How to become more productive each day
I often do a review of my own productivity and spend time looking over my digital workflow to see how I can improve my organisation and in turn keep on top of things as new projects are taken on. Here are some frameworks that I use to help me decide which things I should be working on.
The 2 minute rule
This rule is discussed in David Allen's famous productivity book Getting Things Done. The idea is that when you're sorting through tasks and things that need to be done if you come across one that will take you less then 2 minutes to action then you shouldn't reprioritise that to a different area - you should just simply do it and get it done. I apply the 2 minute rule to lots of tasks - but one where it is particularly effective for me is with email management - e.g. if an email will take me less than 2 minutes to respond to I quickly do it and file it out of my inbox, rather than letting it clutter things up for later.
Don't rely on your brain
"Your brain is great for having ideas, not for storing them"
This is a quote out of David Allen's book and is the reason why I've been spending so much time these past few weeks setting up an organised digital system for saving ideas, thoughts, project timelines, to-do lists and everything else that pops in to my brain. Once I've got my new system up and running and it's functioning well for me I'll create a video about it for my YouTube channel to share what I've learned. But the lesson here is that you must not rely on your brain to store things. You need to develop a system that can capture and file your ideas and thoughts so you can keep your brain free to do what it's good at - which is being creative and having good ideas.
Avoiding overwhelm
Overwhelm is one of the biggest enemies of productivity - often causing procrastination (due to not really knowing where to start or what to do first). One thing to help overcome the feeling of overwhelm when you start to feel it creep in is to take stock of everything you need to do and to simply ask yourself the question:
What can I do TODAY that will move things forward and make the biggest impact right now?
Often this will be the task you least want to do - but if you just get going with it, you'll find you will quickly get in a state of flow and things will seem less overwhelming once you get stuck in to it.
As you guys know I'm super interested in productivity and how to make the most of my time (and work to my fullest potential). For me this is something that is driven by necessity given that I'm trying to run a large business with very little help in only a few hours a day. So I'm always looking for hacks and ideas that will improve the way I work and the above tips are definitely some guiding principles that I use each day.
Productivity is one of the areas I want to move more seriously in to as I restructure the content across my business and personal platforms - so I'm really looking forward to bringing you more in-depth ideas around all of this. :)
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Enjoy the rest of your day!
Clare x
Dr Clare Le Roy
