Brainstorm your goals

Time commitment to get started: Low

Type: Abstract

Perfect for people who: Tend to put off important items, resulting in missed deadlines or rushed work.

What it does: Helps to avoid procrastination while ensuring that you make progress on the right things.

To get started, schedule your daily tasks from hardest to easiest. You’ll get your most important, intimidating, anxiety-inducing tasks (aka your frog) done while your energy is high and your day will get progressively better. You’re likely to find the overall quality of your work improves too.

Time commitment to get started: Medium

Type: Abstract, visual

Perfect for people who: Need to prioritize tasks, but tend to go for lists over graphs.

What it does: Prioritizes your tasks by urgency, ensures that you’re accomplishing the right things.

Write down everything you have to do and then identify each as a Must, a Should, or a Want.

Your Must tasks are non-negotiable. “Pay rent” — that’s a Must if it’s the first of the month.

A Should is something you need to do, but it’s not dire that it be done today. Answering certain emails may be a Should.

A Want is something you’d like to do, but might not be practical or necessary at the moment.

• If you know you’re more likely to work from home, invest in comfortable furniture; you feel good it will inspire you to get work done.
• If you want to join a local co-working space but are intimidated by the price point, ask about smaller memberships to start.

Don’t let your skepticism about productivity hacks get in the way of finding a technique that suits you and helps you get things done.
If you’re still having a hard time identifying priorities, try working backward by identifying work that’s definitely not a priority. Eliminate those items and assess what’s left.

Shifting our focus towards people and projects, rather than the time it takes for us to work on something is referred to as Attention Management.

Productivity is not a virtue, but just a means to an end, and it means nothing if the end is not worthy. Paying attention to your intrinsic motivation, on why you are excited about the project will make you push yourself naturally and achieve the goal.

Many studies show that bad weather days when it is too cold or rainy, keeps the working people glued to their work, being more productive as they are less distracted by the thought of going outside.