The biggest myth in productivity is that to be more productive, you have to push yourself harder.
I see this all the time scattered across social media, people saying things like: “You have to push yourself because nobody else will.” And: “The difference between people that succeed at their dreams and people that don’t is discipline.”
But what if you could be more productive AND go easier on yourself?
The place to start learning how to be truly productive is not by scheduling out every five minute block of your day, and making sure you’re doing something worthwhile in each and every five minute block.
In fact, not only do you not need to start there, feel free to never go there at all.
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Learning true productivity starts with this foundation: Understanding that your brain quite literally runs on fuel.
Activities like taking short breaks and getting enough sleep ensure that you replenish your all-important store of brain fuel, while activities like decision-making and learning, deplete that store of brain fuel quite quickly.
At the end of this post, I’m going to give you a chance to check out my online course Tweak Your Week in which I go into this concept of brain fuel in much more detail. But for now, let me tell you this:
‘If you want to make sure that you’re looking after your reserves of brain fuel and putting them where they matter most, one of the things you need to do is make sure that you’re taking breaks throughout the day, which are disconnected from technology. Not scrolling your smartphone not looking at social media, but actually stepping away from technology and giving your brain a chance to look around at the wide world around you.
Step 1: Manage your focus
Building on this foundation of understanding brain fuel, Phase One of transformative productivity involves learning how to manage your focus. Your focus is much more limited than your time. You have 24 hours in a day. But you can only give really good focus to the things that matter most for three to five of those hours.
And so true productivity begins with understanding how to direct your focus to the things that matter most. And how to make sure that you’re not putting it to the things that don’t matter.
If you are giving your best focus to things like email, then I guarantee you, you are not doing your best work.
If you sign up to my online course Tweak Your Week, I will give you a simple four-step formula for saying “No,” to make sure that you’re saying no to the things that you shouldn’t be focusing on. As well as five research-backed tools to help you direct your focus to the things that matter most.
Step 2: Make fast and flexible progress
Then in Phase Two of transformative productivity, you move on to making fast and flexible progress on your projects. While this phase is about working faster, it is not about pushing yourself harder.
This is all about tapping into your natural reserves of creativity, so that you can get started easily and have your best ideas.
In the online course we talk about how having your best ideas can be as simple as letting your mind wander. And we steal methodologies from software developers for working fast and flexibly, stripped right down to the simple essentials.
Step 3: Plan your time
Only in Phase Three of transformative productivity do you move on to time management. This is where you start writing to-do lists that actually work and planning out your week. Here you are adding a layer of how does she do it organisational skills to everything that came before.
In the Tweak Your Week online course, I will walk you through step by step, how to do that weekly and daily planning, and how to estimate how long things really take so that you can make realistic plans.
If you are doing this final phase correctly, rather than feeling like an administrative burden, it becomes a useful tool in helping you direct your limited focus to the things that matter most.
And that is how the right productivity skills help you live better, instead of faster.
To learn more about my online course, check out the information below.
