it.
3. Schedule and batch your tasks
To-do lists are good. Calendars are better. When planning out your day, try to explicitly schedule when you will work on each item from your to-do list.
This has the immediate benefit of calibration. If you can’t reasonably fit all those to-dos in your day, then you’re probably taking too much on. This approach forces you to dwindle down your tasks to the must-haves. It’s a great way to prioritize. Plus, by batching similar tasks together, you can reduce the amount of context switching in your day.
Without time scheduled for each of your to-dos, they will live in your brain as “things that I have to do”. They will consume some part of your focus all day—begging to be dealt with. If you have them scheduled, you can reduce that burden. If you can trust that there is time set aside to get to those other tasks, it will make focusing on your current task much easier.
I have found much success doing this with my inboxes, which are often full of new tasks. Idly checking my email without the time to respond to any of the messages just loads up my brain with more “things that I have to do.”
When I say inboxes, I mean Email, Slack, Twitter… the list goes on. These places are distraction factories. Scheduling time to check them once or twice a day, and only once or twice a day, might be the most valuable thing you can do for your productivity.
- Russell