8 Productivity boosting behaviours which will improve your performance
8 Productivity boosting behaviours
The following list consists of 8 of the most important productivity boosting behaviours which you can adopt.1. Get enough sleep
Sleep allows your body and mind to recover from the pressures of the day and to prepare for the challenges of the day. When you have had a proper night’s sleep, you feel refreshed and ready to take on the world. You start the day with more energy and you get some of your best work done while others are still ordering their first coffee of the day.
Different people require different quantities of sleep. It’s worth taking the time to assess how much sleep you really need. Then, set up a daily ritual whereby you go to bed at a consistent time, thus allowing yourself sufficient time to get your required amount of sleep. Establishing an effective sleep routine is one of the most powerful productivity boosting behaviours that you can employ.
2. Get up earlier
When you get up earlier, you can get more work done because your customers, colleagues and friend tend are not up yet. Also, people do not generally expect a response from you before the regular starting time for the workday. Therefore, there are less people in a position to distract you. You are able to have a clear focus on your tasks. I have started to get up earlier in past couple of months and the amount of quality work which I get done has risen dramatically.
Rather than throw your routine completely out of sync, you can bring your start to the day forward by 15 minutes per week. In just one month, you will be starting your day 1 hour earlier and you will complete a lot more quality work.
3. Take a midday nap
Energy levels are cyclical. Getting sufficient sleep and rising earlier will see you start the day with more energy and enthusiasm. However, at some point in the day, your energy levels will start to drop. If you do nothing about this, your energy levels will remain lower than they need to be for the remainder of the day, rendering you less productive.
Rather than fight this, take a nap in the middle of the day for approx. 30 minutes. A power nap is one of the best productivity boosting behaviours and one that many great leaders throughout history have adopted e.g. Winston Churchill. This will give you quick recovery and rejuvenation. It may seem counterintuitive but taking this time out of your schedule will put more energy into your performance. The extra energy will lead to you being far more productive for the remainder of the day.
4. Learn to say “No”
Other people will steal your productive time if you let them. It is important that you learn to say ‘No’ to tasks which are not important to you and do not serve your objectives. This one word will free up hours of productive time each month.
5. Develop daily rituals
Having daily rituals, which can effectively be performed on Autopilot, will help to boost your productivity. Your daily rituals are important items which you perform at certain times each day. Every minute of your day should not be filled in. Items which might be daily rituals include:
- Going to the gym at a certain time
- Performing your most important task of the day at a certain time (e.g. I start the day with my most important task)
- Meditation time
- Nap time
- Time to go to bed and time to rise
The above items are just examples of what might be included but having important rituals in your schedule allows you to ensure that they get done and gives some structure to your day so that you do not have to be constantly assessing what the next item is. If your days are constantly changing, then take time each night to plan your next day so that you have time to get these rituals into your schedule.
6. Focus on 1 thing
For each day, set one important task to get done. This task should be the one task that, if it was the only task you completed that day, would still leave you feeling that you had an effective day. This task should be your key focus for the day.
Taking the time to determine your most important task, and completing it, helps you to stay focused on your priorities. Focus in one of the most essential productivity boosting behaviours.
7. Eliminate distractions
If you are interrupted while completing a task, it can take up to 4 times longer to complete that task. What started as a minor distraction soon becomes 5-10 minutes of lost productivity. Having clear processes for keeping distractions to a minimum is far easier, and more effective, than trying to deal with them when they arise. Here are some strategies that might help you:
- Have clear processes for communicating with others as other people are one of the biggest sources of distraction. Click here for some suggestions.
- Have somewhere, away from you desk, where you can go to get important tasks done, free from distraction e.g. a local library
- Consider using technology to help you focus e.g. Rescue time, or get concentrate
8. Have a strategy for dealing with meetings
Meetings can be one of the biggest time wasters which you will ever encounter. Most meetings are so badly organised that they achieve nothing and cause stress. It would be easy to fill your schedule with unnecessary meetings but you need to develop strong criteria for determining whether you will actually attend a meeting or not. For starters, I would recommend:
- If the purpose of the meeting is to spread information rather than make decisions, ask them to send you to the minutes. Meetings which do not take decisive action are just talking shops.
- If there is no clear agenda, preferably with timings for each item, then the meeting is not going to achieve anything important. Ask for the minutes to be sent your way.
- Is the meeting relevant to you? It’s amazing how many people will go to meetings which are not really relevant to them or their work. If the meeting is not going to help you move forward with your objectives, there is no point in you sitting through it.
You will find a list of 12 criteria for effective meetings here. If the meetings which you are invited to are failing to meet these criteria, you need to stop wasting your time at them. For many people, developing a clear strategy for how they deal with meetings is one the most powerful productivity boosting behaviours that they will ever adopt.
Productivity boosting behaviours are consistent, easily repeated, behaviours which help you to maximise your productivity and performance. They support your productivity system and help you to turn ideas into actions. Productivity is not just about one-off actions. More importantly than that, they are about the consistent behaviours and rituals that you adopt. These behaviours are either productivity boosting behaviours, or productivity reducing behaviours. If you want to improve your productivity, take a look through the productivity boosting behaviours, listed above, and determine which ones you can implement. Image Credit: Wixphoto.com