5 Small But Powerful Ways to Boost Your Productivity

Are you interested in learning how to boost your productivity? If so, you’re far from alone.

I think it’s safe to say we all want to be a little more productive. It doesn’t matter if you’re a blogger, entrepreneur, or simply working a traditional 9-5; there’s a good chance you want to learn how to get more value from your time.

You’ll be happy to know that there are plenty of little things you can do throughout the day that will ultimately help you accomplish more in less time.

Today, I’m going to show you 5 small but powerful ways you can stay focused throughout the day, which means more time for relaxing, working on your side hustles, and hanging out with friends and family.

Let’s dive in!

Don’t Check Your Phone as Soon as You Wake Up

When you open your eyes in the morning, do you instinctively reach for your phone? Most of us do, and honestly, this habit can hold you back more than you realize.

People use this time to check their email, social media, news stories, and more. At face value, it seems like an innocent little habit. But there are a few significant ways this can impact your productivity for the rest of the day.

1. Time sink - the average person spends about 2.5 hours on social media. When you consider that 4.72 billion people use the most popular platforms, we can conclude that across all platforms, people spend close to 10 billion hours every single day scrolling. This also means that each person spends 15+ hours a week on these sites. Imagine what you could do with that time!
2. Overwhelm paralysis - When you open your phone, information comes at you fast. If you haven’t even made it out of bed yet, it can be a lot to process. Some people report experiencing a form of paralysis from information overload from using their phones too much. It’s obvious that this isn’t the best way to start your day.
3. Miss the good around you - Finally, starting your day on social media can make it easy to miss the good things around you, like your spouse, pets, children, or garden. You’ll probably feel much more optimistic and productive if you spend the morning with people and places that matter.

My suggestion is to start the day by stretching and drinking some water. Then, eat a good breakfast and spend time doing things you enjoy away from your phone so you can find your focus and start your day on the right foot.

Don’t get me wrong: when used consciously and in moderation, technology absolutely has its benefits. But be wary of mindless scrolling, liking, and sharing - these habits often do little more than create mental clutter and zap your productivity.

Use Time Blocking to Manage Your Day

Next, I want to talk about one of my favorite scheduling strategies: time blocking.

If you’re not familiar, time blocking is a simple but highly effective technique that involves assigning set periods of time for dedicated tasks.

Instead of jumping from task to task in a scattered fashion, you block out parts of your day for focused work. This helps avoid distraction and ensures important responsibilities get done.

This strategy helps because it allows you to use your energy intentionally, which means you get more done in less time. If you’re wondering how this can impact your productivity, consider this: trying to seriously focus on more than one thing at once can reduce your productivity by a whopping 40%!

When you’re first starting out, try to break your day up into multiple large chunks with a little wiggle room.

For example, you could say the first hour and a half is for your morning routine; then, you’ll spend one hour responding to emails. If you manage to clear your emails in 25 minutes, you’ve managed to harness an extra 35 minutes that you can use to get started on the next task.

It may seem rigid, but there’s no question that time blocking can help improve your productivity by allowing you to hone in on one specific task at a time.

Celebrate Small Wins

One of the problems I’ve seen as a business owner is people around me getting overwhelmed when working toward large goals. Developing a product from the ground up or creating an email series from scratch takes a lot of time and effort.

My advice to them and you is to start celebrating small wins. You don’t need to write a 2,500-word essay to feel good about yourself and your accomplishments. Celebrate once you get a solid outline and are working on the draft.

I’ve found checklists extremely helpful for tracking my wins. I start by creating a big project or goal – and then include smaller actionable things I need to do to achieve the goal.

Of course, your idea of celebrations may vary too. Some people like to celebrate by taking a 20-minute break; others may read a few pages from a book for leisure, or you could spend a few minutes listening to some of your favorite songs. The possibilities are quite literally endless.

However, you’ll never get a chance to celebrate your wins if you don’t acknowledge your victories! Start keeping track of your daily goals, and don’t be afraid to feel proud of yourself.

Schedule Time for Deep Focus

My next tip is to be sure to schedule time for deep focus. This strategy ties in with some of the other tips I’ve discussed today.

Put plainly, deep focus is a distraction-free period of time where you can focus on important tasks for the day. This is often easier said than done, especially if you’re a remote worker and have family and pets walking into your home office.

But if you take the right steps, you can schedule time for focus, which means you’ll see a big boost in productivity.

Here are a few things I do when I need to take some time to work on priority tasks throughout the day:

• Mute my phone
• Silence notifications on my PC
• Put on noise-canceling headphones and a long playlist
• Let people know that I’m having a “head-down” time and would prefer not to be interrupted.

It’s worth remembering that you can have deep focus time for your normal work or other things you want to pursue. For instance, you may choose to devote 1 hour of deep focus time a day to starting your first business.

Reflect for 15 Minutes a Day

One thing I’ve learned over the years is spending just 15 minutes a day in quiet reflection can have a profound impact on your productivity.

As entrepreneurs and writers, our minds are constantly buzzing with ideas, to-do lists, and thoughts about work. Taking time each day to pause and reflect provides mental space to process it all.

My advice is to start your self-reflection journey in a journal so you can go back and reference it at the end of the year, week, month, or year. Personally, I like reviewing both weekly and monthly so I can figure out what went well and where I can improve next time.

It’s easy to miss out on opportunities to grow both personally and professionally if you don’t take a good hard look at your thoughts, actions, and consequences. Once you have a better understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and thought processes, you’ll find it’s much easier to stay productive, even when things get rough.

Final Thoughts

There you have it! The 5 tips I shared today are small but extremely powerful ways to boost productivity. The best part is you can do most of the things we discussed, like reflecting, planning, and celebrating, in less than an hour each day. It’s remarkable to see how shifting one hour of your focus can have such a profound impact on your productivity and overall happiness.