How To Be More Productive Everyday

Procrastination. The biggest enemy of human productivity to ever exist.

How can you defeat it? Do you even stand a chance? Read on to find out.

Now, before we get started, first I want you to think to yourself what exactly?being productive?means to you.

Because, for a basketball player, it can be getting 2000 practice shots done every day and for a bar hopper it could be drinking 20 beers in an hour or less. Depending on who you are and what your goals are, your idea of productivity in your day will vary greatly.

So,?once you have defined what being productive means to you, you’re ready to start figuring out HOW to pull it off.

Productivity Optimization Step 1 — Goal Definition

First, you need to figure out what’s most important for your productivity optimization. What is your preferred orientation? Depending on who you are, one of these possibilities will suit you best. If you have no idea which, just try both and find out:

Possibility 1 — “Task Oriented”: Getting an X amount of tasks done in a day.

Possibility 2 — “Time Oriented”: Spending a specific amount of time working in a day.

An example for?Possibility 1, would be a programmer. When a programmer begins a project, ideally, he should plan out the entire project and then create small tasks that, when put together, make up the entire project.

That means this person’s goal is to "just" complete tasks. So, they would need to focus on task completion, rather than time spent working during the day.

Now, for?Possibility 2, we can use a data entry job as an example. Imagine someone who has a mechanical, nearly auto-pilot mode job. They just have to copy information and place it in the correct spot and do it over and over again.

Their goal should be to maximize the amount of time spent doing their work. The more time they spend working, the more data will be entered.

And you may be thinking to yourself, “isn’t that the case for the programmer too?”. Not really, because it’s best for them to start and finish a task without interrupting it for half of a day. That would kill the momentum and it wouldn’t be optimal.

Productivity Optimization Step 2 — Planning

Seeing as you already know (or?should?know) what your favored type of optimization is, we can get to the next step,?planning.

One thing that you can be sure of, is that planning cannot EVER be overrated. The only way to screw up planning is to spend so much time doing it that you forget to actually put it to practice.

This is the KEY to defeating procrastination.

You need to be meticulous.

You need to predict your behavior.

And you need to give yourself ZERO trust that you’ll get shit done. I’ll repeat that: do NOT trust yourself because you’ll just end up self-negotiating and, once you've done that, you will have lost.

Productivity Optimization Step 3 — Time

How?exactly you plan seriously matters.

Your planning can’t be lazy and it can’t be unspecific, just like the tasks you set for yourself. Both must be as specific as you can possibly get, because "future you" will make up whatever excuse in the book to mark a previously defined task or planned activity as done. Even if it’s just “technically” done.

Task Oriented

So, if you’re going to work with tasks as the daily goal, then you need to predict how long the tasks in your day should take to complete. Ideally, you shouldn’t have more than 3 daily tasks (unless they’re quick and easy).

When predicting the estimated time to complete a task, try to give yourself enough time for it, but don’t be too generous. Don’t give yourself 5 hours to do something you can do in 3.

Also, don’t just define a target time. Aim to keep it. And, once you’re done, write down how long it took you so you can have a record to check later. This will improve your time-to-finish tasks prediction ability. And this is a crucial ability for anyone who frequently plans.

Time Oriented

For those of you who are more time oriented, write down what you have to do for the day and categorize it (e.g: "Project Q", “Work”, “Hobby”, “Cleaning”).

Then, divide your day by blocks of time. Feel free to experiment with what works best for you.

Ideally, you’d divide the day into blocks of 1 hour. However, some people aren’t cut out to work for consecutive hours. You can split your day into blocks of 50 mins + 10 mins of resting for example.

This one can be tricky to get just right. Test what works. Adjust the time until you reach your peak productivity. Testing is REALLY the secret here.

Once you’ve defined the right blocks of time, distribute the categories through the time blocks.

You can do consecutive categories or switch up what you’re doing every hour to keep you more stimulated. It’s up to you. You’re the one who has to find out what best works?for you.

Productivity Optimization Step 4 — Schedule It

When I said get specific, I meant?get seriously specific.

You must plan out your day on Google Calendar or any other calendar. You need to plan every single minute of the day. From the moment you wake up, to the moment you wish your to-dos to be finished by.

Some people want to work all day, others want to work 4–6 hours. Again, it’s really up to you.

