Nine Productivity Tips - aka The Productivity Porcupine

I was reading a productivity blog just now and thinking about how I don’t do any of their recommendations – get lots of exercise, go to bed early and get up early, batch tasks together, give up Facebook and TV – …I can’t be bothered!

But I AM a very productive person. So here are the things that I actually DO. I don’t just talk about them, I really DO them, and they work for me, so maybe they will work for you too.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you….. The Productivity Porcupine!

For everything that repeats, you need a process so that you can save time. Any repeating problem needs to be fixed and any repeating process needs to be automated.

Unproductive people have repeating problems – they car regularly doesn’t start because the battery is old, they regularly can’t find a pen they regularly run out of milk. And then they have repeating jobs that take too much time – they type each similar email out in full, or they back the same things in a bag each time they go on a business trip, and they can’t find that vital phone number. Systems would prevent the problems and save the time on the repeating tasks.

Knowing what your long-term aims are will improve your productivity in two ways. First, you can discriminate the important from the unimportant – if it doesn’t take you towards your goals it’s not important, so it can be squeezed down or even not done at all. 

Unproductive people drift through life, doing things that are not going to get them anywhere, because they don’t know where they are going. By the way I’m not talking about money here – goals can be to write a book or get fit or spend time with your kids – but whatever they are, spend the max time on them.

Then your goals will make you more assertive and more self-disciplined – people without goals fritter away their time because …why not?

This sounds UNproductive at first doesn’t it? But if you don’t reply to every email, text, phone call, and letter then you’ll spend longer in the end, being chased up by people or missing out on opportunities. Don’t have loose ends – it’s very quick just to send a reply, even if it’s “Sorry but no” or “Message received, I’ll have a look at it later”. 

Unproductive people are annoying to deal with because they don’t get back to you – did they even GET that email, who knows? – so after a while they don’t get invited, they don’t get offered that great job.

Delegate as much as you can, especially if it’s boring or you’re not very good at it. Is it the best use of your time? Yes I could cut my hedge, but it takes me a whole weekend and I could pay someone ￡50 to do it. Is a weekend of my life worth ￡50? I think so! The argument that you might not have ￡50 misses the point that your time has value – you could earn more than ￡50 in that time, doing something that you’re good at and which you enjoy?

Most people use a daily jobs-to-list occasionally, and don’t have a master list of everything. It’s really important to have both. If you have a master list of everything then you can plan, it helps you to say no when you have too much, you won’t forget anything, and you have nice feeling of control. Unproductive people worry about how much they have to do, and then they do whatever is most urgent, whatever they are being chased for by someone else. They are not in control.

Then there’s daily list, which I write EVERY day – and if there isn’t much to put on it I pull some things across from the master list, so I’m working on important things as well as urgent ones. Unproductive people only put things on their daily list so they don’t get around to the important things, which are the ones that lead to real results.

Putting things off is a sure sign of an unproductive person – it’s lack of self-discipline. And the tasks that get put off tend to be the ones that are important, just not yet urgent. They are the ones that would add most value if you did them!

So productive people have a Do It Now mentality, or habit. You can use tricks, like rewarding yourself or getting rid of distractions, or writing the time in your diary, or starting each day with the toughest task – whatever works for you. But one way or another you must beat procrastination.

The essence of Time Management is to maximise the time you spend on important tasks, which means the same as minimising the time you spend on unimportant tasks. Perfectionists struggle with this, because they try to do everything perfectly, even the unimportant tasks – which are MOST tasks. Realise that it’s OK to spend enough time on a task, to do it well enough, which probably means “not perfectly”.

Saying no is a vital part of being productive, because if you don’t say No you’ll end up doing lots of things that don’t contribute to what you are trying to achieve. They may be great for other people, and sometimes you should indeed do this type of task, but YOU decide when and for you. Every time you say Yes to something you don’t really want to do you are effectively saying No to EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE WORLD. “Focus” means saying No to everything except the one thing you want to work on. So if it’s not near the top of your list if it doesn’t contribute to your goals, then you should certainly consider saying no to it. 

Finally, write everything down. Every appointment goes in your diary. Every small job goes on your daily list. Every big thing what you’ll do sometime but you’re not sure when, goes on your master list. Every email that you can’t deal with right now goes on your daily or master list. Every promise you make goes on one of your lists. Every promise that is made by someone else gets a date from them and is then put in your diary for that date.

This means that there is NOTHING in your head. You are free to be creative. Everything is in control, nothing will be forgotten, it’s all in your system.

Unproductive people have a mess of stuff in their head, an inbox full or emails read but ‘marked as unread’ and not done, maybe extra stuff on post-it notes and piles of paper. Get rid of all that paper, write each job on your list and then file or bin the paper. Move every email into either bin or “To be done”- or add it to your master/daily list and then bin it, because it’s now as good as done, it’s on your list.

The Productivity Porcupine

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