5 ways to improve your productivity
Part of 2021 for me is to start new things and sticking to them.
One of them is writing small articles on LinkedIn so go check out my very first one and while you are there throw me a connect!
Please let me know your productivity tricks in the comments below, I am always looking to pick up nifty habits :)
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/5-ways-improve-your-productivity-niklas-westin/
Hey thanks
I definitely agree about the notebook and the task-less calendar, so I'll give some thought to the explicitly big, multi-year goals. Do you have a separate system for organizing large goals or do you just organize them in the same way as smaller goals? Do you classify them into those that need more thought and those that are ready for work?
My favorite productivity trick is that whenever I have energy without motivation, I can create motivation for myself by measuring how efficiently I can get a task done.
Unfortunately, it doesn't work if I just think of an estimate of how long the task should take and then time how long it actually takes, because that leaves me wondering how good my initial estimate was.
However, if I think of two estimates for two tasks and then I do both of them in a random order and compare how long each one took compared to expectations and to the other one, then on average any mistakes in my difficulty estimates should cancel out, and I can learn some information about my efficiency as a function of other factors like time of day, amount of rest, things like that.
The ability to run these efficiency measurement experiments is probably the coolest feature of my free + open-source motivation/inspiration/time-tracking app. If anybody else wants to measure their efficiency too, you can download it at https://github.com/mathjeff/ActivityRecommender .
Feedback (especially how to make it easier for new users to get started) is more than welcome!
Hi!
Thanks for your thoughts. My bigger and longer goals are usually more free-flowing because that gives me more flexibility. Currently for my 3-5 year plan include finishing school and starting multiple startups in the process.
My motivation hack is to start cleaning. After I am finished I look at what I have accomplished and usually I am pumped to start something new :)
I will be sure to give your app a go!
Oh interesting. My understanding is that starting even one start-up is hard, which would make it even more exciting if you can pull it off. Good luck; I hope you succeed!
I'm unfortunately less enthusiastic about cleaning, although ActivityRecommender helps make things more exciting for me by timing how long it takes me and also cheering for me (assuming that recording cleaning is correlated with being happier, which I think it often is). That might mean that ActivityRecommender will suggest cleaning less often for you if it turns out that you will have already thought of it. Anyway, I hope you like it!
I recently did something so easy as organising my Apple Calendar with different colours and themes. So that instead of having different to do-lists on a hundred different places I now add everything into my calendar with an alert set in the morning. Simple but efficient 🤷♀️
Amazing idea, I have not even thought about customising my digital tools. Thanks!
Thanks for sharing, @NikeMan. Loved the article, especially the part about setting big expectations for ourselves, since I think we tend to forget about the big picture and our end goal.
Regarding tips, I have several that have learned over the years (and still learning). One of my favorite ones would be Stay away from temptations. It's like emptying your fridge from fast-food when you're on a diet. Same thing happens with our time. You start your day with high expectations and get distracted by the news, social media, etc, and a few hours later you notice that your day is gone and you have accomplished nothing or very little.
And it's actually one of the reasons why I'm creating my current project:
timeivy.com
To scratch my own itch and to help others too.
Thanks!
Temptations are really hard sometimes. My worst enemy from that aspect has to be Reddit even though now that I plan my days better it has kinda been an afterthought.
I really like your website, idea and design! I am now on the waiting list :D
Yeah, Reddit is a tough one for me as well because my mind kinda tries to justify that I'm using it for a "good purpose" (ie. getting up to date on trends, or learning, etc). But in reality, it's a time sucker so I mostly avoid it altogether.
Best of luck with your goal of writing more this year (and glad to hear you liked my site :)
I've had moderate success with trying to leave and join one subreddit per day.
If I leave one subreddit per day then it takes me less time to leave ones that I don't like. If I join one subreddit per day than it's less costly to also leave one per day because if it turns out to have been a good one then I'll probably be back soon.
As for which one to leave every day, usually I leave the subreddit containing my least favorite post of the day.
The one that I join is usually based on finding my favorite post of the day and checking other activity from that user.
That definitely makes Reddit more interesting for me, but unfortunately the conversations there are still more superficial than I'd like.
So, I'm trying out RSS more, which is how I arrived here