hack your productivity 21 ways
Post on 21-Jul-2016
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Hack Your Productivity
21 Ways
Harrison Li
Table of Contents
Foreword
1. Use the passion energy.
2. Stop the so-called multitasking.
3. Focus on one goal.
4. Follow your intuition.
5. Save time from your cleansing.
6. Save time from your eating habits.
7. Save time from your sleeping habits.
8. Schedule time blocks.
9. Prevent time-dragging tasks.
10. Simplify your environment.
11. Prioritize tasks by importance.
12. Have good eating habits.
13. Forget perfectionism.
14. Learn to speed read.
15. Learn to type faster.
16. Work in a workspace environment.
17. Work in groups.
18. Set yourself deadlines.
19. Blend work and joy together.
20. Start by crawling, not sprinting.
21. Get inspiration boosts.
Afterword
Foreword
Hi,
I’m Harrison Li.
I’m the founder of Mind Fuels.
I believe that everyone in the
world has the potential to
achieve more in life, but this
requires the instructions to do so.
This is where I step in.
Every once in a while, I share awesome productivity
breakthroughs to my blog readers.
I have also created this free eBook with 21 simple, direct
and actionable ways you can use to boost your productivity
right away.
Enjoy.
Cheers,
Harrison Li
http://mindfuels.net/
You may share this in any way with the restrictions of
usage without credits, commercial use and modifications.
1. Use the passion energy.
“If you really want to do something, you'll find a way. If
you don't, you'll find an excuse.” ― Jim Rohn
What separates a happy working man from an unhappy
working man is: passion.
Passion is a natural productivity force.
A person doing tasks he does not truly enjoy or find
interest in will never be able to achieve peak performance
in productivity.
The key message is here is never to live your life in the
shoes of another – do what you want, not what society
wants.
Don’t waste your time doing something you hate, follow
your passion, or at least first achieve financial stability and
find a way to substitute the work you hate with the work
you love (by then it won’t be work anymore).
Be authentic.
2. Stop the so-called multitasking.
There’s no such thing as multitasking.
The only effective and existent multitasking combination
in the world is a strongly familiarized set of physical acts
with a mentally challenging task.
Example: you could walk and talk on the phone at the
same time.
Studies have revealed that other sorts of multitasking that
you believe exist are simply “quick-switching” between
various tasks.
The problem with quick-switching is that every time you
switch from one task to another, the focus has to be
recalibrated.
Because you constantly readjust your focus, it ruins
productivity in 2 ways:
1. Readjustment to another task takes time to re-focus.
2. You never tend to achieve high-quality work
because of your weak focus.
Numerous of studies have confirmed that multitasking
brings no benefits at all compared to not multitasking.
Stop multitasking today, and start single-tasking.
3. Focus on one goal.
Taking the last point into a bigger scale, you should also
never work on too many goals at once.
Cliche advice – and it’s true.
For the best output, how many goals should you work on at
once?
All I can tell you is there’s no magic number but if you
want a rock-solid answer it’d be 1.
The truth is, the more goals you have, the more you split
up your time, focus, attention, energy and all other factors
to your other tasks.
It’s best to specialize on 1 project at once, 1 goal, 1 dream
and one task right now.
While it may be inevitable to achieve the number 1, it is
definitely possible to cut down your list of to-do items to a
more compact version.
4. Follow your intuition.
Life is often made a lot more complicated than it is.
Why?
Because we think too much; we think of all the possibilities,
we pre-calculate everything, we plan everything ahead, we
worry, we guess, we assume and all else hypothetical.
While certain cases are beneficial, most are non-essential
and a waste of time and energy.
If you want to achieve high productivity, you’ve got to free
your mind of unnecessary thoughts and learn to follow
your intuition.
Whatever first comes to your mind, do it.
Don’t hesitate, don’t calculate the pros & cons – don’t think
too much.
Obviously, this excludes scenarios that you know you’ll
need some serious thoughts into.
But the lesson is, don’t overcomplicate life when it doesn’t
need to be.
5. Save time from your cleansing.
Essential daily habits are a big target for saving up time,
and cleansing is one common reducible factor.
In fact, a tiny percentage of people around the world
(including those I have met and know) shower once every
several days and maybe even once per week.
