4 Meta Habits To Increase Your Productivity
Understanding where you lose efficiency is 50% of it.
People want to be productive.
We feel useless without having done something valuable, and that’s quite difficult when you’re constantly under pressure or you don’t know what to do.
Most people lose efficiency because they’ve been programmed in the wrong way — they have bad habits.
In this article, I’ll show you 4 meta habits to increase your productivity.
1 — Prioritize and Plan Your Tasks
Having a good schedule is crucial. Without properly planning and prioritizing your plans you will almost always fail in becoming productive.
There are a lot of tasks you have to complete in a day.
You can’t handle them all at the same time, so that’s why a daily or even weekly plan might help you out.
Try to make a schedule for the week and in that week for each day.
If you’re able to split up all tasks you have over multiple days, it’s much easier to get a good overview of what you’re doing.
Also, prioritize these tasks.
You don’t want the important tasks to be left at the bottom of your list when their deadline is due.
If you still think those tasks are too big, split them up again.
This even makes you more productive.
When you complete certain tasks, your body injects dopamine and you feel good.
So when you have more and smaller tasks you’ll have that feeling more often which motivates you to keep going.
So create that plan!
2 — Optimize Your Work Environment
Do you know what’s killing your productivity? Distractions.
Your work environment is so important if you want to optimize your productivity — even when you’re a little distracted it can plummet to zero.
Not the best example, but I’m sitting in a very messy room — cozy and nice but not ideal for getting some work done. Unless you’re capable of canceling out distractions.
That’s something you can train. Like a muscle.
Your phone is a big distraction nowadays. Get that thing out of the space you’re working in. You can download an app that blocks all notifications and apps that you don’t need.
But it’s also possible to just put your phone in another room.
Then there’s your ‘digital environment’. Most work gets done on a computer in 2024, so optimize your desktop, your web browser, and your filesystem.
Here are some things to think about when you’re working:
Use structured and logical file and folder names
Use a simplistic or minimalistic wallpaper (colors might distract)
Get rid of your unwanted bookmarks in your browser
If possible, use different desktops for work and private, so that you don’t get bothered with all the fun on your computer that you don’t need for work.
Besides all that, make sure to find a method for you to optimize your workspace.
If you like to go to a coffee shop, that’s fine! Just make it work.
3 — Master Your Time Management
This goes hand in hand with the previous section.
You need to learn how to manage your time. If you keep getting distracted and don’t know how long you want to work on something, that will reduce productivity instead of increasing it.
There are so many tools out there that you can use to manage your time, digital and physical.
Still one of the best techniques to use is regular time blocking.
Get your calendar and block out time. Give them all different colors and make sure you’re not merging it with your calendar, that doesn’t work.
You can turn off your active (personal) calendar in Apple Calendar for example — now you can only see the calendar items you’ve put in for work purposes.
Include breaks — they’re so important.
You don’t want to go without any breaks. But here’s the big mistake people make about taking breaks. “I need to take a long break to recover from long periods of work”.
Both wrong.
You don’t need and shouldn’t want to work very long periods, and you don’t need to take long breaks.
I use the 30/5 method.
The analogy here is that you have a phone and after charging it for an hour or something you can use it again for 24 hours, right? You don’t need to charge it for 24 hours to use it for the same amount of time.
Same with us.
After 30 minutes of work, take a 5-minute break and get back to work. This way you get plenty of time to recharge but you don’t lose concentration. One way of filling in your break is going for a walk and getting away from the job you’re doing.
4 — Use a Growth Mindset
If you want to stay productive, you have to keep learning. Luckily, with the internet, it’s much easier and cheaper to learn new things.
I’m a software engineer and everything I want to know is out there on the internet. If I don’t know how to use a certain technique in a programming language I go to YouTube and within 5 minutes I’ve found a video explaining it to me.
You also have to want to learn new things.
Getting better at something and learning things is fun. It’s not how we are forced to learn like in high school — you’re now doing something you like. (I hope)
Get better at what you’re already good at and stop being afraid of trying new things.
Even if you fail the first time trying, you still learn that something might not be it for you — or you need to try it again.
Just remind yourself that learning is fun!
Final Thoughts
Now that you know all these 4 meta habits for getting more productive it’s time to apply them.
Don’t sit back and wait for something to happen — take action!
You’re the only one that can change your habits and workflow. But don’t get demotivated when you’re falling back into old habits. It takes an average of 66 days before you’ve adapted a new habit.
Just don’t give up too soon.