Being productive != Being busy.

Most of times, most of the people tag themselves busy. They don't give time for anything else apart the job lined up on their schedule. Yet, the tasks they are involved in might not be an important or an urgent task. Working 9 hours straight might be called being busy, but not productive. So what's being productive?

Being productive essentially means two things. One, focusing on important & urgent tasks. Two, not wasting much time when we are working on any particular task and give 100% focus and dedication to it.

I will share two popular techniques which can aid you to be productive.

1. Urgent-Important matrix.

The urgent-Important matrix consists of four quadrants. The x-axis represents urgency and y-axis represents Importance. The first quadrant is the one where you place tasks which are both important and urgent. You should prioritise this task highly and finish it as soon as possible. The second quadrant is one where you place tasks that are important but not urgent. You should plan for and schedule these tasks. This should be your second priority after the tasks placed in first quadrant. The third quadrant is the one where you place Urgent tasks but which aren’t important. And these tasks should be delegated to someone else so that the schedule is not missed. So this becomes an important and urgent tasks for others and not you. And the fourth quadrant, having non-important and non-urgent tasks, are the ones to be eliminated. They can be rescheduled to a later time or delegated as per situation and requirement.

2. Pomodoro Technique.

The urgent-important matrix strategy helps you to plan your time and schedule your tasks in the right way. Now, how do you make your work more effective? We have Pomodoro Technique for that.

The technique says you focus on a task for 25 minutes straight and take a short break of 3–5 minutes. This completes one cycle. After four cycles, you take a long break of 15–25 minutes and repeat.

During the breaks, activities which divert our mind should be avoided. For instance, watching TV, or reading news or politics, entertainment etc can be avoided. Instead, you can read good books, go for a walk, drink some water, meditate etc. which helps really to relax without diverting our mind. Keep a water bottle with you always. If you feel you are losing focus, just take a sip of water and it will surely help you to refocus.

Also, remember, when you are in focussed mode and get diverted by diverting activities mentioned above, which may fill unwanted content in your brain, it takes 15–20 minutes to develop the same level of focus again. That’s why it’s essential to remain without diversion.

By implementing these two strategies you become really productive as productivity essentially means focusing on important things and working effectively.

Connecting the dots,

Being busy doesn't necessarily mean that we are doing quality work. One cannot be busy all the time. Even any CEO of a company, whom we can call the busiest, gets good time to spend on his personal interests and hobbies. Busy doesn't always account to quality and most often it lacks schedule and planning. Once stuffs aligned are planned, we come out of our busy schedule, we start using our time effectively and can complete tasks more efficiently and that becomes improved productivity and yields lot of free time.

Thanks, Sairam.