Little improvements every day, compound over time
A cup of coffee is something that comes to our minds when we feel sluggish. Coffee wakes one up, but it is not a solution to productivity that we face every day.
It happens quite often that you know the solution but you need to hear it from others. I am no different. We are going to discuss a few small actions or habits that boost your daily productivity to a great extent —
Analyze your achievements at EOD
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” — Peter Drucker
It starts with introspection. At the end of every day, measure what have you achieved. The idea is how fruitful your day was. Could it have been better? Could you have done more stuff? Could you have done things in a better way?
This is the feedback loop that helps you learn over months. You get to understand the areas where you need to improve. How to improve comes later, first figure out what are you doing right and wrong.
Plan your day
“If you don’t plan your day, someone or something else will.” — Nir Eyal
Once you know how to measure your efficiency and productivity, you need to plan your day to be more efficient and productive.
There are so many distractions these days, social media, videos, news feeds, people, etc. The rectangular device in your pocket is always craving your attention with constant notifications.
So if don’t plan your day, you are letting these distractions plan it for you. At the end of each day after introspecting your day plan the next day.
The right time to have a cup of caffeine
I consume a cup of coffee and a couple of cups of tea every day. A cup of caffeine helps me stay awake and focused on the things I want to do.
A cup of black coffee takes around 8–14 hours to flush out of your body. As part of my daily routine, I like to take a cup of coffee between 11–11:30. We generally have meetings in the morning, then I take a break and have a cup of coffee.
It helps me stay focused on my work, at least I believe so. And it is out of my system before I go to bed at the night. Taking coffee in the evening might disturb your sleep and hence affect your productivity the next day.
So, plan when you want to have your cup of caffeine.
Keep your long term goals in mind
“Never let a short term desire get in the way of long term goal.” — Curtis Martin
Reviewing your long-term goals are regular intervals is required to keep you on track. This ritual has two advantages, it keeps you reminding yourself about your goals and helps you measure your long-term progress.
This goes hand in hand with your daily planning of tasks. A few experts say you should review your long-term goals every day. I suggest starting with at least doing it once a week.
Manage meetings
“The longer the meeting, the less is accomplished.” — Tim Cook
At work, we attend a lot of meetings. They are part of our work-life and important as well. Since the pandemic breakout, with work from home becoming mandatory, the time we spend in meetings has skyrocketed. Meetings over audio/video calls became the only way to connect with coworkers.
These meetings give us a feeling of accomplishment but most of the meetings are long and unnecessary. Learn to keep the meetings short and focused on the agenda. This might save you a lot of time.
Focused coding hours
“Focus on being productive instead of busy.” — Tim Ferris
The idea is to have 2–3 hours of focused work completely away from distractions. There are different kinds of distractions at work — your phone, email, chat, coworkers asking for help, meetings, and many more.
Having dedicated, no distraction and no interruption time helps you achieve more than what you can achieve in a day. Coding requires a dedicated amount of time with no disturbance and no context switching. Give yourselves this time and you will get more done in a short time.
Prioritize your tasks based on the value they bring in
“The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen Covey
Prioritize your tasks based on what is important for the organization’s business. We often try to complete whatever is there on our task list without looking at the bigger picture.
Having a sense of which task should be prioritized over what is quite important for the business to move forward.
Take a 3–5 minutes break for every 25 mins work interval
This technique is called Pomodoro Technique. The usual attention span of a human being is of about 25 minutes. So try to maximize your attention span and take a much-needed break after the session of 25 minutes.
I typically use an alarm for each session. This alarm gives you a cue to analyze if you are focusing on the problem at hand or deviating from it. It gives you a chance to get back to the important tasks.
Power nap
I take a nap of around 15 mins on my recliner after lunch to recharge myself. This nap works like garbage collection. Your mind flushes out all the things going on and gives a performance boost.
Wrapping Up
I have incorporated these habits into my life. These habits take time to build. It might take a while before you see their benefits in your work life. But if you keep doing this for a few days you will be more focused, you will be more productive, and most importantly you will have more time at your disposal.
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