This is all about how you can be more productive starting today. First, we’ll get the most straightforward and easy ways to manage your time and remove tedious tasks from your list.

So often, your brain 🧠 feels like there is an endless list of things to do. This is why I would recommend starting with brain-dumping, writing everything down ✍🏻, from the simplest, most insignificant task to your biggest, most 💆🏻‍♀️ stressful project.

• When you brain-dump, serval things happen: first, you create mind-space, then you can start thinking, which allows you to be more productive. 
• Instead of using your brain to store a list of things to do or ideas, you can use it to generate new ones and think. 

I also recommend that you write your list by hand 📝. Studies show that what you write by hand, with pen and paper, you are 42% more likely to accomplish. So, there you go, if you want to get things done, my recommendation is to write them down 🗒️. 

The next step is to prioritize. Another study ✍🏻 shows that about 41% of items on your to-do list will never get done. That is, they may be important but not urgent. Start prioritizing through elimination. 

➡️ First, ask yourself

• Does everything on this list really need to get done? But really?
• What will happen if x, y, or z items don’t get done?
• Remove as much as you can, declutter your list, and gain visibility 👀 on what’s actually important and impactful for the future. 

Something else that’s really important to consider here is your goals 🎯. Which we talk about other posts:

• How To Set Achievable Goals
• How To Manage Your Time To Achieve Your Goals

If you don’t know what’s important, what you should be spending time on or not, review your goals.

• Will this task move you forward in any way?
• Does it serve a purpose or function?
• Is this aligned with your goals?

In the end, your to-do list will never be empty 🤦🏻‍♀️. There will always be something to do, and new items will continually be added 🙃. Which is why it’s so important to view your tasks in order of priority. 

There are plenty of tools ⚒️ out there that you can start using today for free to increase the amount of time ⏱️ you have and allow you to be more productive.

➡️ For example, a scheduling assistant or tool like Calendly can reduce the amount of back-and-forth you spend on scheduling a 👩🏻‍💻 single meeting.

Of course, here you have to consider many aspects 🤷🏻‍♀️, which we’ve talked about in other posts.

Such as:

• What you can delegate
• Who you can delegate to
• and How you can make this process and transition as easy and feasible as possible. 

For example, can you afford a full-time assistant 👩🏻‍💻, part-time? Or maybe an intern? Consider what your possibilities are and plan accordingly. 

My recommendation would be first to be clear on which tasks 📝 this person will be working on and how much time🕓 those tasks will take.

• You don’t want to bring someone in without 🙅🏻‍♀️ knowing what they will be working on, much less if you need to plan a budget 💸 for bringing this person in.

• A useful technique, which we covered in a previous post, is the DRIP Matrix.

A super easy way to gain more time is by actually using the time you have.

• So often, we think of 10 minutes or 5 minutes as being useless.
• You have a meeting that’s starting in 10 minutes, and so your brain goes, “There’s nothing I can actually do in 10 minutes, so I might as well go into social media or check my email 📧 for the 50^th time today.” Use those minutes!

If you had 10 spare minutes every day from Monday to Saturday, that’s an hour you could be using! Leverage it. Instead of mindlessly scrolling social media 📲 or rounding up time, thinking it’s 4:50 pm, I’ll start my next task at 5:00 pm⏰, use those minutes to be more productive. 

➡️ Something that’s really helpful here is having a list of quick tasks. Things you could do in 5 – 15 minutes. So, whenever those 10 spare minutes come up, you instantly know what small task can be completed ✔️.

If you don’t have a list of small or quick tasks ☑️, then use those 10 minutes for the big projects.

• Do you need to write an essay? Work on a pitch? Whatever it is you need to do, use your time wisely. You’d be surprised at how much you can achieve in 10 minutes if you set your mind to it. 

Again, be intentional with your time and don’t willingly give away to distraction 💭 thinking “there is nothing I could possibly do with 10 minutes”.

It will take you the amount of time you have. The idea here is pretty simple, if you assign two hours to one task, you will finish your task in two hours. If you assign four hours to the same task, you’ll waste 🗑️ time here and there, get distracted every 10 minutes ⏰, and end up completing the task in four hours instead of two. 

This is an example of how I time-block to be more productive throughout the week.

The same happens with goals 🎯. If you set a goal at the beginning of the year and know you have a full year to complete said goal, you’ll leave it for the end of the year because you think you have so much time. Then, all of a sudden, November comes around, and guess what hasn’t been completed? 🙅🏻‍♀️ Your goal.