Their philosophy is that daily showers are not necessary to
survive, plus, they have developed the ability to ignore the
basics of hygiene e.g. uncomfortableness, oily hair and
body odor.
Limiting showers will certainly save time, I sometimes
shower once per two days (if condition-permitting),
especially in winter.
This also means no baths.
For showers, I have a personal rule of no more than 10
minutes max, and if I decide to skip a day’s shower, I’d
only briefly wash my hair in the sink.
Learn to speed up your cleansing process, stop thinking
and just focus on cleaning your body – you can even do a
countdown in your head for 10 seconds to make yourself
move into the next cleaning area.
6. Save time from your eating habits.
Eating is also a daily habit that time can be saved up from.
I have yet to know people who fast for a day to save up
eating time but I do know a lot of people who skip
breakfast.
There’s a concept called intermittent fasting which
incorporates periods of fasting in your day e.g. eating only
from noon to 8pm every day.
Apart from talking about skipping meals, there are other
ways you can speed up this process:
Eat fast-food (but healthy, please).
Get a delivery service for cooked meals, order and
pay in advance for the next week/month too.
Liquify your meal, don’t eat a salad – drink a glass
of green juice.
If you cook, chop food into tiny bite-sized pieces for
faster swallowing.
For homemade lunchboxes, prepare lots of them in
advance.
And, avoid long social chit-chats accompanied by most
meals.
7. Save time from your sleeping habits.
Again, sleep is an essential daily habit capable for freeing
up more time.
If you’re an adult, you need around 7-9 hours of shut-eye
every night.
Now, I won’t be telling you to simply cut a few hours off
your sleep, you need it for health.
But here’s the right way to reduce sleep without
challenging your body.
It’s called polyphasic sleep.
Most of us are monophasic sleepers that means we sleep
once per day, some of us (Mexicans, Spaniards…etc.) sleep
biphasically and break their sleep into two times a day – a
core sleep at night with a nap after noon.
The more you break up your sleep, the less total sleep you
need.
The science behind this method is to purposely train your
brain to go into REM stage (where actual energy comes
from) as soon as possible to skip the NREM stages (body
maintenance) which take up most of the time – in other
words time wasted.
The most realistic way to exploit sleep is the biphasic sleep
pattern as you only need 6.3 hours per day instead of
monophasic sleep that you need 8, and it’s easy to
incorporate.
Check out this guide on how to hack your sleep.
8. Schedule time blocks.
If you think you are a robot who can work all day long
without breaks, and at least feel more productive because
you’ve been working the whole time – you’re not.
It’s been confirmed many times.
Getting a short break after periods of productive sessions is
currently the best option for the highest output.
These are two common options:
1. 90 mins work sessions followed by 15 mins breaks.
2. 25 mins work sessions followed by 5 mins breaks.
Either way, you’re going to achieve more than using all of
your minutes for work.
A good way to time yourself is to use an online stopwatch
or the one on your phone.
Don’t go for the little extra when it’s break time, as soon as
you hear the timer, stop everything immediately.
Similarly, if you hear your break finish, get to work right
away.
9. Prevent time-dragging tasks.
“If people are constantly falling off a cliff, you could place
ambulances under the cliff or build a fence on the top of
the cliff. We are placing all too many ambulances under
the cliff.” — Denis Burkitt
Time-dragging tasks are the #1 contributor to
procrastination and time wastage.
What are time-dragging tasks?
They are tasks that have no specific boundaries of time
required for completion.
This means:
All social media networking.
Youtube, movies and all types of video.
Listening to music.
Purposelessly surfing the web, blogs and reading
interesting but useless stuff.
And you know more.
If you can’t find an end to a medium, it’s a time-dragging
task. The longer you use it, the longer you want to use it.
Ways to counter this:
Time yourself with a stopwatch and do these in
break time.
Prevent yourself doing them in the beginning.
Unplug your internet cable outright (best approach).
It really takes self-control.
10. Simplify your environment.
The environment you often spend time in means a lot to
your overall productivity.
Too much fluff around you will give you more mental
stress and hinder your workflow.
Speak minimalism.
