Each day contains the same number of hours for everyone, but the most successful people in the world have figured out a few ways to boost their productivity within those twenty-four hours. To make the most of your day, give a few of their ideas a try.
Narrow Your Focus
Time that could be spent being productive is often wasted on irrelevant activities. To prevent this from happening, you must be highly selective of what you dedicate your time to working on. For example, Apple-founder Steve Jobs reportedly made long lists of potential ideas for improving his company. He then pared down those lists until he was left with a top ten. From those ten best ideas, he selected only three to focus on.
The takeaway? If you try to do everything, you won’t do anything well. Eliminate things that aren’t worth pursuing and focus your time and energy on your best ideas.
Schedule Free Time
When you’re trying to increase productivity, it’s easy to over-pack your schedule. But this only works against you. One of the co-founders of Asana, Dustin Moskowitz, sets aside every Wednesday as a “free day”; he schedules no meetings or events on these days to make sure that his employees and himself have uninterrupted time to work on their projects.
An entire “free day” may not work for everyone, but scheduling a free morning or a free afternoon at the same time each week can be a great way to get things done.
Keep Your Meetings and Your Invite List Short
Meetings should be purposeful, brief, and to the point, and one way to ensure this is by limiting the number of attendees. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, cuts off his meeting invites at around eight people, never allowing more people than “two pizzas can feed.” His reasoning? The more people you have in the room, the more talking and getting off track you will have. This means a longer meeting and more wasted time.
Write Lists
Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, attributes his success to his love of making lists. He carries a pen and notebook with him at all times and jots down lists of ideas as they come to him. He likes to dream big and list long-term future goals, while simultaneously creating daily to-do lists that allow him to accomplish those long-term goals in small chunks.
Handwritten lists are an excellent way to organize your thoughts and plans, and there’s something uniquely satisfying about manually checking a completed task off of your list.
To maximize your productivity, hack your schedule and experiment with these tips. Make the most of your time and accomplish your goals.
