How To Be Productive: The Beginner’s Guide To Productivity

Table of Contents:

• The Key Concepts of Productivity
• The First Steps You Should Take To Learn To Be Productive
• The Advanced Steps You Should Take To Learn To Be More Productive
  • Advanced Practices
  • 30 Day Challenges
  • The Most Effective Productivity Techniques To Practice
• Solutions For When You Encounter Problems
• The Top Productivity Resources
  • The Best Books For Learning About Productivity
  • The Best Guides and Articles For Learning About Productivity
  • The Best Videos For Learning About Productivity
  • The Best Online Courses For Learning About Productivity
  • The Best Apps and Software For Being Productive
  • The Top Productivity Experts To Follow On Social Media

To Begin, What Exactly is Productivity?

1. Make a focused commitment to complete this entire exercise to the best of your ability – Starting off by making a commitment is an important step because it puts positive pressure on yourself to follow the entire process. Following the entire process gives you access to the entirety of the positive results. Your first step in this exercise is simply to write (either on paper or via computer) the following sentence “I, NAME, have committed to following this entire exercise one time to the best of my ability.” Don’t worry, there are no tricks here, this exercise is valuable but straightforward.
2. Choose one important task that you want to get done – While you can choose any task that you deem is important, you will likely receive the most value from picking a known task that has both been on your mind as a to-do item and one that you believe will generate a positive outcome for you. Your second step is to write the title of that task under the commitment you made in step one.
3. Go somewhere where you can eliminate distractions – Go to a place that you know will be quiet for the next hour or longer. If this is not possible, find earplugs or headphones. Remove, turn off or cover any visual screens, windows or devices that you believe might distract you.
4. Actively eliminate distractions – Let it be known to others that you are seeking privacy. This can be done with a handwritten sign or simply by telling others that you need some time to focus and work. Lastly, silence any devices you may have with you. If a computer is required to do your task and you absolutely need Internet access, promise yourself that you will not succumb to distracting websites or services throughout the duration of this exercise. You can, however, visit these distracting websites during your break time that is described in step 9.
5. Turn on some music to promote focus – Use lyric-less, calming music to help drive and maintain the focus you will need. You can find free focus music here: (Free classical music playlist, Free trance music playlist)
6. Break your important task into sub-tasks – In order to make your important task more manageable, break it down into the required steps for completion. For example, if your self-assigned task is to pay your phone bill, make a list of the required sub-tasks. In this example, these might be finding the URL or mailing address for the phone company, determine how much money is owed, pick a payment method, send payment method to phone company.
7. Set a timer for 25 minutes – 25 minutes is not an arbitrary number. It comes from a very simple and popular productivity method called the Pomodoro technique. The Pomodoro technique is a productivity technique that breaks work commitments into segments of 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest and distraction. This cycle, 25 on and 5 off, is then repeated as needed until the given task is completed. Google offers a free web-based timer that you can use for this purpose.
8. With distractions eliminated, take the first sub-task of your important task and diligently work on it until completion or until 25 minutes have passed (whichever comes first) – This is the implementation of the Pomodoro technique.
9. After 25 minutes have passed, take a five-minute break – This gives your mind a break makes this entire exercise much more manageable and maintainable. To make sure you don’t get distracted for longer than 5 minutes it is a good idea to set another timer so that you know when your distraction time has come to an end for the given cycle.
10. Continue repeating steps 8 & 9 until you have either completed your task or made as much progress on your important task as possible within a single workday.

Push Your Understanding Further By Doing The Following:

1. Read the seminal book on productivity, Getting Things Done (or watch this overview video). This book is uniquely valuable because it teaches 90% of everything you need to know in order to be incredibly productive.
2. Read this other seminal book on productivity, Deep Work (or watch this overview video). It picks up where Getting Things Done end by applying the key concepts of productivity to our quickly changing world.
3. Optimize your working space for focus. Use the instructions in Getting Things Done to do this. At a minimum, find a quiet workspace and/or use headphones, earplugs, signs, tough conversations or physical barriers to develop a space that enables you to focus.
4. End your night by making your prioritized to-do list for the next day. If you are unsure of how to do this, read the book Eat That Frog and use the process described there.
5. Use your list from the night before and use the Pomodoro technique (described below) to complete them.
6. Assign yourself a 30-day productivity challenge (see section below).

