24 Productivity Tips From the Best Productivity Blogs

I’ve been looking through the productivity blogs out there and I’ve chosen some great tips from what I consider to be the best productivity blogs that are still being updated on a regular basis. (Yes, I included my own blog, there I am at number 20. What can I say, sometimes you have to toot your own horn.) I hope you enjoy these 24 productivity tips:

1. Work in a field you love. “Do what you love” is perhaps the most basic productivity tip of all. You’ll be much more productive when you do work you enjoy. Unfortunately, this tip is as obvious as it is ignored . . . When you enjoy your work, you’ll tend to enjoy a fast tempo. You’ll also do better quality work, and high-quality work is more efficient than low-quality work. Low-quality work generates inferior results and often has to be redone.

Don’t waste your time trying to become more productive in a field you don’t enjoy. Such a struggle is a complete waste of your life. You deserve better than to subject yourself to such punishment.” — “Personal Development for Smart People”

2. Goodbye Gadgets, Hello Moleskine. “After years spent tracking the latest gadget trends, handing over my credit card for a PDA upgrade every 4-6 months, and receiving odd glances in public for reading “The Gawkish Geek’s Guide to Gadgets” (monthly), I gave up my fancy gizmos and electronic organisers for good . . .

In recognition of the intense effort it takes for a self-confessed gadget geek to drop his ‘habit’, I hope you won’t mind when I admit to replacing it with another: the love of Moleskine notebooks. These simple notebooks are both beautiful and relatively gentle on the wallet.” –  “Put Things Off”

3. Focus. “We previously defined simplicity as the key ingredient in productivity, which makes multitasking the antithesis of productivity. In order to get things done, and make serious progress on projects and tasks, it’s essential to stick to one project at a time and one task at a time. This is accomplished by tuning out all distractions and blocking off periods of time to work without phone/e-mail interruptions.” — “Practical Personal Development”

4. Invest in Yourself. “Make sure you take the time to invest in yourself. This may mean going to a conference or training. It might mean reading a book or regularly checking a blog for productivity tips. (Had to throw that one in there.) The point is to make sure that you are doing things on purpose to better yourself. Showing yourself that you are valuable and worth investing in will increase what you are able to accomplish, both from the new skills you acquire and from showing your subconscious that you believe in yourself.”  –  Productivity 501

5. Beware the optimism bias when setting task-completion times. “In my days as a project manager (and in another life as a freelance designer), I got into a habit that has served me well to this day: get the best estimate of both job requirements and time-to-completion that you can find. Then add 20%. Then, when nobody is looking, add another 20%. Then pray.

Although it’s no inoculation against the (apparently immutable nature of) Hofstadter’s Law – and you’ll still end up short most of the time – it can help you do one thing much better: manage expectations.” — “43 Folders”

(Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.)

6. Take Breaks. “Instead of increasing the amount of time you work, try to increase the quality of the time you work. Focus on single-tasking and eliminating distractions. Train yourself to focus on one thing for a designated period of time. 30 minutes is usually a good starting point.

Then focus on taking breaks that rejuvenate you and recover your ability to focus. You may be resistant to this idea at first; taking breaks is seen as lazy and counterproductive. Warriors push through it and suck it up, right? Maybe, but they’re also the ones with the shortest careers, who burn out the fastest.” — “Zen Habits”

7. If you have to swallow a frog (completing a task that you dread doing), do it first thing in the morning. “The longer the task sits there, the more you think about it, and the amount of time you’ve invested in thinking about and putting off the task somehow gets added to the psychological “size” of the task. The frog gets bigger and wartier, and the warts themselves start growing hairs and warts. It feels that way, at least.

At a certain point, the distinction between directly working on that task and indirectly working on it blurs to the point in which it doesn’t make sense to make the distinction. If you’ve spent all day (or week) avoiding and fretting about it, then you’ve spent time and energy on it that you could have spent on other things.” — Productive Flourishing

8. Productivity starts with a clear desk. “During his initial description of the collecting process, David Allen talks about taking everything off of (and, in some cases, out of) your desk and plopping it into your in-basket for processing (whether it will ultimately translate into a task/project notwithstanding). Having a desk at home (which I share with my wife) and a desk at the office (all mine), I’ve come to realize just how great an impact the state of your work area can have on productivity.” — “The Cranking Widgets Blog”

9. Schedule your priorities. “The way to make sure that you do the things that are really impactful is to put them on your calendar . . . When you are scheduled for the things that are really important and let the less important thing take only the ‘extra’ time you have, you are on the road to feeling in control, productive, and being successful.