And again…

By?getting seriously specific, I mean every single minute of that day. If you know you need to be in the bathroom between 5:30 PM and 6:00 PM, then schedule it. (This is an obvious exaggeration. Unless you can predict that — if you can, you’re way ahead of the rest of us.)

So…

If you know you need to go buy bread at 11 AM, you better schedule it.

If you know you’re taking your dog for a walk, SCHEDULE IT.

Once everything is scheduled, you’ll get notifications about your events (at least on Google Calendars that happens. And you can set when you want to receive the notifications — 30 minutes before, 5 minutes before, or just right at the time of the event).

This will make you receive notifications throughout the day and it will pressure you (the good kind of pressure) into doing whatever it is you set out to do.

You will know that yesterday’s version of you wanted that to be done, so you’ll feel like you should be doing it. And if you’re way behind on your day… well, you’ll know.

Let’s Use An Example

To help you understand this concept, let’s see Joey’s day as an example (Joey’s some random made-up guy).

- He wakes up at 10 AM, so he starts his Google Calendar at 10 AM. He gives himself an hour to take a shower and have breakfast (10 AM — 11 AM).

- After that, he either watches a Joe Rogan Experience podcast or inspirational videos to motivate himself (11 AM — 12 PM).

- At 12 PM, it’s his daily go at number two (Yes, I’m talking about poo). He also uses this time to read a book while he’s at it (12 PM — 12:30 PM).

- 12:30 PM, back to JRE/Inspirational videos for another hour (12:30 PM — 1:30 PM)

- 1:30 PM, create the Instagram reels he loves so much — in fact, it’s his new hobby. (1:30 PM — 3:00 PM)

- 3 PM, time for a late lunch and a short walk after (3 PM — 4:30 PM).

- 4:30 PM? Time to watch his online course on ClickBank that he bought for $599 from some random Instagram ad (4:30 PM — 5:30 PM).

- At 5:30 PM, Joey can’t take it anymore. This guy can’t handle “all work and no play”, so he set aside some “Play” time (5:30 PM — 6:30 PM).

- Then at 6:30 PM, he gets hungry (6:30 PM — 7 PM)

- And at 7 PM, he reminisces about his ex-fiancee for about an hour, by watching YouTube videos of marriage proposals (7 PM — 8 PM).

- Finally, at 8 PM, after such a long day of hard work, it’s either playtime or dinner time. Joey didn’t really know so he just joined them together and then decides, on the spot, what to do. This way he can leave a little spontaneity in the air while STILL being organized (8 PM — 10 PM).

- And, as a joke, he gave the 10 PM — 10:30 PM spot some time to finish any unfinished tasks, but really he’s just going to meditate on all the sadness he felt watching those marriage proposals.

Also, yes. This surprisingly was the schedule of a?Task Oriented?day. Joey’s tasks?

• Watch 2 hours of Joe Rogan/Inspirational Videos; ??
• Create 5 Reels; ??
• Watch 3 Lessons of his $1599 valued ClickBank course; ??
• Have at least 1 hour straight of fun; ??
• Only dedicate 1 hour to sadness; ??

As you can see, Joey checked all of them.

But Don’t Be A Robot — Improvise When Needed

You see, an important detail is that he didn’t meticulously keep up with the schedule.

Instead of being hungry at 6:30 PM, he felt his stomach growl at 5 PM! So he just went for a bite and then finished the 5th reel during the time assigned to eating a snack.

What's on your calendar is more of a blueprint that you?should?follow during the day. Not a set of strict rules, because you won’t ever be able to perfectly predict your day. You’re?not?a robot.

Now, for the Time Oriented?people, the same logic can be applied.? In fact, I’d argue it’s much easier to plan your day out as a?Time Oriented?person. You just need to define how many hours you want to work, pick what to work on and then distribute the blocks of time throughout your days. No tutorial is needed for that.

I hope the example helped you understand. I tried to give Joey a rather shady/funny day to keep you paying attention to it.

Go ahead, give it a try and let me know if it worked for you. If you have any doubts, just let me know in the comments below.

- Dez (AKA Pedro)

P.S: Something worth mentioning is that you can set any event on Google Calendar to repeat as often as you want weekly. You can literally make something repeat every week at the same time only on Sundays and Thursdays for example. This will make it very easy to plan out your week every week.

P.P.S: If you’d like to have a life consultant to help you with planning out your weeks and to hold you accountable to the plan, you can always visit my website and book a call with me:?https://kaidezen.com/