Are you trying to improve your day-to-day productivity but still not successful yet? Let’s find some of the most effective ideas and practices that can help you achieve it.
Productivity is one of the prime aspects of life and one of the most concerning topics among humans these days. Every individual wants progress in life with improvements, but the process is often longer than expected. You cannot become highly productive in just one night, as it requires constant effort with perseverance. Sticking to a tight routine is also not easy, especially if you have a busy lifestyle where you hardly get any time to relax. Let’s find some new habits that you can experiment with to make yourself more productive each day.
- The 5 Minute Journal
The Five Minute Journal is an effective practice that allows staying more mindful and productive each day. It is a daily journaling habit that would not take more than 5 minutes from your daily life. You can do this early in the morning or late at night, whatever suits you. A lot of people also keep a gratitude journal where they write down about people and things that they are grateful for. It is a positive practice that lets you look back at each of your experiences and the experiences that influence you. When you know yourself well and are trying to push your productivity, journaling can be one of the best ways to do it.
- Adequate Hydrating
Drinking ample water is often overlooked by most individuals, but water is one of the most important ingredients for your body. The human body is 70% filled with fluid, and water helps to keep that fluidity in the body, which improves circulation and regulation. There is no secret that hydration is one of the most important and crucial activities to live with a healthy body, and drinking ample water can also help to stabilize your mood. An adult human must drink around 3 to 4 liters of water every day in order to stay healthy and hydrated.
- Never Skip Breakfast
Do you know that the most important meal of the day is breakfast, which you consume after waking up? Breakfast has to be healthy and nutritious as it is the first meal of the day, and it should offer energy that wakes your body and energizes it. A lot of people skip breakfast as they get late for work, but keeping yourself hungry till you have lunch is like the worst idea that breaks your body down quickly. You can never feel productive on an empty stomach. Therefore, you should have a healthy breakfast every day before you get ready for your daily work.
- Shut Off Social Media at Night
One of the biggest blessings and curses of this modern era is the social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The influence of these social platforms on our daily lives is huge, and we tend to spend a lot of our daily time on these platforms. After the emergence of short-form videos, people are stuck in the wormhole of reels and shorts that they keep scrolling. It gets even worse when you watch videos or scroll through social media at night before bedtime. Instead of mindlessly scrolling, try to shut down your digital time and social media habits that have grown on you. This can help to improve your well-being, reduce digital time, and offer you a good and deep sleep.
- Prioritize Sleep with a Daily Alarm
Just like you set an alarm in the morning to wake up, you can also set an alarm to go to sleep. There is no point in being a nocturnal animal unless you are doing some important project, or night is the working time for you. Sleep is often overlooked and abused by us as we stay awake at night with social media and OTT platforms, and that damages our sleep greatly. An adult human being needs 7-8 hours of sleep every day, and when you sleep less, it makes you deprived. Without ample sleep, your mind and body cannot rejuvenate, and it leads to great productivity loss. Sleep more to work more, simple!
- Replaces Video with Audio
Since most people have developed a habit of watching cinemas, series, or online videos at night before they go to sleep, it is affecting their health and increasing their digital time, which is also quite bad for their eyes and overall well-being. It is also not good as it makes you fall asleep late. What you need is something that can help you sleep early with a good mood. Replace your video needs with audio to enjoy a good sleep with the help of sound or music. You might already know that white noise, the sound of rain, and many other audio elements can make you fall asleep faster.
- Optimize the Layout of Your Living Space
Most common folks are not filthy rich people with multiple properties, and most people spend their lives in a single house that they stay in. You might not get a new house, but you can always give it a makeover, changing and optimizing the layout of your place. Clean up, re-arrange things, make DIY craft an art for décor, bring new houseplants, etc. There are many ways to get a new place for you, which is your old place with a new look. Making a few changes and utilizing the space more can be a productive way to work and positively affect your mind.
- Daily Exercise Becomes Integral
It goes without saying that exercise or workout is one of the most important aspects of your life that allows you to stay fit and greatly improves your physical and mental health. For many people, it’s hard to make time for exercise. If you have a hard time getting yourself to the gym or out to play sports. You can also go for cardio exercise like cycling, swimming, running, and many others.
- Automate Tedious Tasks
The busy professionals often do not get the time for their home chores, but we are living in the age of AI applications, and you can leverage digital technologies and AI to handle the tedious work. It’s a beautiful thing to live in an age where you can order specialized services on demand. From dry cleaning to scheduling meetings to buying razors, there is almost nothing that you can’t automate or outsource.
- Breathing Exercises
Not just physical exercises, but you should also focus on breathing exercises, which help prevent anxiety, stress, and panic. Relaxing breathing exercises every morning would really boost your body and mind, and get you ready for the day. The yogic practices are mainly based on breathing exercises, and you can also use them during meditation for better results. You do not have to spend a lot of time behind this, as only 15-20 minutes of breathing exercises can make a deep impact on your body and mind. It refreshes and energizes you like a complete reset with rejuvenation.
- Re-arrange Your Applications
Most of the actions we perform on our phones are habitual and mindless, and we often spend too much time in apps that don’t actually add any value to our day. Perhaps it is time for you to rearrange your apps on your mobile based on priority. This is not big, but it can still make a huge difference by keeping things easier in your own way. It is also recommended to keep a minimalist set of apps, as handling too many apps can also increase digital time and your engagement in such activities. Utilizing apps that can help improve your productivity is the best way to deal with this. There are also many brain training apps that you can use to sharpen your senses.
