How often do you find yourself grinding through tasks, only to end the day feeling unproductive, like you didn’t accomplish enough? You’re not alone.
It’s easy to get caught up in the hustle—endless to-do lists, juggling priorities, and trying to stay on top of everything. But when you’re exhausted and still not seeing the results, something must change.
In this video, I’ll share 6 proven strategies to help you increase your productivity and achieve more each day. These techniques will show you how to work smarter, not harder, so you can finally start seeing the progress you deserve.
Break it
Productivity isn’t just about staying busy; it’s about staying focused on the right things. To truly maximize your efficiency, you need to break your work down into manageable pieces. For example, keep in mind these three critical areas you could focus on: tasks, time, and output.
- When focusing on tasks prioritize your inputs by breaking them down into actionable steps. This helps ensure that nothing gets forgotten and provides clear goals for each work session. To achieve this, you could for example make use of todo lists.
- As for focusing on time spent working, allocate specific blocks of time to work on particular (maybe longer), tasks throughout your day. This reduces distractions and helps you stay on track, knowing exactly what to focus on during each time block.
- You could also focus on output. What you accomplish within a work session. In a sense, measure results, not just effort. With this method, your productivity is defined by the results you achieve, not just the hours you put in or the tasks you finished. When focusing on output, set the result you want to achieve within your work session, and don’t stop until it is produced. This way, you ensure that each session produces tangible progress toward your goals.
Plan ahead
Have you ever sat down to work, only to feel overwhelmed by the number of decisions you need to make before you even begin? What should you start with? What will actually make the biggest impact? This uncertainty can lead to procrastination, wasting valuable time and energy. But there’s a way to avoid this mental drain: planning ahead. By setting your tasks and priorities before your work session, you eliminate this decision fatigue and ensure you’re always focused on what matters most.
Aim to take some time (in the evening, the day before perhaps) to decide what you will work on, what you need to start with, and which task or outcome will bring you’re the most results.
Planning ahead alleviates the risk of procrastination because procrastination occurs for many reasons, but one of them is not knowing exactly what needs to be done. By clearly defining what tasks to start with and which outcomes will bring the most results, you eliminate this uncertainty.
However, in order to plan correctly, you need to know what you’re planning for.
What are you working towards? What is the goal? As author Ryan Holiday wrote:
“Having an end in mind is no guarantee that you’ll reach it, but not having an end in mind is a guarantee you won’t. When your efforts are not directed at a cause or a purpose, how will you know what to do day in and day out?”
Create systems and templates
For tasks you perform regularly—like responding to emails or managing projects – creating templates and systems will again reduce decision fatigue and increase efficiency.
Templates save time, and systems provide consistency. Whether it’s a checklist for a routine project or a framework for how you tackle daily tasks, these tools help ensure you stay on track.
When you know exactly what needs doing, as mentioned before, and how it gets done, through systems and checklists, you are more likely to stay disciplined. You free up mental energy for more important decisions and instead of getting bogged down by the small stuff, you focus on execution.
While it might seem like a lot of upfront effort to create these systems, it’s an investment of your time that will pay off in the long run. Once they’re in place, you’ll find yourself moving through tasks faster and with more focus, leading to consistent, disciplined progress and increased productivity.
Make it easy to work, hard to get distracted
Be aware of the distractions surrounding you. Nowadays, these are much easier to access because of our phones and the internet. Each time we let ourselves be distracted, our concentration is broken, and it takes some time to build it back up.
In his book “The Happiness Advantage”, author Shawn Achor explains that we should put our desired behaviour on the path of least resistance and the non-desired behaviour on the path of most resistance. This means that we should aim to reduce the activation energy – the time, the choices, the mental and physical effort – it takes to start working, while making it harder to be distracted.
For example, we could block phone notifications and set up our work environment.
Do not fall victim to the ease of distraction, or your days will go by so fast, you won’t feel like you have done enough. As author Ryan Holiday states:
“We’re pretty liberal with how freely we spend our time.”
Forget about motivation
Mike Tyson once said:
“Discipline is doing what you hate to do but doing it like you love it.”
Relying only on motivation can lead to inconsistency, because motivation comes in waves.
Imagine a graph where the Y-axis represents the amount of work produced, and the X-axis represents each work session over time.
Motivation comes and goes. Some days we’re highly motivated and produce a lot of work, but on other days, when motivation is low, we produce much less work. So, with motivation, our output is inconsistent.
Discipline, however, is a constant. Unlike motivation, discipline allows for consistent work output over time. It doesn’t rely on emotional or mental states like motivation does. The line for discipline is steady and level, where each work session produces about the same amount of work, even if you don’t feel particularly motivated.
Over time, discipline therefore leads to greater output. Since motivation is unpredictable, relying on it means that the total amount of work produced will vary. But with discipline, the consistency it brings allows you to achieve more in the long run, even though each session may seem smaller compared to a highly motivated burst.
Motivation will not make you consistent. It’s all about discipline.
Get Started
Here’s a quote from Alex Hormozi:
“People delay doing things they don’t like for longer than it takes to do them.”
Don’t wait two days before completing a task that takes 2 hours. Procrastination is the enemy of being productive.
Because inactivity is generally the easiest option, we often find excuses not to start working on something and simply wait for perfect conditions. We need to forget about that “Right Moment”, there isn’t one, and there never will be.
Even if we’re not motivated to work, most of the time our motivation will come only once we have actually started. Pushing past the initial resistance can create the momentum needed to achieve what you want.
Just remember that it’s better to take imperfect action now than to wait for perfect conditions.
So, start big, start small. But just start, and whatever happens, you can handle it.
Focus !
Here’s a bonus strategy. Learn to focus and have a clear mind when working on something. This is an essential part of productivity and one you mustn’t overlook.
Focus is built and maintained through many methods, and one of them is to avoid brain fog. Check out the article. I’ll see you there !
