HOW TO ENHANCE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY
Don’t be a Busy Bee!
People always mistake being busy as being productive. But honestly, it’s the opposite.
“Focus on being productive instead of busy”- Tim Ferriss
6 brilliant productivity hacks tried by some of the top entrepreneurs that made them so productive in an increasingly busy world:
1. Manage Priorities, Not Time:
“The key to productivity is to rotate your avoidance techniques”.
How does Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink, manage all those projects on a day to day basis? It all starts at 7 am, with a half-hour period of addressing “critical emails” which helps him lay out his main priorities for the next several hours.
2. The “Two Pizza Rule”:
One of the core reasons behind any time loss in doing meetings probably is the number of people involved. Even 15 mins of time wasted turns into 3 hours of time lost when there are 12 people in the room.
That’s why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos uses the “Two Pizza Rule”. He never invites more people to a meeting than two pizzas could sufficiently feed.
3. The Best for Nothing:
Steve Jobs was known to collect a list of 100 ideas from his top executives on how Apple could improve in the next year. He immediately crossed out anything he thought was dumb, then kept crossing things out until he had a “top 10” list. Out of those 10, he kept three. Only 3% of ideas were worth spending time on, from his perspective.
4. ‘No’ Paperless:
“Productivity isn’t magic, it’s discipline”.
Richard Branson is known for carrying a notebook everywhere he goes, and for preferring handwritten lists to digital or mental ones. This helps him transform everything, from daily tasks to long-term project goals, into digestible lists that can be crossed out, item by item.
5. Stretch Goals:
Robert Kirkman, cofounder of Skybound Entertainment, keeps himself productive by setting overly ambitious goals for himself. If he wants to write four or five pages in a day, Kirkman sets a goal to write 12, and might end up writing six or seven. Since he didn’t hit that larger goal, he will work harder the next day, and end up achieving far more than if he would set lower benchmark for himself.
6. The DND (Do not Disturb) Mode:
Dustin Moskowitz, CEO of Asana, tries to keep at least one day of the week completely free and open. This eliminates the possibility of bad or time-wasting meetings on at least one day of the week, and allows him to focus exclusively on heads-down projects.
You may not be able to set aside a full day, depending on your position, but you can at least set aside a few hours a week to remain uninterrupted. Hope, some of these productivity hacks resonate with you. You can try any of the above which one is applicable to you.