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How to Be More Productive by Hacking Your Perception of Time
Evolution of time management in 5 stages
- The Clock-Slave: you are either begging for the clock to speed up or slow down.
- The Time Tracker: some find it an excellent way of ensuring they stay on track. But when combined with excessive time pressure, it becomes unhealthy.
- The Smart Breaker: you use like the Pomodoro technique or the Ultradian rhythms.
- The Free Spirit: you opt for a more spontaneous and free life, and avoid keeping a rigid schedule at all costs.
- The Enlightened One: you understand that scarcity of time is an illusion. That enemy does not exist.
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Evolution of time management in 5 stages
- The Clock-Slave: you are either begging for the clock to speed up or slow down.
- The Time Tracker: some find it an excellent way of ensuring they stay on track. But when combined with excessive time pressure, it becomes unhealthy.
- The Smart Breaker: you use like the Pomodoro technique or the Ultradian rhythms.
- The Free Spirit: you opt for a more spontaneous and free life, and avoid keeping a rigid schedule at all costs.
- The Enlightened One: you understand that scarcity of time is an illusion. That enemy does not exist.
The scarcity spiral
When you are time-pressured, you see time as a precious and scarce resource. This triggers a stress response, which can improve motivation in the short term, but often at the expense of morale in the long term. And an unhappy worker is a less productive worker. With lower productivity, there is even more time pressure to get things done.
And on goes the cycle.
The inner tyrant
When a time constraint is placed on you, it will play on repeat in your head: “Get to work!”. If a task takes longer than expected, thoughts like “What is taking so long?" might appear. And at the end of a chaotic day, you might find yourself thinking “You have done nothing today!”.
But you can overthrow this tyrant.
The abundance spiral
Without the time pressure, you view time from an hourglass half-full perspective.
This perceived abundance of time improves wellbeing, which in turn increases productivity. When productivity is high, there is less time pressure, and time feels even more abundant.
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Work Around Your Energy Levels
Productivity is directly related to your energy level.
Find your most productive hours — the time of your peak energy — and schedule Deep Work for those periods. Do low-value and low-energy tasks (also known as shallow work), such as responding to emails or unimportant meetings, in between those hours.
Plan Your Day the Night Before
Before going to bed, spend 5 minutes writing your to-do list for the next day. These tasks should help you move towards your professional and personal goals.
You’ll be better prepared mentally for the challenges ahead before waking up and there won’t be any room for procrastination in the morning. As a result, you’ll work faster and smoother than ever before.
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'Eat that Frog'
This is a productivity method developed by Brian Tracy. The 'frog' refers to the most important and most impactful task you have to complete.
If you work on it first thing e...
Clarify your goals
If you don't know what your goals are, most likely you won't be able to identify and prioritize the specific tasks you need to work on to achieve those goals.
Write your major goals down and break them into tasks. Your goal tasks are your frogs, the things you want to work on first thing every day for greater productivity and success.
Think long-term
... to make better short-term decisions.
If you question the consequences of doing/not doing a to-do before you start on it, it not only makes it easier to find your frogs, but it also makes it easier to find time-wasting tasks that are better deleted from your list or delegated to someone else.
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