8 Psychological Hacks to be more Productive
DONT MULTITASK
Multitasking is the enemy of focus —
You’ll be more productive when you focus all your attention & energy on one objective at a time.
My late father once said:
“When you try to bake two pigs at one time, one of them will get burnt”
He was the reason to why my senior year I didn’t do Marching Band, was a waiter at Waffle House, and take 8 College Courses on top of my normal school work. He told me that he prayed that I wouldn’t get that job. Now, my wife reminds of him everyday when she says for me to focus.
DELAY GRATIFICATION
A pleasure delayed is a pleasure enhanced.
Discipline yourself to choose long term benefits and habits over short term enjoyment. We all like to be affirmed, but the thing that will always be more powerful than simple affirmation is the policy to adhere to your habits and continue creating the habit just for the sake of creating it.
WORK IN TIME BLOCKS
This one is debated in Medium, but personally I would say if you just want to create a habit, start with time blocks of 25–45 minutes and then take a break for 5–10 minutes and just repeat.
This will keep you at a high energy pace for longer, and increase your pulse for creative thinking as well.
ORGANIZE YOUR WORKSPACE
Tweak your environment to work for you, and not you work for it.
Two ideas that you could implement immediately:
1) Have a personal workspace and keep it tidy
2) Have a picture of your goals around
Working in a clean space will improve your mood, focus and overall output.
PLAN YOUR DAY THE NIGHT BEFORE
Prioritizing your tasks will give you a clear overview of what your ideal day should look like, allowing you to get more done in less time.
The night before you are ambitious and many times regretting that you didn’t get enough done the day in the morning. You are thinking that you should’ve got up earlier, how much time you wasted thinking about what should be your next move, and all this extra sort of nonsense. This that could all be easily avoided when you focus the night before and game-plan.
AVOID DISTRACTIONS
Every-time you get distracted, you weaken your willpower and lengthen your completion time.
If I gave you 10 months to write a thesis 11-page paper it would take 80% of you reading this about 10 months to complete the paper. If I gave you about 3 days, you would finish it in 3 days. If I gave you three hours to clean your room, it would take you about three hours, if I gave you 15 minutes it would take you 15 minutes.
Schedule time for deep work, and less important tasks like replying to emails. This will help you game-plan and have a plan of attack so that way you can end your day the most productively as possible.
Keep your phon away so you can work in a flow state without interruptions. Another life hack is that if you are like me and use your phone 90% of the time as a tool, put the phone on airplane mode to clear yourself from distractions.
USE A STOP WATCH & JOURNAL
This will help you keep track of how you waste your time. This could be used to set a time for working in time blocks or even to limit scrolling time on your phone.
A journal will be one that you will use to log the time that you waste on nonessential tasks such as watching TV, playing video games, or even doing other tasks that do not have a goal.
SLEEP 8 HOURS
Lack of sleep will destroy your memory, it is extremely difficult to be productive and creative with a foggy brain.
Many people who do not get enough sleep will take into account the event of yesterday into today, sleep was created as a form of reset. We need to reset and let go of whatever may have happened yesterday in order for us to accomplish with full focus what is in front of us today.
