Productivity Tips

Finding ways to be more productive involves many different skills. When these skills are consistently put to use it can dramatically change how effectively a person uses his or her time. In our hurried lives there are many benefits to having more focused, productive time. These benefits can include a decrease in stress from the hustle and bustle and having more time to spend with family, friends, and in pleasurable activities.

Tips to Help with Productivity:

1. Pareto’s Principle–the 80/20 Rule. This principle found consistently in nature is that 80% of your results come from 20% of your efforts. In the 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss uses this principle to ask many questions about how you evaluate many of your work systems to be more effective and save yourself time since only 20% of your efforts in different areas are actually generating your results. In Productivity Hacks for Entrepreneurs by Chandler Bolt and James Roper they draw this specifically to productivity stating that, “80% of your productivity happens during 20% of your time. 20% of your distractions cause 80% of your unproductive time.” I like to think that you can also apply the same principle to parenting as well to think about which 20% of parenting strategies/interventions/bonus/etc. are delivering 80% of your results?

2. Set times to return phone calls and emails. One big tip when it comes to productivity is to set specific times in the day to return calls and emails so that you don’t spend your day in a reactionary state of mind in which you are responding to other people’s To Do list instead of your own. Having set times to accomplish these tasks that isn’t right at the beginning of the day, but instead scheduled around times like 10 and 2 can help you respond to needed items, but also make it so necessary To Do list items still happen. One free tool that has been helpful to me this year has been Unroll.me, which is a program that helps unsubscribe you to listserves and puts many emails in a bulk email for you if you would like. This service has helped me to not miss important emails. Finding ways to not have your phone right next to you or shutting off notifications on your phone or computer screen can help with this as well to keep you from reacting to things that are not planned at certain times. Studies have found that looking over just to see a text or notification (even if you don’t respond) gets you out of your efficiency rhythm and often costs as much as 15 minutes of your time productivity wise. This gets compounded by the more disruptions you have.

3. Set chunks of time to do similar tasks. Your brain works similar to a computer in how it processes information so if you can set certain blocks of time to complete similar tasks such as sending out a group of emails, paying a bunch of bills at once, returning a few phone calls, report writing, etc. you will have much better focused attention and get more done quickly as opposed to doing one thing in each of these categories in a block of time.

4. Write a To Do List with 3 to 5 Items to Check Off. It is helpful the night before or early in the morning to take time to set priorities for the day of what items are of the highest priority on your list to cross off. Some people are using apps such as Wunderlist to create multiple To Do lists and to be able to share their lists with others. For me personally, I am still a fan of the yellow note pad since I can visualize it better (and it is the system I learned from my dad), but I have now added the daily 3 to 5 list on my notepad. This change has served to further focus my To Do list. Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod and Robert Kiyosaki

5. Just Say “No.” This item is truly about self-care and realizing that it just isn’t possible to do everything and it is important to have healthy boundaries and limits. Often, people are overwhelmed and more hurried because they say “yes” to things when it would be better to instead say “no” or work to eliminate something that shouldn’t be on your list anymore. This one can be very difficult at first since it can be hard to say “no” to others since you don’t want to disappoint anyone or to remove things from your list, but ultimately it can be very liberating and can save a lot of time. A great resource in this area that is written from a Christian perspective is The Best Yes by Lysa Terkeurst.

I hope that these tips are helpful to you. I specifically mentioned a few books in this post, but there are a lot of great books in this area that are very reasonable as ebooks on places like Amazon. Next month, I hope that you have several extra hours for yourself and your family due to these strategies.