- Keep a Book Beside Your Bed
This is one of the best and most effective practices that can make you more productive in your daily life. Keeping a book beside your bed allows you to read whenever you are relaxing in bed, and that is the best time to read as well. Even if you only read a few pages, it’s an amazing way to declutter your brain and relax your eyes. Make sure, though, that you have an engaging book on the go. Like any habit, you’ll break it if you don’t actually look forward to reading the book you have.
- Improve Your Reading Habit
You can build an active reading list with the books you have or want to read in the coming days. This is simple yet super effective to improve your reading habit. To take your reading commitment a step further, add it to your calendar. Maybe it’s a Sunday afternoon timeslot, or every night before bed, or both. Whatever works best for you, add a reading block to your calendar to help make sure you find some quality time away from a screen. Reading can also make you empathetic and improve your perception. The more you read, the more you want to read.
- Always Carry Your Earphones
Well, this is not for the music lovers, as the earphones serve a different purpose here. Earphones will allow you to listen to podcasts and audio stories while you are working or multitasking through chores and other tasks. The earphones will make your busy time more productive and offer you insights that are important for your life. Keep the earphones in your jacket pocket or next to your keys to help you remember. You can carry them to your workplace and other areas where you can listen to things you want to listen to, but often do not get time to do so.
- Batch Your Social Media Usage
It’s hard to avoid social media at work, especially if you use LinkedIn and Twitter for business purposes. To combat this difficulty, it is recommended to “batching” your social media usage. Set out 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the afternoon to hit up your networks and see what’s going on. If you really need to avoid social media for a period of time and can’t shake your urges, there are apps to help you with this purpose and help you stay focused without getting distracted.
- Framework for Slow Days
We all have days when there isn’t a ton going on at work. If it’s important to you to still be productive at non-peak times, you can create a framework that allows you to use the day optimally. You can also create such frameworks for the other days when you are not busy with work. So, there can be frameworks for weekends and holidays as well. While, you do not have to religiously follow it, it can still give you a better idea of what to do next instead feeling lost and directionless about what to do next.
- Minimize Your Notification Noise
Mobile push notifications are insanely addictive. They can distract you in an instant and pull you away from important work, but only if you let them. Let’s face it, you don’t need a notification for every Instagram like or Facebook message. Minimize the number of notifications that show up on your home screen, and the number of red dots that show up on your apps. It is guaranteed that this tactic will help you focus more on the world around you and the task at hand. It has become highly important in this digital age, where people receive millions of notifications from different apps every day. Try to remove the distraction, and it will help you reduce digital time or screen time.
- Delete the Apps that Suck Your Time
If you’re bold and willing to take your productivity binge a step further, try deleting your time-suck apps. We all have them, and we hate that we use them so much. But We Just. Can’t. Resist! Try weaning yourself from the apps that deliver the least value and take up the most of your time. Just try. Worst comes to worst, you can always re-download Angry Birds and get to that next level. It can also help to keep your mobile clean and smooth without putting much pressure on the RAM. Besides, it also removes some of the burden of handling so many apps on a daily basis.
- Stand Up and Move Around
Doing a desk job on a daily basis makes us sit for a long time, and that can greatly damage our spine and posture. The hunching of the back quickly turns into a lifelong pain, and that is why it is highly recommended to stand up and move around. There are a lot of people who are mainly standing most of the time at work, and for them it is recommended to sit whenever they can. When you sit hunched over, your chest is in a collapsed position, and your diaphragm is pressing against the bottom of your lungs, which hinders your ability to breathe easily and deeply. Sit up straight or stand up, and you’ll find that you can breathe easier and more fully. As a result, your brain will get more oxygen, and you’ll be able to concentrate better.
- Practice Quiet Times
Foster ways to create space in your life. It is so easy to get caught up in constant activity. When we do, we lose sight of our priorities. And worse, we stop being creative. Take time each day to stop the constant barrage of thoughts and activities. Meditation and prayer are great tools. Steve Jobs was known to take walks. Others find ways to regularly convene with nature. Playing or listening to music may allow you to reset. Find what works for you to recenter and make the most out of each moment. When you discover ways to clear your thoughts, you allow creativity and openness to new ideas. It is much less about the quantity of our activity and much more about the quality. Creating space in your mind will naturally allow you to make much better use of the time you have.
- One Thing at a Time
The inability to complete tasks in a manner you feel good about creates mounting anxiety and impairs your effectiveness in subsequent activities. Be patient in your work and seek closure to the greatest possible extent on each activity you perform throughout the day. We as humans thrive when we feel the success of accomplishment. Completing one task well builds wonderful momentum. Leaving a task incomplete will stick in the back of your mind and keep popping up until you take the time to finish it. Finally, since it has been proven that the human mind can only think one thought at a time, the concept of multitasking is an illusion. All it really does is dilute your effectiveness on each of the tasks you are attempting to juggle simultaneously. Focus on one thing at a time. Follow this guidance, and you will complete activities at a higher level of quality each day.
You can create your own productivity routine by combining the practices given above and creating a personalized way of living that is productive and satisfying.