There are people who own less than 300, 200 and even 60
possessions. Check this out.
This is what you can do to simplify:
De-clutter your workplace.
Re-organize your books by categories.
Stack up your paperwork in the right places with
labels.
Throw away things that don’t matter.
Hide messy things in a drawer e.g. clips, pins…etc.
Hate the concept of excessiveness.
Simplify.
11. Prioritize tasks by importance.
Every day starting from the morning until the night, the
amount of energy you have will gradually decrease.
This is why we have to carefully prioritize what we should
do and do the right tasks at the right time.
Make a to-do list for your day the night before.
Highlight one or more most important tasks (MITs) and do
them as soon as possible when the next day begins.
This means:
Don’t get close to any time-dragging tasks in the
morning.
Do tasks that require creativity juice ASAP – here’s
how to get more ideas.
Leave your games and free time to the end of the
day.
Start your day with big tasks, not small.
12. Have good eating habits.
You are what you eat.
This is cliche advice but you MUST do it.
It’s a completely different thing to speak than to do but for
me, my discipline is strong enough to restrict myself into
an extremely healthy diet (also because I have eczema).
Each meal:
Must be in ratio of 50% veggies, 25% carbs and 25%
protein.
Must be in balance on of 80% alkaline foods and 20%
acidifying foods.
Food rules:
No gluten.
No dairy products.
Nothing made artificially.
No foods high in natural chemicals.
No nightshades e.g. potatoes, tomatoes,
eggplant…etc.
No flavour enhancements e.g. sugar, commercial
salt (sea salt is okay), spices, MSG…etc.
I eat only plain, fresh, organic and natural foods.
For me, this is the closest to the definition of best.
Honestly, I’d break rules every once in a while due to social
pressure, but after that I’d immediately go back to my diet,
or else where’s the joy of life?
13. Forget perfectionism.
Just accept the fact that nothing is perfect.
I know you know what I’m talking about, it’s about going
with our first thoughts, first drafts, first answers…
In certain cases, getting as close as to perfect is extremely
essential such as for writing a book, drafting your speech
and various other tasks that require top-notch precision.
But there’s still a way to reduce the effects of time wastage
due to perfectionism.
When you are working on a task, never rewind. Keep
moving forward and don’t go back until you’ve finished it.
For example: if you are writing a book you will continue
to write and write without using the backspace button,
because every time you go back you’ll have to rewire your
thoughts and that ultimately means wasting time.
Allow yourself to make mistakes, keep going. Separate your
proof-reading and writing into two distinct tasks, don’t
blend them into one.
14. Learn to speed read.
Many of our daily habits can be sped up, and reading is one
definitely improvable case.
It’s called speed reading.
You’ve probably heard of it, it’s a skill that you can train to
increase your readings speed.
Key points:
No re-reading anything.
Group several words together and read them at once.
Read from left-to-right then right-to-left for the
next line and so on.
Get used to skipping useless words such as “a”, “an”,
“the”…etc.
It’s absolutely practicable.
However, you should avoid speed reading for arbitrary
information e.g. dates, specific rules…etc.
15. Learn to type faster.
Just as to writing faster, there’s no reason not to type faster.
I learned how to properly type when I was in primary
school with a program called Typing Tournament.
Anyway, here are typing lessons you can use.
And here’s an online typing test (1 minute test) to test your
typing speed right now. I just scored 96 words per minute
(WPM) with some errors so about 80WPM.
The average typing speed is around 36WPM. So again,
there’s no reason not to be above average!
I find 2 important aspects of good typing speed:
1. Not having to look at your keyboard while typing.
2. Knowing which fingers to hit which keys – to have a
basic knowledge of your positioning.
I think that my speed being around 80 is good enough, and
there’s no need to strive for the fastest. Since there isn’t too
much practical use behind a lightning fast typing speed,
tests give us something to copy; normally we would need to
think about what to type!
16. Work in a workspace environment.
If you want to rocket-boost your productivity, do your task
in the matching environment.
This means, even if you are able to work at home, get
outside and work at Starbucks or in the library.
Your environment will have strong influence on what you
do; by being in the right place, you are allowing yourself to
fully focus without getting distracted into the wrong tasks
e.g. at home sitting on the sofa + an array of time wasting
possibilities.
