6 Productivity tips to put time on your side

6 Productivity tips to put time on your side Its telling that some of the most popular blogs focus on productivity. I learned this when I interviewed productivity gurus about their best time-management tips last year and it became the post that bloggers link to most often on Brazen Careerist. How to get more things done is a hot topic for younger workers especially, and one that has seemingly endless angles. Thats because young people are good at multitasking, and yet feel as though true productivity goes a step further than simply working feverishly on more than one task at the same time. Here are six productivity-blogger tips with some new takes on the old idea of blowing through your to-do list to feel good about your day. Whats interesting to note is that each piece of advice actually encourages people to get more done by slowing down to focus rather than multitasking nonstop: Having goals is more important than the content of the goals Productivity should be aimed at meeting goals rather than merely keeping up with ones to-do list. Its a question of the big picture versus the little picture, and we need to be sure to have some big-picture ideas about our life or we wont be able to steer it. So often, though, we dont set goals because were worried theyll change. But theyll change regardless, and we dont want the same things throughout our whole lives anyway. As Eric Nehrlich says on his blog Unrepentant Generalist, The particular goals arent as important as the process of setting goals and working to meet them. Knowing you can meet goals encourages you to set more, and setting more encourages more conscious thinking about what youre doing. That may well be the very core of productivity. •  Get information at scheduled times In a world where most of us are knowledge workers, the person whos best at taking in information and synthesizing it is going to stand out. The last thing youd want to do, then, is stop taking in information. But theres limitless information, so you have to set your own limits. Tiffany Monhollon at  Little Red Suit  suggests scheduling when precisely you take in your information. This means that it doesnt interrupt you constantly, which really undermines productivity, but it also doesnt elude you, which is the sure way to become obsolete in the workforce. •  Make your to-do list doable A lot of us get stuck because everything on our to-do list is daunting. As Gina Trapani explains at  Lifehacker, each of us has two selves the boss and the assistant. The boss self comes up with things that are cool to do, as well as things that are awful to do but that need to get done anyway. The assistant self has to execute all of it, and sometimes the boss self makes life impossible for the assistant self. Ideas that have no execution strategy, projects that have 50 (or more) steps, and administrative tasks that arent essential all drive your assistant self crazy. Trapani explains how to make sure your boss self and assistant self are working together to create a to-do  list that doesnt stop you in your tracks. You actually need to put a lot of thought into how you manage yourself. Maybe thats why the best reader for this column is your philosopher self. •  Do something youre passionate about Every Monday,  Zen Habits Leo Babauta blogs about productivity and organization. That in itself is a great productivity lesson: If you schedule something important for certain days or certain times each day, youll get into the habit of getting the important things done. Zen Habits No. 1 productivity tip is to do something youre passionate about. Why? Because when youre enthusiastic about something youre better at it, and you dont mind trying harder and putting more time into it. Its the work you dont really want to do that you put off or do slowly and without much attention. •  Do important tasks instead of urgent ones Steve Pavlina  shows how to make a distinction between the important tasks and the urgent tasks on your to-do list. Examples of important items on your list could be learning new skills, finding a new relationship (or working on the one you have), or starting a new project. Note that these items are for you, not for someone waiting for a response to your e-mail. Steve calls this paying yourself first. Ask yourself if it will matter in five years whether you did a particular task or not. Taking that class youve always wanted to take passes the test itll surely matter in five years. On the other hand, not answering that e-mail from an impatient coworker right this minute probably wont matter in five years. What does this have to do with productivity? You cant be truly productive if youre wearing yourself out by taking care of other peoples needs. If you decide that 5 out of 10 things on your to-do list wont really be important in the long run, then youll be much more productive by making time to work on those less-urgent but more-important items first. •  Focus on outcome Just because youre getting something done doesnt mean it matters. In the long run, youll feel better about the time you spend if youre making a difference with the outcome. We often put things on our to-do list that take much more time to accomplish than theyre worth, but we focus so much on getting them done that we dont think about if they were worth the time. Chris Michel has an equation for this on his blog  Found|Read: Take the desired outcome (value) and divide it by actions (cost), and you have the return on your investment (time). Michael theorizes that looking at tasks this way will inspire you to come up with ways to get to the outcome with fewer wasted actions. Timing Is Everything As you try to implement new productivity tactics in your life, keep in mind a study from the  Center for Creative Leadership  that says we each have ways of doing things that are hardwired, and if we get stressed out well revert to those ways. So even though its tempting to try new productivity methods when you need them the most, youll have more success making the switch if you wait until a relatively calm  period of  your life.