9 Ways to Increase Your Productivity by Doing Less

As an Artist and Solopraneaur I constantly feel like there are not enough hours in the day. Lists pile on top of lists and it’s easy to feel like I’m playing constant catch up on my life. In fact, no matter who you are these days, it’s easy to compare yourself to people on the internet who look like they’re doing it all. 

We live with a constant dialogue of “never enough.” We wake up in the morning with the thought that we didn’t get enough sleep. We do our jobs and feel like we didn’t get enough done. We look at other’s bodies and feel like we aren’t getting enough exercise. We look at other’s lives and feel like we’re not getting enough connection, exploration, entertainment, etc. So how can we feel like we’re accomplishing what we need to do in this life without running ourselves into the ground?

1. Define Your Goals

With our infinite access to information, it’s easy to feel like we should be able to “do it all.” But doing it all instead of focusing on specifics will drain your energy and make sure that you won’t do anything overly well. This will leave us feeling like the things we want in life will never actually be accomplished.

The people who are the most successful are only focusing on a few specific things in their lives. So sit down and define exactly what it is you want from your life, and then get clear about how you will accomplish that in the next one, five, and ten years. These goals should include your work, but also your personal life and happiness.

Whenever new tasks or projects come up, ask yourself if it’s contributing to the accomplishment of your goals. If it’s not, don’t take it on.

This will make sure that you’ll have the energy available to put towards what really matters.

2. Throw Out Your “To-Do” List

It is easy to get caught up in the minutia of feeling busy. Feeling busy makes us feel like we’re accomplishing things, but in reality, most of our to-do’s aren’t helping us achieve results.

Instead of to-do’s, figure out the outcomes you want from your day.

For example, if your outcome is to increase sales, then the tasks you need to do come naturally from that larger goal. This helps us be able to cut out superfluous tasks or waste energy on busywork.

3. Preload Your Day

Decision fatigue is a huge killer of productivity. We have this idea that all hours are equal, but in reality, the more tired you are the less efficient and capable you’ll be. You will be more productive at certain times than at others, figure out when these times are for yourself and capitalize on it. If you leave the hard tasks to later in the day or for a time when you’re less productive you’ll end up needing to spend more time on the things that are the most difficult.

So plan your workday to have the most energy for the things that are the hardest or require the most decisions.

4. Figure out your 20%

The Pareto principle states that for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. If we apply that rule to our home and business, then that means that only 20% of our tasks are contributing to 80% of our success. It’s easy to look at other people’s production and believe that we have to do things a certain way, without paying attention to what strategies are actually successful for us. We then unconsciously pour energy into the things we think we should be doing instead of focusing on the things that are the most successful. Stuff that looks better doesn’t necessarily work better, so figure your most successful actions and focus on those.

Write down the “big wins” from all areas of your life and link them to your goals. A win means an action that has been very advantageous in creating the desired result. From this, you can cut out the actions that aren’t achieving the result you want, or the actions that aren’t linked to a specific goal.

Focus on replicating the things that work and stop doing the actions that aren’t furthering your desires.

5. Pay Attention to Your Personal Tasks Just as Much as Your Professional Ones

It’s important to remember that we do unnecessary tasks throughout all areas of our life, and personal habits can deplete our energy just as much as things at work.

Pay attention to what areas of your personal life feel the most draining for you and come up with ways to make those things more efficient.

If you hate deciding what to cook, find a meal service plan, or do batch cooking so it’s all done in one day. If cleaning the house takes you three days and is extremely frustrating, hire a cleaner or do a work exchange with someone. If going to a bar on Friday nights so you can see you friends isn’t fun and leaves you exhausted, come up with another routine so you can connect with the people you love. There are countless ways that we can pair down or cut out the things at home that leave us frustrated and drain our energy.

