5 Productivity Techniques to Use Every Day

No matter how productive we are today, we're never satisfied. We still look for new ways to be more productive tomorrow and after, and the cycle goes on.

If you are one of those super-motivated people who are always striving to improve your efficiency, consider these latest innovative productivity techniques and how they might work for you.

1. The Flow Technique 

This practice allows you to discover your most productive working hours and harness them to structure a perfect day. It's recommended to use a time tracking app with this technique.

Just take a week to monitor yourself and note how you work throughout the day. For example, you may be able to work for 90 minutes straight in the early morning before feeling you need a break. Later in the day, you may need a break every 10 or 20 minutes, and so on.

Once you have monitored and discovered your individual work flowtime, you can begin to structure your day accordingly. Naturally, you would prioritize important tasks for times when you are most productive and can spend more time working on them.  More mundane tasks can be done at times when your work flowtime is at an ebb. 

2. Keep a Productivity Journal

This is a great way to keep up your motivation and review areas where you can improve productivity.

Take five minutes at the end of each day to record what you have accomplished, what you are especially proud of, and what you feel you could've done better.

Keeping a journal gives you a history of your work habits and patterns. You can easily review it to see where you can improve and what you need to keep doing. It also makes productivity fun!

3. The 10-Minute Rule

This is a really great productivity booster when it comes to getting longer-term tasks finished. It simply involves dedicating 10 minutes of your time to working on a big task in small steps. Use a timer and work for 10 minutes on any task that is due in a couple of weeks or even longer.

What can you get done in 10 minutes? Quite a lot, actually. You can collect and organize images for a presentation, write a quick outline for a report, write a page of a book or essay, or analyze a few figures.

This method can actually help you get things done before the deadline. More importantly, it spares you that panic-driven last-minute scramble when a deadline starts looming.

4. The Autofocus Method

One of the biggest flaws of typical productivity methods is that they focus too much on organization. You are advised to schedule, prioritize, make to-do lists… and more or less box yourself into a rigid system that can actually be detrimental to productivity.

The autofocus method lets you focus instead on getting things done. You start by creating three separate lists:

• New
• Recurring
• Unfinished

List all new tasks for that day or week under "new tasks", tasks that you do on a regular basis like answering email under "recurring" and tasks you have not yet finished under "unfinished". A list-based organization app like Trello will make this much easier.

Start with the new tasks and work through a few of them. Then move down and finish a couple of recurring tasks and cross them off, then move on to the unfinished tasks.

Rotate through the list in this manner and at the end of the day, move any "new" tasks that you were unable to finish under "unfinished tasks".

This list allows you to see at a glance where you stand with your workday and what your priorities are, and simply get things done. For example, on days when you have a lot of new tasks, you can skip the recurring tasks altogether and work on unfinished tasks that have a nearing deadline.

5. The Stoplight Method 

 This method is similar to the autofocus method but is better for days when you have only a few tasks. With this technique, you use a color-coded list as follows:

• A red list for tasks that need to get finished today
• A yellow list for tasks that need to get done in 2 days
• A green list for less urgent tasks that can be postponed if absolutely necessary

Start with the red list and when those tasks are finished, move on to the yellow tasks then to the green ones. Make a new list every day, moving tasks that are due today from yellow to red, and so on.

Wrapping It Up

These 5 techniques are the latest trends in the world of productivity enhancement. They challenge a lot of the traditional productivity methods and are based on the theory that more flexibility can make you more productive.

They can also be easily integrated with most productivity apps. More importantly, they can be applied immediately with no cost or effort. Do they really work? That's for you to decide.

Whether you're using these productivity tips in your job role, in your SAP training, or in everyday life, they are essential for reaching your peak productivity. 

For further insights on this topic, check out our course on Peak Productivity Hacks.