5 Sure-Fire Productivity Jolts

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5 Sure-Fire Productivity Jolts

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Lots to do but feeling out of focus? Try one of these sure-fire methods for boosting your productivity:

1. Organize Your Workspace: Before the workday begins, gather all the materials you’ll need that day: reports, paper, contact info, correspondence and files (digital or otherwise), notebooks, pens, and so on. Doing so ensures that you won’t have to interrupt what you’re doing to go on a search for a missing item, thereby breaking your concentration and wasting time. Some people prefer to organize their desk at the end of the previous workday. That way, when they come to work the next morning, everything is set to go.

For more on this topic, see my earlier posts: How to Keep Your Desk Organized, Stacks & Piles of Stuff, and Drowning in Paper?

2. Establish Today’s Major Goal: Where do you want to “go” today? Establishing a crystal-clear end point for the day—a goal, in other words—makes it easy to prioritize ongoing tasks and anything that might develop over the day’s trajectory. Don’t just think about your main goal: write it down. Keep it on your desk in a location where you can see it all day long. You might even consider buying a small stand-alone frame in which to insert each day’s goal. In a sense, this turns your goal into a work of art—not a bad thing.

3. Undertake Mind-Mapping: Also known as brainstorming, mind-mapping can be an effective method for overcoming mental lethargy about a project and get you up and going. What’s a mind map? Simply put, it’s a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea.

Mind-mapping is easy. Just open a blank page in a notebook. In the center, write down the topic or project name you’re working on. Whenever you think of an idea or association related to this topic, add it somewhere on the sheet and connect it to the topic with a straight line. Put down any ideas that pop into your mind, whether or not you think they’re good or bad. What you’re aiming for here is to get your creativity flowing smoothly, not stop it dead in its tracks with judgments about how well you’re doing. As in the illustration at the top, feel free to decorate and jazz up your Mind Map. (Photo licensed under GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or later)

4. Do a Mind Sweep: One of the best ways to sharpen your mind into focussing like a laser-beam is to get rid of all the task-oriented flotsam and jetsam floating around inside of it. You know the kind of thing: “Oh, I’ve got to call Mom and wish her a Happy Birthday!” Or, “I’ve got to prepare a report for the Board meeting next week,” “Jim Thompson in Accounting wants that expense report pronto,” “The lawn needs cutting,” “I I absolutely have to return the DVD to Netflix today,” and on and on. This kind of thing simply never stops…unless you make it stop.

A Mind Sweep gets rid of all that “to do” junk by putting it securely on paper. Thereafter, you don’t have to think about it any more. Well, most of the time, anyway.

To learn how to do a Mind Sweep, read my previous post entitled What’s a Mind Sweep?

5. Work in Small Portions: Instead of writing down one huge task—”Write book about creativity,” say–break that task down into smaller, easy-action portions. For instance, “Outline Chapters” or “Write Chapter One.” Then start completing the small portions one by one, et voila! Before you know it, you’ve written a book about creativity. Breaking large tasks into smaller tasks is one of the primary philosophies of noted “Get it Done” guru David Allen.

For more information, read my earlier articles on this subject, How to Create Actionable Items with Taskwise and Kaizen: One Small Step.

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