My Top 5 Best Ways to Improve Your Productivity
I'm working from home now, so staying productive is something I'm thinking about a lot. Because I am generous, I shall share my top five productivity improvement tips.
- Subscribe to every productivity blog you can find, and spend at least three hours a day reading top-X blog posts on improving productivity. Since the best tips come first, a lower value for X is better. Don't waste your time reading anything that can't be summarized in at most ten bullet points.
- Commit yourself to reading at least three books a week on productivity. Look for large books that only really have one new central idea, which is usually made clear in the title, work best. Only buy books from well-known authors that make a living from running conferences on productivity improvement.
- Start every day by committing two hours to making a list of goals for the day. Start with the biggest and hardest items, to increase the chances of never having a 'win' in a single day.
- End every day by taking an hour to berate yourself for not achieving anything on your list. Remember: even if you achieved 90% of your goals for the day, you are a failure. The guilt will make you work harder tomorrow (you loser).
- Leave comments on other people's posts about productivity, to explain to them why they are wrong. Tell them how some simplistic system you learnt from a book is working wonders for you and they should give it a try. Ensure each comment contains at least 500 words. After all, you're so productive you have time to spare.
I hope this post has helped :)
Welcome, my name is Paul Stovell. I live in Brisbane and work on Octopus Deploy, an automated deployment tool.
Prior to founding Octopus Deploy, I worked for an investment bank in London building WPF applications, and before that I worked for Readify, an Australian .NET consulting firm. I also worked on a number of open source projects and was an active user group presenter. I was a Microsoft MVP for WPF from 2006 to 2013.
When I’ve got a big project on the go I usually like to incorporate as many of Rimmer’s Study Habits as I possibly can into my day to day project planning. But I think that, with your help, I can kick my productivity up yet another notch.
You are so wrong! I now only work 4 hours, 4 days a week using this technique: I've downloaded 10 to-do list app in my phone, my tablet and my PC. I spend a few hours keeping all the lists up to date and in sync, but the rest of the day, I'm so productive!
:)
Scott