I shared this link a couple of weeks ago during a bit of a productivity binge that I was on at the time, but now that a couple of weeks have passed, I wanted to circle back to it and go through some of my favorite ideas and add a few comments about how they’ve been working for me…
https://doist.com/blog/how-to-focus-better-at-work/
7. Schedule your email time.
It’s taken me a long time to get into the mindset that I don’t have to respond to something the second it appears in my inbox, but it’s incredibly freeing and helps me to dive deeper into important tasks when I give myself permission to wait until later in the day. I’ve also found that surprisingly it can help your co-workers to become more self sufficient because if it’s important enough that they need an answer immediately, sometimes that’ll drive them to start looking for the answer themselves!
…and nothing’s more rewarding than getting that follow-up email, “Nevermind – I just found this on your team’s website…” 😉
8. Keep a to-do list with focused, actionable items.
I recommitted myself to using the Todoist app at the beginning of the year and so far, I think it’s really helping. I feel more productive and less overwhelmed, and I can look across my work to plainly see that I”m getting more of it done, even when there are days when I feel like I just postponed all of my tasks to the following day!
10. Schedule your daily to-do’s.
I find this is a good way to spend my commute in the car … which I otherwise despise, but at least I can feel like I’m being somewhat productive if I take the time to go over everything I want to get done today and figure out what I’m doing first, what I’m doing after lunch, and so forth.
15. Keep a “read later” list.
This actually has been helping me to keep less tabs open in my browser, which in theory should lead to less distractions! I just need to also remember to make time to check back on it so that it doesn’t just become a list of stuff that I never got around to reading.
16. Keep a “bright ideas” repository.
This is easy enough to do in Todoist – if I think of a blog or column idea that I want to work on, I just throw it into my Writing project without a specific deadline … unless it’s something I want to write in the near future, then it does get a date attached to it. Again, here I feel like my biggest challenge is going to be simply remembering to look back every once in a while so that all of my great ideas don’t get lost to the void!
19. Forgive yourself when your day doesn’t go as planned.
And this one, frankly, is huge for me because I have toddlers at home, and sometimes work flares up in unexpected ways, and I know that in the past I’ve lost a lot of time just being angry with myself for not working on something that I was trying to get done in that particular moment. In reality, I know that stuff is still getting done, even if it’s not exactly what I had planned, and at some point it’s important to give yourself credit for that because otherwise it’s really hard to be productive when you’re also beating yourself up.