Ensure you can realistically complete your work each day.People will often schedule time on their digital or physical calendars for each task.įor example, if you’re a content writer, your time-blocked schedule might look like this: Time blocking is a productivity technique where you schedule specific tasks for specific blocks of time. Habit 4: Time block (or time box) every day. Want to learn more about how to prioritize? This article shares three methods for effective prioritization - The Ivy Lee Method, The Eisenhower Matrix, and the GTD Method. Understanding this, prioritizing work by importance, and completing it in order of importance (highest priority first) can help you avoid this bias. Behavioral scientists call this tendency “completion bias.” Modern knowledge workers face constant distractions: meetings, emails, Slack messages, etc.Īnd generally, people do their easiest work first, because they can complete it quickly, giving them the satisfaction and dopamine of completing a task with little effort. Prioritization, clearly, is a massive issue in the workplace. They spend just 20% of their time on meaningful, important work. Only 52 percent said how they spent their workday aligned with their organization’s priorities.Īnother study found that the average worker spends 80% of their workday on tasks with little to no value. They found that only 9 percent were "very satisfied" with their time allocation. McKinsey asked 1,500 business executives worldwide about their priorities. One way to make your to-do list more formal: Prioritize them. The study we just referenced revealed that formal to-do lists decrease procrastination the most. Those who frequently use and refer back to their to-do list procrastinate less.Those who create formal, organized, and structured written to-do lists procrastinate the least.Those who create to-do lists - even mental or casual to-do lists jotted down on a scrap of paper - procrastinate less.Productivity influencers constantly recommend to-do lists, but do they increase productivity?Ī 2020 study in Psychology Today revealed that: It takes 66 days to form a new pro-health habit, according to 2010 research (Lally, van Jaarsveld, Potts, & Wardle). If you don’t regularly, frequently write down your goals (or perform any other habit in this article), you’re unlikely to forge the new habit before you lose focus or forget about it.įor more guidance on how to set goals, check out this Ultimate Guide to Setting Professional Goals in 2023. However, I recommend documenting goals at least once a week or daily to establish a habit. You could write down daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, and even five-year goals.įind what works for you, and do it. Habit 1: Set goals regularly.Ī 2015 study found that people who write down their goals are 33% more likely to accomplish them compared to people who don’t do so.Ĭreate a regular habit of documenting your goals - both long-term and short-term goals. This post looks at 10 habits that studies and science tell us lead to productivity gains. All of these, they claim, lead to higher productivity. Nowadays, online bloggers and influencers tout dozens of different habits. They can increase your productivity and fulfillment, or they can decrease both. But habits can be positive, or they can be negative. New habits, even small ones, can change the course of your life. Success is the product of daily habits - not once-in-a-lifetime transformations.” Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be. “A slight change in your daily habits can guide your life to a very different destination. James Clear in his book Atomic Habits emphasizes the importance of small habits. The flexibility of my new work from home schedule and more free time from quarantine led me to forge one of my all-time favorite habits: Regular, long walks. On March 13th, 2020, my workplace closed down, and I started working from home.
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