Five simple ways to boost your productivity

… to free up more time for things you love!

Maybe you fall into the category of loving work and work doesn’t feel like work to you. In which case - amazing!

If that’s not you, don’t worry - that’s amazing, too! You have work and it affords you the life you have, that’s something to be grateful for and celebrate. If you’re in this category, then, like me, work is a tool for you. A tool to make an income. A tool to pay for you to acquire and do things you love. And I want to maximize the tool. Not by working harder but by working smarter. By getting my work done more efficiently. This won’t drain my energy and free up more time for me to do what I love. 

I wear many hats - from being a marketing director in the E-commerce space to owning a real estate brokerage and pouring love and time into this platform. I also have a lot of side-projects like punch-needling, making pottery. And I want

Here are a few things that I have implemented over time that have worked for me.

1. Planning

Start with planning out your week and be clear about your priorities and goals. It’s best to start with the big ticket items, even if they require more work. There is a well-known business theory - the “Big Rocks Theory”. The ‘big rocks’ here are your mission critical priorities, and the theory is that if you start working on those first, the small everyday stuff (the small pebbles) can still fit around it. While if you started the other way round, you can just fill your day with the small stuff and there’ll be no room for the big rocks. And obviously it’s the big rocks that we want to make sure are addressed.

You can watch this video here that illustrates how you can filling your bowl (ie your day) with big rocks first makes a difference over starting with the small pebbles.

At the beginning of each week, set away 30 minutes to plan out your week. Write down what your key priorities are. It’s ok if nothing else gets done, but these key priorities are important and critical in achieving your goals. From there, write down what that means - what do you have to do to achieve these priorities?

For example, if I put my real estate hat on, let’s say my key priority is to reach out to 50 realtors and tell them about our brokerage and why they should join. That’s in support of my goal for this year - to grow the real estate brokerage by 10 agents. My goal is “grow the brokerage by 10 agents”. My priority for the week (my big rock) is “reach out to 50 realtors”. The tasks and action items could be something like “put a one-page pdf together of why they should join us/what they get when they join us” or “identify 50 agents that may be interested in our brokerage’s offering” and “find a VA to help with the actual reach outs”.

To me, personally, it’s super helpful to do this on a Sunday afternoon. I take my notebook or laptop onto my cozy chair in the office and put on a headset so I can be undisturbed. I remind myself of my big goals and look at last week’s priorities. I used to write my priorities and tasks down in my paper calendar (I’m old school like that, Moleskin forever has my planning heart). A few weeks ago I started using Notion and it’s been great also - it’s accessible via my desktop but also my phone. Whether you’re writing yourself an email, writing it on a post it that you keep on your desk, put it in your calendar, notion or any other planning tool - do whatever way works for you!

If you’re not sure where to start with goal setting - sign up below for a code to download my Intentional Goal Setting guide for free!

2. Find and work with your rhythm

Maybe you have things on your schedule that are hard to move - dropping kids off at school, commitments to exercise classes or medical treatments, weekly calls you need to attend. Keeping that in mind, see how you can organize your work day to fit into your commitment and energy schedule. Every body is different. Some get a spur of energy in the afternoon or early evening, others maybe are most action oriented in the morning.

I generally find that it’s easiest to tackle things in the morning. Before other things can happen, there are fires to put out, people add things to my to-do list, the phone rings, etc. But maybe it’s the afternoon hours for you when you can shut everything else out and focus on ploughing through your tasks.

Pay attention to when you feel more energetic and ready for action, when you feel more inspired vs when you need a break or it’s a better time to ingest information or do research. Account for that as you go through your day.

3. Work in sprints and take breaks

There is a difference between discipline and productivity! You might be the most disciplined sitting in your closed office until your to-do list is done, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you are the most productive.

There are numerous studies that show that taking a break away from work (a real break, meaning to step away from your desk and engage in non-work related activities) can boost your productivity! There are different ways to do it - for example you can follow the Pomodoro Technique: 25 minutes of focused work, followed by a 5 min break with a 15 minute break every two hours. Or maybe working for an hour at a time and taking a fifteen minute break is more suitable to you. Play around with this, see what works for you and the type of work you do.

It’s easiest to set yourself a timer to remind you to take a break as it’s easy to get carried away with work.

4. Can you do it with less resistance?

Half of the struggle is the resistance in anticipation of the task.

We spend a lot of mental energy resisting the idea of something and anguishing over it before it actually happens (or sometimes it doesn’t even happen like that). “I don’t want to go to that appointment” “I don’t want to go into that meeting” “Work is such a drag” “I hate my job.” and then the appointment is just fine. Maybe not great, but fine and we get done with it. The meeting gets done and we still show up at work. 

Here is the thing. If you are going to do it anyway - why do you use up so much of your mental energy resisting it? It’s not that spending all the negative energy in anticipation is going to make the actual thing less painful. Quite the contrary! If you think that something is going to be awful, it’s more likely that you will actually perceive it as awful and ‘the worst’. 

It’s so easy to simply get used to the ‘dread’ and resistance as our modus operandi. On some level maybe it provides us comfort, because we are so familiar with that feeling. Doesn’t that sound crazy? Think about what you can do with the energy that you don’t spend having negative thoughts in anticipation of events! And it takes a lot of energy to dread and resist something! 

Start to pay attention to your thoughts and if you catch yourself dragging your feed or resisting an idea, ask yourself “Can I do it with less resistance.” Hopefully you will find that the answer more often than not is ‘yes’. 

5. Find a playlist that works for you

Several studies show that music has a powerful impact on your mood as well as cognitive performance.

Maybe you have heard of the Mozart effect. In a 1993 study subjects showed an increase in spatial reasoning skills after listening to Mozart for 10 minutes. This isn’t a general claim of enhancing your intelligence and the effects only lasted about 15 minutes. But it shows the impact music can have on your cognitive performance.

Background music can have a positive impact on your productivity - but it can also be a distraction. Choose your music wisely, it’s easiest to pick music without lyrics or music that you are so familiar with already that you don’t pay a ton of attention to it while it runs in the background. This is probably another area of trial and error to see what motivates you, what makes you feel happy and positive and what will distract you.

Personally for me, electronic music with minimal lyrics and subtle melodies are a great way to get into a focus zone. Shingo Nakamura and Chris Luno have a few hour long playlists on youtube that are my go-to, and I have recently discovered Peggy Gou or Kyogo as well (though latter can be a little too melodic for me at times).

I hope these tips help you be the most productive version of yourself. Not with the goal to do more for the sake of doing more. But with the goal of achieving what we want to in a more efficient way to free up time to do what we love and spend it with people we love.