Introduction:
In a contemporary and fast-paced society like ours, it isn’t enough to call being productive working hard, it’s also to prioritise working smarter. Productivity is relevant throughout our lives and helps us through many tasks, whether it be something little like doing your homework as a student, or something big such as investing in a business plan as an entrepreneur. Therefore, in this blog, I’ll be excited to share three ways to maximise your levels of productivity.
- Make Use Of The 80/20 Rule
The main point of the 80/20 rule, is that 80 percent of your results should only come from 20% of your efforts. In other words if you have a plan to do something such as doing your homework, you should focus more on the important 20% of what you have to do, ensuring greater and more beneficial outcomes. For example, take a student studying for a test. Say you have a math test the next day on quadratics the next day and you didn’t study for it. Instead of mindlessly doing trivial and random quadratic equation questions you find online, find out what specific quadratics your being tested upon. If your being tested on vertex quadratics, focus studying on that, instead of bothering yourself with other types of unrelated questions, ensuring that you receive a fulfilling outcome..
2. Integrate Time-Blocking
The concept of time-blocking is to dedicate certain blocks of times in the day to specific tasks. This reduces the fatigue you get from making decisions on what to do and makes sure that you wont get sidelined and distracted from important tasks. You can apply this by placing blocks of time in your Google Calendar, or go old-school and write it down on a daily planner. A pro tip when using this trick is to assign your most important tasks in the time where people are most productive, which tends to be the mid-morning or the early afternoon.
3. Take MORE Breaks
Contradictive to the common belief that breaks lower productivity, but research shows that breaks are actually vital to ensuring focus and decreasing burnout. There are many techniques that integrate more breaks in your sessions for example, the Pomodoro Technique. In the Pomodoro Technique, you will need to work for 25 minutes and then take a 5 minute break, this will count as one session. Following around four sessions of this, you will now take longer breaks, ranging from 15-30 minutes. This method works because as you are studying more, you may become more prone to burnout. The longer breaks after each session helps calm this buildup of burnout and helps you come back to your session with a more clear mind.
Conclusion:
Maximizing productivity isn’t about cramming all your work!