The opposite of scheduling your priorities is letting other people take your time, reacting to the emergency of the moment (found when you checked your email no doubt), and losing site of what you’re responsible to do. This usually is accompanied by stress, overwhelm, and working overtime.” — “Productivity Cafe”

10. Follow the 80/20 Rule. “The 80/20 rule states that 80% of your results come from just 20% of your efforts. If you can identify and focus on the 20% that matters most, you can be more productive (and impressive) without increasing your workload. Try to automate or delegate the less productive 80% whenever possible. When random emails and phone calls start pushing you off course, remind yourself of the 80/20 rule and make an immediate course correction. If an emergency arises and you absolutely need to eliminate something from your schedule, make sure it’s not part of the vital 20%.” — “Marc and Angel Hack Life”

11. Do not work more to fix overwhelm, prioritize. “If you don’t prioritize, everything seems urgent and important. If you define the single most important task for each day, almost nothing seems urgent or important. Oftentimes, it’s just a matter of letting little bad things happen (return a phone call late and apologize, pay a small late fee, lose an unreasonable customer, etc.) to get the big important things done. The answer to overwhelm is not spinning more plates — or doing more — it’s defining the few things that can really fundamentally change your business and life.” –  “The Blog of Tim Ferriss”

12. Give yourself daily quiet time. “I like the way John Assaraf puts it. He says, “You want to slow down inside so that everything speeds up on the outside.” Take a manual transmission car for example. When you shift from first to second gear, the engine slows down but the car speeds up. As you shift from second to third, the engine slows down again, but the car speeds up even more.

You want to do the same thing: slow down on the inside so that you speed up on the outside. Make it a daily ritual to mediate, breath or visualize every day to become calm of mind.” — “Dumb Little Man”

13. Keep an empty “inbox”. “Allen (David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”) advocates keeping an empty email inbox for the same reason he advocates processing your physical inbox down to empty every day – if your inbox isn’t a place where you trust yourself to get the information you need and is instead simply a place to store things that could very well be important, you’ll never be able to relax and trust your entire system. Everything in your inbox represents a potential task or project that you are not doing – and you don’t even know what it is.” — Stepcase Lifehack

14. Turn your email alert off. “The October issue of Real Simple magazine quotes a Microsoft and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign study that claims it takes 17 minutes “for a worker interrupted by e-mail to get back to what she was doing.”

If this statistic is true, and I know from experience that there is a refractory time after any distraction, it is strong evidence against leaving the notification alert active on your e-mail program. Instead, you should schedule time in your day to check your e-mail. Based on the type of office environment you work in, you might need to check your e-mail at the top of every hour. However, most people can get by only checking their e-mail two to four times during the work day.” — “Unclutterer”

15. The two-minute rule. “One of the main, and easiest to remember, principles of GTD is the simple yet powerful rule: If it takes less than 2 minutes – do it now. Everything else is placed into one of the buckets that you will implement when designing your system. It’s amazing how much impact that one little rule of thumb has on your life. Try it out for a week, and see what I mean.” – “Ririan Project”

16. Use time boxing. “Putting it simply, time boxing is the most effective time management tool that I know of. Even if you already know and use it to some extent, there is a good chance that you can make it even better with some of the tips that follow.

