How to Finally Pop Your Productivity 🍒 in 2021

4. Flight Mode

Removing distractions works wonders. According to a recent study, it can take us about 23 minutes to get back to the task at hand after a notification has forced us to switch between tasks.

It has been found that people generally spend an average of three hours and 15 minutes on their phones every day, with the top 20% of smartphone users spending upwards of four and a half hours.

Put your phone on flight mode for one hour in the day or put your phone in another room (if you don’t want to miss important calls). You can actually focus during this hour and be more effective with your time. Start with one hour and then you might find you can do it multiple times across the day.

5. Say “NO”

“It’s only by saying “NO” that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” Steve Jobs

If you don’t value your own time, then no one else will.

There is a reason influencers such as Naval Ravikant, Tim Ferriss, Paul Graham and James Clear are successful. They have mastered how to say ‘NO’ to requests. Try saying “NO” to the next person that requests a pointless meeting or use the logic below from Naval Ratikant:

“Meetings should really be phone calls, phone call should be emails, and phone calls should just be texts”

You can see some of their “NO” email templates here.

6. Music for the brain

I love having my headphones on while I work — it allows me to get in the zone and subtly let others know that I don’t want to be disturbed. However, I sometimes fall into the trap of nodding along to my music. I have found that productivity music is more effective and less distracting.

You can actually get the best of both worlds — I personally love hip hop music and get my fix with BEATstrumentals on apple music.

7. Plan Ahead

Plan your day/week ahead of time.

If you know what you are trying to do, then it allows you to keep track and measure. As Peter Drucker once said,

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure”

How many times have you got to the end of the week and realised you have barely achieved the things you were hoping to for the week.

Spend 15mins planning your upcoming week and see how it improves your outcomes for the week.

8. Block your day

I have found structuring my day into 30min blocks allows me to get so much more done. Ideally, on a piece of paper, list out 30min increments between 9–5 (depends on your workday), then just put the tasks you want to achieve in each block. Something like the below:

900— Team Standup, Check and reply to starred emails

930 — Blog writing

1000 — Blog writing

1030 — Meeting with John S