5 Awesome Ways to Double Your Productivity

I’ve been an internet marketer for the past 4 years and throughout my business journey I’ve come across many productivity tips. I’ve learnt from many experts. I’ve read many books on the subject.

Productivity is a topic which doesn’t have any solid foundation. Each person approaches this topic in a different manner and a piece of advice that works for one person may not work for another person. If you’re a reader of productivity books yourself, you’ve probably found that many of the tips that are shared contradict each other. I’ve tried many different productivity techniques and strategies and I’ve compiled my own list with my favourite productivity tips.

1. Empty Your Mind

As you may know, our mind has a short-term memory and a long-term memory. We all have a lot of tasks to do in our daily lives. We remember most of the tasks in our short-term memory. Our short-term memory is very much like RAM memory in our computer. Just like with the RAM memory, our short-term memory is limited and therefore there’s a limit to how much data that we can hold(how many things that we can remember) at any particular time.

The more your short-term memory is occupied, the less you will be able to focus on the task at hand. When we restart our computer, the RAM memory is cleared and as a result, our computer performs better. We can do practically the same thing with our short-term memory.

This is usually done by creating a to-do list.

To create a to-do list, just simply jot down any tasks (the phone call that you have to make, the bills that you have to pay, etc.) that you have to do. As soon as you’ve put down everything on a paper, you will feel more productive instantly. And once you’ve made sure that you will revisit the to-do list at a later time, you will be free from the thoughts that you put down on the paper.

You can also add another step to the creating of your to-do list. You can divide the items on your to-do list into two categories; do it now and do it someday soon. In the do it now category, you can list all the things that you have to do right away. While in the do it someday category, you can list all the things that you would like to do at some point in the future but that you don’t have the time to do immediately.

I personally jot all the things that I have to do on my whiteboard that’s in my office. That way it’s very easy for me to jot down new tasks that I have to do and it’s easy to erase the tasks that I no longer have to do. It’s important that you keep this to-do list in front of you all the time. I don’t recommend keeping your to-do list at a place where you don’t look often. Keep it at a place where it’s visible to you at all times.

That way you can review it often and you will also be reminded of the things that you have to do.

2. Have Two Monitors for Your Computer

I recommend going for big HD monitors (22” and above). Many people have proved that our productivity increases by up to 30% when we use two monitors. Dual monitors and supporting graphics adapters are not so costly nowadays.

3. Have a Home Office (if you work from home)

If you don’t have a traditional 9-5 job and are working from home, it’s not a good idea to work from your own bedroom or living room. It’s a much better idea to have your own little office that is situated a short walking distance from your home.

This will make your business and work feel a lot more important and professional. This way you can focus completely on work when you’re in your office and you can focus on entertainment and rejuvenation when you’re in your home.

If your working space is inside your home you won’t be able to concentrate and focus fully and you will also not be able to enjoy your time when you’re not working as much. It’s easy to get distracted when you’re working from home and as you know, distractions are productivity killers.

Another benefit of having your own office outside your home is that it will prevent you from working late into the night. If you’re at home in the late evening and you’re not feeling sleepy, you won’t be tempted to work if you have your office outside your home. This is a good thing because working late at night is not a good thing for our productivity and energy.

4. Avoid Taking Your Mobile Phone to your Home Office

If you leave your mobile phone at home and someone calls you, you can always get back to them when you get home later in the day. Receiving calls can be a major distraction and talking on the phone about non-business matters takes away from your time.

5. Limit your Working Time

This is the most important tip out of the 5. Following this piece of advice has been very useful in my business. If you’re a freelancer who works from home, which I think most of you who read this are, don’t think that you have 24 hours in a day.

I work for no longer than 5 hours a day. I do this because when you limit the time that you spend working, during your working hours you will be much more likely to just do the important tasks and you will value your time much more, therefore, be more productive.

If you don’t limit the time that you spend working each day, you will spend too much time on things that isn’t work such as chatting, browsing the Internet, and watching videos on YouTube. When you limit the amount of hours that you work, you will spend those hours doing real work.

This technique may sound counter-intuitive, but if you try it you will find that it’s a very powerful technique that you can use to increase your productivity. If you now spend 10 hours each day working, try to decrease that amount and you will probably find that you get a lot more things done each day.

A lot of very successful people follow this method and I think that you should give it a try.

These are just my tips for increasing productivity and I know that a productivity technique that works for me, may not work for you. Therefore I would like you to share your thoughts on productivity and share any piece of advice that you have in the comment section below.

Deepak,
The Productive Professional