For those new to it, time boxing is simply fixing a time period to work on a task or group of tasks. Instead of working on a task until it’s done, you commit to work on it for a specific amount of time instead.” — “Litemind”

17. Conduct a GTD Brain Dump or a Mind Sweep (Get all of those thoughts you have floating around in your head as loose ends out of your head and onto a piece of paper.) “When we’re constantly having to remember what to do, we spend less time doing actual work. When we doubt that we’re remembering everything we have to do, or suspect that there’s something else we are supposed to do first, then that’s even worse. GTD addresses this by emphasizing the “front-end” decision making to reduce the number of tasks, and by using what he labels as distributed cognition: the offloading as much crap out of your brain into physical systems that are easily accessible and reliable.” — David Seah

18. The most important part of any productivity system is simplicity. “Here’s the system:

• Write 3-5 major tasks/small projects/etc. that have to be done today. (These are your Most Important Tasks (or MIT’s.) Do them.

• Capture all of the other little stuff that you have to do in the near future. Try to do a few of these each day, in order of when they need to be done (if there’s a deadline attached to them).

• At the end of the day, make a list of tomorrow’s MIT’s, and add some of the smaller tasks below them.

• Do this every day.”– LifeDev

19. Learn to say “no”. “Not getting the wrong things done is just as important as getting the right things done. Of course, it’s up to you to classify something as the right or the wrong thing to do. But once you decide that something is wrong to do, you should not get it done and not even work on it in the first place. That ensures that you have the time and energy to get the right things done and done right. Reserve your mental energy and don’t waste your resources on something that will give you nothing in the end. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you should be selfish and not help others. What I mean is you shouldn’t help others in a way that will harm yourself.” –  Life Optimizer

20. Gather all of the tools, resources, and instructions you’ll need before starting.” “Mise en place” (pronounced MEEZ ahn plahs) is a French phrase which basically means “to put the right things in the right place”. It’s used by chefs to refer to the process of getting things ready before they start to cook the meal. This includes reviewing the recipe, gathering the ingredients, laying out all of the cooking utensils that will be used, measuring spices and other ingredients that will be needed, washing and chopping vegetables, preheating the oven, and so on.

When the chef does start cooking the meal, everything he needs is already laid out before him and all he has to do is work his magic. The concept of mis en place can be applied to almost any other area of your life to help you be more prepared, organized, and productive.” — Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online

21. Make your tasks easy for you to do. “At any point during your work day you are in one of two modes: thinking mode (that’s you with the Boss hat on) and action mode (that’s you with the Personal Assistant hat on.) When a project or task comes up, the steps you’ve got to take start to form in your mind. Now you’re in thinking/Boss mode – the guy/gal who gives the orders. Your to-do list is a collection of those orders, which your Assistant personality will later pick up and do.

So when you’re wearing your Boss hat, it’s up to you to write down the instructions in such a way that your Assistant self can just do them without having to think. . .

The best way to make yourself avoid a task like the plague is to make it a vague monstrosity. The Getting Things Done productivity system defines projects differently from tasks: projects have multiple sub-actions. That’s an important distinction – internalize it, because your to-do list is not your project list. Don’t add multi-action tasks to it, like “Clean out the office.” Break it down to smaller, easier-to-tackle subtasks like “Purge filing cabinet,” “Shred old paperwork” or “Box up unneeded books for library drive.” Because Assistant you is going to run for the hills when Boss you says “Clean out the office.” — “Lifehacker”

22. Keep a daily log. “I have long been intrigued by the usefulness and power of keeping a daily log of ones activities. . . . Recently, I have been coming across many articles surrounding the methods and values of “life tracking”. . . The options and possibilities for how to keep a log are nearly endless. For instance, a simple piece of paper or notebook would suffice. The key, for me at least, is to make your Daily Log as simple as possible to add an entry to.” — “Patrick Rhone”

23. Get Regular Aerobic exercise. “The central part of any productivity plan is aerobic exercise. It seems like it would make you tired. But consistent heart work keeps your body in tip top shape. An efficient body works efficiently and is more streamlined for the zone.” –“Persistence Unlimited”

24. Focus on providing value. “One of the easiest ways for me to discover whether I’m working on important or urgent items is asking myself how much value it will provide myself or others. I know going to the gym, writing articles and spending quality time with my wife will have a more long term impact than sorting files, checking my site stats every 30 minutes and playing Tetris. Ask yourself: ‘How much value will this provide me, or someone else?’” –“Pick the Brain”

photo credit: brunkfordbraun

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