Complete a 30 Day Challenge To Build And Cement Productive Habits:

Complete one of the following learning challenges:

• I will do the Pomodoro Technique at least once every weekday for the next 30 days.
• I will complete the entire Getting Things Done process (this includes building your workstation and personal productivity system) and use it daily for 30 days in a row.
• I will end every night for 30 nights in a row by creating a prioritized to-do for the next day.

Practice Each Of These Productivity Techniques:

POMODORO TECHNIQUE

The Pomodoro technique is a productivity technique that that breaks work commitments into segments of 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of rest and distraction. This cycle, 25 on and 5 off, is then repeated as needed until the given task is completed.

How To Practice This Technique

1. Set a timer for 25 minutes and work diligently until the time is up.
2. After 25 minutes have elapsed, rest for 5 minutes in order to give your mind a break.
3. After that 5 minutes have passed, start another 25 minute round of work.
4. Continue this cycle until you complete your task.

SMART Goals

SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-focused and Time-bound. This criterion is useful for structuring goals in a way that makes their completion a binary event, they either are complete or not complete. This is as opposed to typical goals that tend to be open-ended and thus hard to determine if they are complete or not.

As an example, a common New Years resolution is to “lose weight”. Choosing “lose weight” as a goal is in the right spirit but does not set the goal maker up for success. With the goal stated as it is, how will they know when they are complete? It is an open-ended goal.

At better-structured goal (using the SMART criterion) would be “I will decrease my weight by 10 pounds by February 29th, 2018”. This is an example of a SMART goal because it is specific (decrease by 10 pounds), measurable (10 pounds), attainable (losing 10 pounds in two months is something the average person can do), Results-focused (the emphasis is on losing weight rather than abstract ideas) and time-bound (by February 29th 2018). Unlike the previous open-ended goal, this SMART goal is easy to evaluate whether or not it was completed or not.

How To Practice This Technique

1. Choose one goal you have for yourself and recraft it to use the SMART format.

INBOX ZERO

Inbox Zero is a popular business term that refers to completely emptying an e-mail inbox by answering, delegating or archiving all e-mails within a given inbox. Many people find that doing this gives them a feeling of satisfaction and completion.

How To Practice This Technique

1. Open your e-mail inbox.
2. Read the e-mail at the top of the list.
3. Depending on its content, answer it, delegate it to someone else or archive it right now. (Resist the strong urge to do nothing which would require you to return to it later.)
4. Do the same for all remaining e-mails until your e-mail inbox is empty.

80/20 Principle

The 80/20 principle (also called the Pareto principle, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. With regard to productivity, this principle applies widely to tasks, projects, clients, co-workers, team members and family members. (You can find the Wikipedia article on this topic here.) In many cases, this means you can extract 80% of the value of something by focusing only on 20% of the work.

How To Practice This Technique

1. Make a list of all of your clients, pending tasks, work responsibilities or pending projects.
2. Identify which of those are providing disproportion amount of value to you and identify which of those are requiring a disproportionate amount of work from you. (These are usually not the same items.)
3. Using any gained insights, prioritize the work that will get you the most value and actively eliminate the low-value items from your planned workload.

Single-task Rather Than Multitask

While there is much appeal to the theory of multitasking, growing research is indicating that it is simply not an effective option for most people. Instead, most people get more work completed when they actively focus on completing a single task at a time, a method call single-tasking.

How To Practice This Technique

1. Break your bigger projects into small tasks.
2. Actively only work on a single task at a time until it is completed.
3. Actively resist the urge to multitask as multitasking is usually just a disguise for distractions.

Solutions To The Most Common Learning Hurdles:

The Most Helpful productivity focused Companies and Communities:

If you need personalized help with your learning, try connecting or hiring these resources:

In order to supplement the practicing that you are doing, extend your knowledge by studying the top learning resources that are listed below. All of the resources that follow are the best of the best of their given format.

Read The Best Books for learning about productivity:

Read The most helpful productivity Guides and Articles:

Other Valuable Articles:

• “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) by Tim Ferriss on Tim.blog
• Productivity Advice for the Weird by Ramit Sethi on I Will Teach You To Be Rich
• How to Make the Most of Your Workday by Phyllis Korkki on The New York Times

Watch The Most Helpful Productivity Videos and Video Channels:

The Most Helpful Productivity YouTube Channels:

Take The most useful productivity Online Courses:

Download The most useful productivity Apps and Software:

Follow The Top Experts in the Productivity Field on Social Media: