A Life of Productivity

When I graduated University with a business degree last May, I received two incredible full-time job offers, both of which I declined because I had a plan. For exactly one year, from May 1, 2013, through May 1, 2014, I would devour everything I could get my hands on about productivity, and write every day about the lessons I learned on A Year of Productivity .

Water is one of the best things ever. My biggest lessons from this experiment (in order of increasing importance): every day you drink a whopping 400 calories; there are 8 triggers that motivate you to drink something; caffeine boosts your athletic performance; what you eat and drink are two of the biggest things that impact your energy levels; coffee/tea are just as hydrating as water; take the time to be grateful for all of the nice things you have; you should drink caffeine strategically, not habitually; and caffeine boosts your focus, but makes you less creative. Whew.

If you're looking for focus and purpose at the start of each day, use the Rule of Three technique. Estimated Reading Time: 1 minute, 19s. One of the simplest, most powerful time management techniques I've come across lately is the "Rule of 3″ (from the book Getting Results the Agile Way).

Breaks let you step back from your work, recharge, come up with better ideas, slow down, reflect on your work, and ultimately make you a lot more productive. Take them. Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes, 11s. Some of the best productivity tips out there are counterintuitive.

When you maintain a list of everything you're waiting for, you can make sure nothing slips through the cracks, and you can worry a lot less about the things and people you need to stay on top of. Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes, 39s.

How you manage your time is a huge contributor to how productive you are, but all three ingredients are absolutely essential if you want to be productive on a daily basis. That’s why there are a bunch of tactics that cover all three areas in this article. You absolutely need all three ingredients to be productive.

To kick things off, here are a number of my favourite time hacks to both:

Get more time
Spend time on the right things.

The more boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, and unstructured a task is, the more likely you are to procrastinate with it. 10 strategies that will help you stop: flip these characteristics to make a task less aversive, recognize how your brain responds to “cognitive dissonance”, limit how much time you spend on something, be kind to yourself, just get started, list the costs of procrastinating, become better friends with future-you, completely disconnect from the Internet, form “implementation intentions”, and use procrastination as a sign that you should seek out more meaningful work. Whew.

As an experiment, last week I watched 70 hours of TED talks; short, 18-minute talks given by leaders in the fields of Technology, Entertainment, and D esign. A lot of the talks had to do with productivity, and I've sifted through all of the boring ones to find the 10 best!