How To Be More Productive

I have been asking myself this since I started my journey on self-improvement and how to be more productive?

I have come to the realisation that this is an ambiguous skill as being productive is an abstract concept.

What productivity means to me is to be able to make the most out of the 24 hours in a day by producing quality and quantitative, work based on the way time is used.

My story with productivity

Ever since I started to think about building my own online business, I realized that I procrastinated a lot due to same bad habits.

These habits involved waking up late, not planning my days and letting my emotions regulate how much work I was going to do in that specific day.

As you may know “those who lack consistency won’t find success”. And yes, that business venture did fail but it taught me a very good lesson, nonetheless. To succeed, I had to rethink what success really meant to me. But also, whether I was willing to better myself to achieve what I want by gaining knowledge and using my time in an efficient way.

How to learn Productivity

• Prioritising: Make a list of things you must do in the next 24 hours and label them from extremely important, important, less important. By doing this, you can be more productive and reduce your stress throughout the day.

• Being Organized: By breaking down big tasks into smaller ones and arranging them into folders while making your workspace tidy keeping your focus on the task at hand.

• Managing Distractions: This is much more than removing physical distractions such as your phone or PlayStation. Going somewhere quiet avoids distractions because our minds do wonder and sometimes as we may be in the right place our minds are just not there. Therefore, controlling inner distractions are just as important as your surroundings. If you do have something in mind, write it down and continue with what you were doing. (This seems to work for me.)

• Growth Mindset: The growth mindset is accepting setbacks and overcoming them. Giving up is not an option for some people. As Albert Einstein said, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new”. In the case of being the type of person to give up without even trying, then you must be prepared that there is a high possibility that you will not succeed in life. Einstein’s brain grew and transformed itself as it was challenged. What we can learn from his life is that consistent practice and failure are necessary to obtain success. Einstein is an example of growth mindset.

• Focus: Learning to maintain focus is essential to achieve our goals and objectives in career and personal life. The importance of keeping your focus is an issue which has been studied and discussed, everyday we try to increase focus to work in important staff.

• 80/20 Principle: This rule is about identifying the best asset and using it efficiently to create maximum value. For example, if a student can identify what parts of the textbook are worth learning about for an upcoming exam, prioritising those first, him/her will get very good marks.

Those are skills that come as a result of being productive and after learning the bases of productivity you became more specific.

Being a student, I wanted to read more books as it comes in handy to be a speed reader, it would make me more efficient and definitely save me a lot of time.

• Subvocalization- I started seeing words instead of reading them inside my head, as you know since a child we are told to read aloud and as we progress, we end up reading inside our heads. The problem with this is that in average, people tend to speak around 100-160 words per minute and this impact your reading speed. While not being an easy skill to learn, it is definitely worthwhile.

• Regression- Is when you finish reading the page or you are half way through, but you feel stuck and think you don’t understand what you have read previously, the you end up reading it all over again. The cause for this is while reading, you can lose your concentration. A good way to overcome this is by being interested in what you are reading. 9 times out of 10, if you are losing concentration it’s because your brain is not really into whatever you’re reading but it doesn’t mean you can’t stimulate the brain to be curious about it.

• Fixation- Fixations are the points on the page where our eyes alight on as we read. Consequently, this affects our reading speed. A way to change this is by using a pen as a pacer, which will work as a tool to guide your eyes as you are reading the sentences.

Resources

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Conclusion

I Truly hope that this may be useful to you and it helps you learn how to be more efficient with your time and in hindsight help you make more money. Being productive has many underlying skills those that I mentioned earlier are just a few. You should learn what applies to you because all those skills can be used to further your career or just other aspects of your life.

What I want you to take from this is that you can make learning fun, in my case after spending 2 months fixing my bad habits while reading I went from 200 word per minute to 580 words per minute meaning. This means I can digest books within a week, while maintaining all or almost all the information. I trust it does not only make my life easier, it makes my notes much fun because I can compact the information acquired into very specific and bite size notes.

This one skill is making a great difference in my life since I have more time, I am no longer stressing about getting information because I can speed read and I am HAPPIER.

All I want is for all of you to achieve the same or even better, this journey of learning skills is important for anyone that envisions a better future and all it takes is learning a simple skill and making the most of it.

Thanks for reading, sharing, and following! :D