How I stay productive and go through my tasks

I received a text message from a former colleague and friend¹ on how I stay productive and avoid procrastination. This colleague is not the first one noticing my strengths in this area, and asked for tips and tricks, and book recommendations on the topic. So here I go.

First things first, there is no silver bullet to doing things right. A lot of things that work for me, might or might not work for you. In the end you need to design a system that works for you. Staying productive in your work and private life for me comes down to building habits, being consistent, optimizing what needs to be improved.

Building habits

Building habits to become more productive and procrastinate less, starts with knowing your strengths and working towards them as much as possible. The reason for that is that by working towards your strengths you will generally ‘feel’ more productive and be a lot happier. When you feel productive and happy it becomes easier to deal with tasks that don’t play to your strengths. As a result you procrastinate less. Once I figured this out in life, things got so much easier for me.

Feeling more productive leads to being more productive.

But it’s not only about feeling, it’s also by doing and that’s where habits come into play. Once certain things, and working on tasks becomes a habit (it takes more then 21 days) it is much easier to do them. Some examples of habits that I’ve created for myself.

• I exercise 3 days a week, every Tuesday morning at 07:00, every Friday morning at 07:00 and every Sunday at 10:00. The moments on which I do sports have changed throughout the years, the amount of time I do sports hasn’t. Working on my physical and mental health helps me keep my energy up. When my energy is up everything is easier.
• I write down everything I need to do in my notebook. When I say everything, I mean everything. I do this throughout the day, and end every working day with going over all these to do’s before I go home. Any task that I haven’t done yet gets transported to my taks manager for me to follow up on.
• Following up on tasks is something that I do at regular moments during my day. To do this, I carve out 20% of my calendar time in 4 blocks of 30 minutes that get moved around the day depending on other meetings.
• This first block in my calendar is always in the morning before any business meetings starts.
• In these reserved blocks I open up my task manager and look at all the things that are listed there. I order the tasks on date due and I pick them up on by one. Things that can be done in max 2-3 minutes need to be done immediately, things that need 30 or more minutes get planned in the calendar. Anything in between 2 and 30 minutes gets done in the already reserved 20% of my time. I do the work based on due date and priority, not on what I like to do.

Being consistent

Creating habits is one, sticking to them is another. Staying consistent and holding yourself accountable works best for me. Examples of things I do consistently so that I keep up with everything that I need to keep up with:

• Use the last two hours of your workweek as reflection time, reflect on the work you have done in the past days and on the work you need to do in the next five days.
• Ensure that everything that needs to be on the task list is there.
• Ensure that you have your 20% time planned in the next week for the work you need to do next to your regular meetings.
• Stick to your personal health and resilience plan. In my case doing sports 3 days a week and reading every evening.
• Quit Outlook when you don’t need it. Outlook is the worst application there is, there is always work and other stuff in there the derail your focus.

Optimize where needed

Stay open to try new things and to adapt or optimize those things that work and don’t work for you. Be very aware on how you use a todo list. Don’t use it only to write things down for the sake of it, do it because it works for you. If it doesn’t work, try something else. It’s never about the next cool digital tool or app.

Book recommendations

These are some management books (on different subjects) that I enjoyed reading in the past years.

• Blue Ocean Strategy – Expanded Edition
• Eat that frog
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Making Work Visible
• Nine Lies About Work
• Our Iceberg Is Melting
• Start with Why
• StrengthsFinder 2.0
• The Culture Map
• The Miracle Morning
• The Pyramid Principle
• Who moved my cheese?

1. Hi A-C! 👋🏻 ↩︎