As I’ve spent more time working and growing my businesses I’ve spent some time reflecting on myself. In particular, I’m always interested in improving my productivity and staying focused.
Recently, I decided to take a look and break down the few most important things that have helped me get more work done. This article is my attempt to share those techniques, and hopefully help you on your own journey. Nothing here is groundbreaking or even unique, but I hope my perspective adds something. Ideally, you’ll learn something here that you can apply to your own life.
Set Goals
The first major thing I do is set goals, both long term and short. Having goals is crucial to having long term success as it gives you something to track against. If you don’t have any end state then it’s difficult to gauge your progress.
When setting goals, I keep in mind the process for setting SMART goals. SMART is an acronym for setting goals, and helps make sure that the goals you’re setting are focused and relevant. If you’re not familiar I highly recommend you check it out, it makes your goals much more valuable.
In terms of deadlines, I like to have long term goals that span an entire year but also set up shorter term ones. I do a lot of my work following a typical 2 week sprint that is common in the software development world. This gives me small chunks of time where I’ve committed to some scope of work.
Every two weeks I set a new set of goals as well as evaluate the previous sprints goals. This gives me a fairly quick feedback loop, and lets me see exactly what I’m missing. I don’t always hit all my goals, that’s perfectly fine and to be expected. What this does is help keep me focused and helps me create my task list. As I go through my backlog of work I always keep in my goals, if a task doesn’t put me close to achieving that goal that means it probably isn’t relevant right now.
Make a TODO List Every Night
Every night, at the end of my workday, I go through and create a simple TODO list of all my work for the next day. First, I pull out all the items that absolutely need to be done the next day. That includes any posts that need to be published, social media that needs to be scheduled, and anything else that has a hard deadline.
After that, I go through my task list for the current 2 week sprint cycle and pull in work that I want to get done the next day. This is a bit of an art, it can be difficult to determine how much work I can take on. I’m well known for trying to get too much done in a single day, that’s something I’m still working on.
While I’m doing this I’m also keeping tasks in mind. If, for example, I need to publish an article, do a social post, and create a graphic for the same site I batch these tasks together. This is called task batching, and is a really powerful productivity technique I like. By batching like tasks together you help reduce time lost due to context switching and stay focused on a single topic.
Ultimately, having a TODO list helps me stay focused and be ready to work right away in the morning. I used to have trouble getting started with work, especially when I knew I had a lot to do. I would sometimes find myself not sure where to start, overthink my plan, and end up wasting time. That doesn’t happen now that I’ve committed to my TODO list, and I try to make sure that I’m not updating it mid day unless something really important comes up. This ultimately helps me stay focused, and it’s a bit of a morale boost every time you check something off for the day.
Use a Time Tracker to See Where Your Time Is Going
Recently, I’ve started using a time tracker to help keep track of my time. I used to be against time tracking and saw it as an unnecessary bit of work, but I’ve recently started to come around to them. Now, I couldn’t picture working without it because of the advantages it gives me. There’s two big wins I get from tracking my time.
First, it helps me see where exactly I’m spending my time. This is helpful in planning because now I can see that it takes me roughly 2 hours to research and write a 1k word post. That’s important, if I know I want to knock out 7 of these in a week then I know I’m using up 7 hours right there, roughly. I don’t have to guess, I have the data.
Having my time also helps me see where I’m wasting time. If I think I’m working 12 hours a day but my tracker only shows 9 then I know that I’ve wasted time somewhere. This has helped me be more mindful of time wasting activities, and has helped me cut down on my daily distractions.
The second big win is that I find myself to be more focused when the timer is running. Maybe it’s just me, but having that time in the back of my mind keeps me focused on my work. It feels like “cheating” if the timer is running and I’m on YouTube or something. I treat myself like I’m my own freelancing client, so when I’m on the clock I’m working.
If you don’t currently track your time then I highly recommend you do so, at least for a bit. You might be surprised at how you’re spending your time, I know I was.
Remove Distractions and Create a Workspace
Lastly, something I’ve been big on over the past few years is making sure that I have a dedicated space to work. If you’re lucky enough to have a separate office that’s great, otherwise a desk in the corner or something similar works great. Regardless, wherever you work you should be free of any distractions that might disrupt you.
The real goal here is to simply create a distraction free area that is dedicated to work. For me, this helps me get into work mode, which ultimately helps me stay focused. When I’m in my office I know it’s time to work, and there’s limited distractions there to take me out of that zone. It’s a really simple step, but it’s been a big help over the years in keeping me focused on my work.