Now, you only have two months left for a goal that initially would’ve taken you four months.

Here, you have two options:

• you either achieve the goal within two months or decide you “didn’t really want it anyway”.
• If you start working on your goal and finish next year, then you won’t achieve your goal for the year. 

In conclusion, the amount of time you give yourself for a task is the amount of time you will spend on it.

• So, something that can be useful is to create personal 👩🏻‍💼 deadlines.
• If you set no deadlines, especially for personal or optional projects, chances are they 👎🏻 won’t get done.

Two things you can start doing today:

• Set personal Deadlines 📅.
  • Leverage The Deadline Effect: as you get closer to the deadline, your sense of urgency, performance, and efficiency increases. Don’t let your mind think you have 12 months or an infinite amount of time ☕️.

• Quarterly Planning 🗒️. Following up on the previous point, view your year in quarters instead of 12 long and infinite months.
  • Instead of simply setting goals for the year, set goals for the quarter and keep yourself accountable.
  • Focus on getting your goals done in the 12 weeks you set instead of 52 weeks.
  • Stay away from the idea or feeling that you have so much time to waste around it will help you be more effective and efficient with your time.

To be more productive, experts recommend having at most 5 to 6 tasks for the day, and in my experience, sometimes that isn’t achievable. It will depend on the amount of time you have available, which is why you should time-block.

I’d recommend you start with the things that you will inevitably need to do. 

• For example, 💻 meetings you have, time you will spend moving from one place to another, breakfast, and so on.

Once you have added to your 🗓️ calendar all of the things that you will have to do, you now have visibility into how much time you actually have left. Based on that, you can organize your tasks in a way that allows you to be more productive.

• Is it two full hours for focus time? 30 minutes here and there?

What And Why To Time-Block

What you should time-block? I’d say everything.

You can start with time-blocking small stuff, then move on to bigger tasks, and then everything until you have full visibility 🗒️ of where you are spending your time and how much of it you have left.

I’m surprised at how few people actually time block.

Many people simply time-block their focus time and not everything else, which makes them think they have so much time ⌚️ left during the day. When in reality, if they factor in everything they need to do, they’ll realize (or you’ll realize) that you actually don’t have so much time as you thought you did. And more often than not, things take insanely more time than you thought.

Another reason why you should time block is to reduce the amount of time you waste context-switching.

• You begin one task, ten minutes later, you are working on something else, then you go back, then 15 minutes later, you get distracted, and now you’ve wasted so much time ⏰ not only getting distracted but also on figuring out where you left off and getting yourself to focus.

Since I learned about this, it has changed the way I approach the day. Prioritization is one thing. The daily highlight ⚡️ is something else.

Having a daily highlight means you clearly understand what the most important task for the day is allowing you to be more productive.

• You know without a doubt which task will help you move forward and move the needle.
• It’s the task 📝 that, if you get done, you will feel as if you’ve made progress today.

It doesn’t matter how small it is. What matters is how much impact it has.

• It can be something as simple as an important email 📧 that will take you 20 minutes to write but can make a huge difference. 

When you’re planning your day, if you want to be more productive, I’d recommend you start with time-blocking and then move on to your daily highlight. 

As your daily highlight⚡️ is the one thing you need and want to get done today, you want to have the right amount of time for it. You want to focus on this first thing. Which is why after you time-block, you shouldn’t leave this task until the end of the day – when you’re tired 😴, unable to focus, and with less of a fresh mind. 

If you implement this when planning your day, you’ll realize that you’ll become more productive. By the end of the week or month 🗓️, you’ll have done many of the important things because you made them a priority and intentionally decided to focus👀 on them.

After you’ve set your daily highlight ⚡️, you can think about the other important, but less urgent, things that need to get done today. Time-block those as well. 

Finally, decide what you don’t want to succeed at ✔️.

• There are many things in life that we simply want to get done or take care of but are not a priority for us to succeed at.
• Things you simply want to get off the list. For example, food.

You want to take care of breakfast, lunch, and dinner 🍴, but it is completely fine if you don’t ever become a chef 👩🏻‍🍳 or never achieve the perfect menu for the day. Maybe your happy with simply making sure that every meal 🥗 you have is a healthy one. If you wanted to be a chef and also manage a successful business 👩🏻‍💻, then either one would take a hit. 

So, decide what is important to you, what you want to succeed at ✔️, and what you simply just want to take care of. 

That’s it for now. We’ll cover more on how to be more productive and techniques for time management in later posts.