Build Your Life To Order ™

How To Achieve Your Maximum Productivity

Everyone finally reaches a point in life, where all the things seem to happen in an orderly way, and most of them are done properly and the general frustration of being unable to cope with the workload is gone.

This is where all the fun begins, as your start questioning your approaches and look for ways to optimize your work and your time to achieve maximum productivity.

My name is Gleb Reys. I write about motivation, time management and productivity at Personal Development Ideas blog, but today I’m a guest blogger here. I’ve been reading this blog for quite some time, and we often discuss topics of personal development with Mark, so I’m proud to be a guest, and happy to have a post by Mark published on my own blog today.

Before we continue, I would like to suggest that you read my How To Manage Your Time Successfully article, which was my guest post for Alex Shalman last week. Today, I’m going to talk about simple but powerful ways to improve productivity, and this article will make much more sense if you read the time management article specified above.

Time blocking

You’ve probably heard of this technique before. Time blocking means breaking the available time into even blocks for easier concentration and regular short breaks.

The idea behind this approach is this: you will concentrate much faster if you know that your time allocated to working on a particular task is properly allocated - you know exactly when to start and when to stop working on a problem. I’m not talking about setting a deadline for each task. Instead, I suggest you to agree with yourself to only work on something for a certain period of time, and then take a break. If you haven’t completed the task - that’s fine. You can continue working on it after your brain gets some rest it needs after concentrated work, and you’ll be able to perform better when you get back to work.

Having rest is essential. It is one of the most important things about time blocking. Take regular breaks, and many tasks will seem much easier to get done.

I personally find the 48 minutes time blocking approach to be most effective. It means that you spend 48 minute working on your task, and then rest for another 12 minutes. Together, they present a really nice time block of one hour. Please read The Power of 48 Minutes article on Success Begins Today blog for more details on this approach.

Closing open loops

How often do you leave your tasks unfinished?

Some of your tasks are nearly finished, yet you leave the final touches undone, probably hoping to get back to them later and knowing that the actual task is practically complete.

Other tasks are simply impossible to complete given your time restrictions or other external factors. You look at the problem, you spend some time trying to solve it, and then you’re forced to drop the work because you’re required to work on something else.

Does either of these scenarios sound familiar to you? Well, you’re gonna have to stop such things from happening. Let me explain why.

The concept of open loops is that your brain keeps thinking of the unfinished tasks even when you switch to doing something else. I’ve learned about open loops from the Getting Things Done book by David Allen. The more unfinished tasks you leave behind, the more your brain will try coming back to them in your thoughts, thus slowing you down as you work on your next task.

And that’s why you need to change your work patterns and try to close as many open loops as you can. As soon as you realize that every unfinished task directly impacts your performance in solving any tasks that follow, you will understand the benefits of closing open loops.

In many cases, it makes perfect sense to take extra 5-10 minutes to complete the task and close the loop, because then you’ll be able to take a break and start working on the next task without having your brain looking back on the old task and breaking your thought patterns.

You will greatly improve your performance by making these two techniques part of your planning. Like many other tips on increasing your productivity, they are simple. It is vital that you understand why you would want to change your process, before you can successfully apply any changes.

Good luck with moving onto a whole new level, and if you liked this article, please visit my Personal Development blog or subscribe to my feed. I will be posting more tips on my blog in the coming days, so stay tuned.

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