10 Steps to Better Productivity & Less Stress

This is a guest post by Paul Gardner with minor edits by me. Paul writes a blog on leadership and productivity called, Simply Productive. You can subscribe to his RSS feed and follow him on Twitter.

I’m a big believer in leaders learning how to be more productive with their time, and Paul has a lot of good information on how to use productivity tools such as GTD and eProductivity.

The Problem

Are there any things that you need to do each day, or that would make your life easier?  You know the sort of things:

• If only I could discipline myself to review my to-do list at the end of each day so the next morning I could fly with the eagles…
• If only I could write a little every day then my novel/blog/assignment would be moving forward
• If only I could spend half an hour each day just thinking/doing yoga/praying then I would be calmer and more productive

I know how you feel.  There are things in my life that if I put the time aside to do everyday my life would become so much less complicated.  But all so often I don’t.  And I’m not just talking about those things that I know work for me over the long term, such as exercise.  I also have problems doing the stuff (regularly) that brings immediate and obvious benefits!

If you fall into the same boat as me we need to ask ourselves two questions:

1. Why is it difficult to discipline ourselves to do something even when the benefits are immediate and obvious?
2. How can we rectify the situation?

Why is it so difficult?

I don’t really know!  I suspect that it is just human nature to rebel against that which is good.  I suspect we just like to use our free will badly sometimes to “show” the world, and possibly even ourselves, that we’re in charge.  Even if that means its to our detriment in the end.

Or it may be something even simpler.  We know it takes quite a while to build up a habit but only a short time to break it and maybe we simply haven’t done that yet?

The Solution

Working on that basis, what should you do to get there? Here’s a 10 step process to set you on your way:

1. Brainstorm just what it is that fits into this category.
2. Put how long each would take to make sure you’re being realistic with your expectations of yourself.
3. Decide just what activities fall into this category keeping the list as short as possible at this stage.
4. As the above steps shouldn’t be completed in haste, (you’ll miss something important), while working on them keep a simple log for a week or so just to find out the times you feel most and least energized.
5. Schedule the activities into appropriate time slots.  This doesn’t mean using all the high energy slots!  Work out which needs high energy and which would be better for down-time periods.
6. Write yourself a large note and post it visibly where you are as a visual reminder.
7. Tell someone else, even on the web, so you make yourself accountable.  If you blog, write a post about it and promise to keep your readers updated on progress for a set time.
8. Do it.   really important step and one often missed out.
9. Each time you complete an activity give yourself a treat.
10. Keep it up for long enough for it to become a habit.

Give this a go, and I hope it helps and that you see immediate productivity and other benefits in your life.

Tagged as: getting started with GTD, gtd, Leadership, productivity, reduce stress