By Callum Van Dyk, MSc Occupational Psychology
During my first semester at University, I came across an approach to productivity that has enabled me to exponentially increase the amount of work I can complete in a day. Finding this approach has been of great benefit to me, so here are a few of the techniques I use on a daily basis to stay productive.
Breaking Down Projects
A key process in productivity is knowing exactly what to do next. It’s easy to treat an assignment as if it’s just one big task, however thinking like this depletes your motivation. By doing this you picture an assignment as a huge task that cannot be completed in one go. Fortunately, a little change can make you massively more productive!
Breakdown your projects into as many mini tasks as possible.
An assignment is not a task, it is a project made up of multiple tasks. That’s why this technique is highly effective because you’ve taken a single ambiguous project, and broken it down into smaller, less ambiguous tasks. Through doing this you’ll begin to discover that assignments contain fewer tasks than first thought. Also, this approach reduces the total time taken to complete a project because you aren’t spending time trying to figure out what to do next.
Organising Tasks
A large element of productivity is capitalising on demotivation. By this I mean it is important to schedule doing certain tasks at times when you’re more motivated and doing other tasks for when you’re less motivated. This takes a little while to get to grips with, but it is crucial in becoming more productive.
Categorise the difficulty of your tasks and know your energy levels.
By knowing these two things, you can schedule completing difficult tasks to when you are feeling motivated and have a lot of energy to tackle them. For example, I know that I am most productive between 11am and 3pm. Therefore, I attempt my most difficult tasks during that period (e.g. assignments) and complete any other tasks (e.g. correspondence) outside that period.
Reviewing Tasks
I have about 10 reminders a day on my phone. This may seem like a lot but compared to how many other notifications I get, it is nothing. The reason that I have multiple reminders is because I am forgetful! I cannot remember everything I need to do and why I need to do those things. This is why I suggest…
Do a weekly review of your tasks and a daily review of your reminders.
Every Monday I schedule my whole week by creating reminders for each day. These reminders are based on the tasks I need to complete. Every morning I review these reminders and ensure I complete them all by the end of the day. It does take a bit of practice to know the difficulty of your tasks and how many you can complete in a day, but I’ve found it to be well worthwhile.
By following these few tips, you can find and capitalise on your motivation. If you want to go even further, I suggest you read the book Getting Things Done by David Allen (this is where I developed my approach).