How To Be Efficient: Dan Ariely's 6 New Secrets To Managing Your Time

We all know how fallible our brains can be yet we routinely trust ourselves to remember and follow through on things.

If it’s important, write it down. Reminders, post-its, and calendars are all good tools.

You have a window of 2-2.5 hours of peak productivity per day, usually starting a couple of hours after waking.

Those are the hours when you should be working on your most cognitively demanding tasks. The big projects. The stuff that really moves the needle.

• Meetings: Schedule your work time on your calendar.
• Email: Most people simply spend too much time in their inboxes to accomplish anything of substance.
• Multitasking: 

  It lowers productivity.

• “Structured Procrastination”: Doing little things that give us the feeling of progress instead of deep work that really makes progress.

You don't need an email break. It won't refresh you.

Getting your head into and out of your work takes time. Switching tasks has cognitive costs that reduce efficiency.