6. Batch Your Tasks and Stop Multitasking

The cost of switching between tasks is a huge time killer. In a world of short attention spans where there are things clamoring for our consideration all the time, we feel the need to multitask and indiscriminately engage with each new thing that asks for our attention. While multitasking may make you feel like you’re being productive, you’re actually adding extra time and effort to every job you have to do.

Learn to focus on one task at a time and cut out other things that will ask for your attention.

Getting texts or emails that interrupt your current task is a massive thing that kills productivity. If you’re not at a job that requires you to have your phone on, turn off your texts and notifications when you’re doing a specific task. Block out times when you check your email and answer all of them at one time. Look at the things you have to do every day and set aside a time once a week where you can do them at one time. By putting aside a block of time to finish a task without distractions you’re able to lessen the amount of time you need to spend on that task.

7. Mimic the Natural Phases

It’s easy to feel like we need to be in a state of high production all of the time. But constant high energy isn’t a sustainable solution and will lead to burnout and a lack of efficiency on tasks. Look at your calendar and match the phases of the project to the amount of energy/ other things that are going on in your life.

Think of your projects like a cycle and allow for all phases to be completed before taking on the next new project. 

The Spring phase is when we research, test assumptions, and prepare project plans. The Summer phase is the state of high production where we do the hard work to accomplish the plan. The Fall is when we wrap things up and begin to filter out what doesn’t need our attention anymore. The Winter allows the time to rest and meditate on the success or failures of the project. By following this natural phasing and cutting out unnecessary multitasking we can make sure that each season of the project is as efficient as possible. We can also avoid expensive burnout which wastes our time and productivity.

8. Ask for Help or Outsource

When you’re unable to ask for help it’s because your sense of self-worth is wrapped up in being capable of doing everything alone. But you are worthy because you’re a human who is innately worthy of love, and you can shift your need to be validated based on the cultural concepts of capability, busy-ness, and production.

With every new task ask yourself, does this need to be done by you?

Does it need to be done at all? Could someone else do this task better/ more efficiently/ more cost-effectively? If there are tasks you can designate or receive help with, ask for help! It does not actually give you more social value to be a martyr and do it all yourself. The only thing that does is drain your time and energy.

9. Rest and Say No

Taking rest time and being healthy is what allows us to be productive when we need to. Without proper physical care, we’ll have to spend way more time trying to accomplish our daily tasks. The best way to achieve rest is to know when and how to say no to projects and people who want your attention. 

When we’re kids so much of our wellbeing is dependant on our parents. If we didn’t make them happy then there was the possibility that resources we needed to survive might be withdrawn from us. We often carry these unconscious feelings into adulthood and feel the need to make the people around us happy all the time. But doing things that aren’t aligned with our goals purely to make people love us can eat up our time and productivity. Having good boundaries and saying no to things that don’t align is essential in achieving what you need from your day.

Create pre-filtering questions and policies to help you define when you should say no.

These policies can be anything as long as it’s something you consistently want to hold to- a cap on time commitment, how late you’ll stay out, how much money it will cost you, etc. By having defined protocols it turns your no into “that’s not something I do,” as opposed to “I’m not doing that with you.”

For example, if you’ve decided that Sunday needs to be your day to take alone time and do household chores, then if someone asks if you want to hang out on a Sunday it can be a clear and non-offensive answer. It’s not personal, that day just isn’t free. But if you haven’t defined policy around it then it’s easy to feel obligated to say yes, which means you’ll end up scrambling to get your home stuff done.

Society is constantly pushing us to do more with our time and energy. It’s easy to get caught up in the sensation that being busy equals being productive, but we need to be very careful not to get caught up in this unconscious cycle. If we want to be functional humans with sustainable lives where we accomplish our goals, we need to be very clear about where and why we use our energy. By using our energy in a focused way we can be more productive while doing less, which will lead to happier and healthier lives. 

Also, check out this amazing article- The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less

And this amazing Podcast- 10x Your Productivity With This Secret Time Management Trick

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