The cliche: do the right thing at the right time.
The new one: do the right thing at the right time at the
right place.
Many people can get productive at home too, but if we’re
talking about peak performance, then working at the right
environment will push you to your limits.
17. Work in groups.
“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins
championships.” – Michael Jordan
Teamwork is always better than individual work.
And, competition pushes people to their limits because at
the end, no one wants to lose.
What this means to you is, for the task you’re working on,
you could partner up with someone and work together.
Working in groups has great advantages:
It will push you to want to be the better one.
Reinforce each other to stay on track.
Get real and honest feedback.
Bond with other people while doing work – which is
a double win and a balance between work and
sociality.
Get instant help, solutions, suggestions and ideas
right away.
Feel happy by helping others too – which builds
authority, credibility, good impressions and
expertise.
Speak teamwork.
18. Set yourself deadlines.
Deadlines don’t sound as scary as they are.
Because of the fact deadlines restrict your flexibility, it
means that you won’t have freedom.
The truth is freedom hinders productivity.
If you want to complete a specific amount of work, setting
yourself to do it in a timeframe is the best option.
The power of deadlines may seem weak just from speaking
about it, but once you have marked a task down on your
calendar, notepad or to-do list (I recommend a physical
one), you will develop the obligation to follow your goals.
19. Blend work and joy together.
Doing work is boring and tiring.
Having fun is awesome.
What if work was fun, wouldn’t you never have to worry
about it again?
While easier said than done, it is possible to make your
work fun and arousing.
Here’s how:
Eliminate all negative thoughts about work – stop
looking at it as a form of torture.
Start associating positive thoughts to your “work” by
genuinely liking and enjoying what you do.
Make your task fun by adding a twist to your normal
routine for example: writing might be boring but
you could look up different styles and techniques
and literary devices and try to implement them with
your creativity.
Looking up on the internet about the interesting
facts and inspirational feats about your subject –
often what you have to do may seem boring because
you don’t know the root purpose or facts behind it.
The goal is to find the source of energy given from passion,
and naturally your work becomes an enjoyable experience.
20. Start by crawling, not sprinting.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu
Whatever you do, don’t start big.
It sounds good to be outside of the box to start big to be
remarkable and unique, but even “big” has a limit.
Learn to take small steps.
Starting is often the biggest barrier to doing any tasks, the
best way to counter this resistance is to take small steps.
This helps:
Start starting. Yes, literally, start starting.
De-stress the overall process.
Actually get a little bit of work done rather than
procrastinating and worrying.
Get a sense of accomplishment from the baby step.
Reduces your unwantingness to work.
Build up momentum.
Ultimately, taking a small step marks the beginning of your
productive journey. Once you have started, you will
continue.
Writing a book? Aim to write 1000 words per day. No. Aim
to write 200 words per day. No. Just write 1 sentence. No.
Just open the folder and open the document.
Now, go back each step slowly. This applies to all tasks.
50 push-ups? Just get on the ground first.
21. Get inspiration boosts.
Inspiration is one of the strongest feelings you can ever get.
When you feel inspired, you automatically feel a burst of
energy within you to do the same but to pursue your goal.
And that’s why I highly encourage you to find inspiration
to boost your productivity.
Where to find them?
Read awesome quotes.
Read success stories online (just Google [your
interest] + “success stories”).
Read books of your interests.
Listen to podcasts (I listen to Entrepreneur on Fire).
Read Q&As with experts and interviews.
Watch video content that inspire you (I love Shark
Tank). You can watch TED talks.
Meet experts of your field.
I find the best inspiration comes from making a goal that I
personally want to achieve, and working towards it, every
little progress that I’ve achieved will act as a source of
motivation for me to keep going.
Afterword
If you find this eBook to be utterly trash, then I apologize
for wasting your time, please close this window.
But if you find the content useful, please be friendly and
share your new discovery to friends and family.
Let me thank you in advance!
For more awesome productivity content designed to help
you achieve more in life, don’t miss out the stuff I’m
pushing out on the blog (my existing readers love it!).
Become a reader of Mind Fuels now! (it’s all free)
(click here to get free updates)
I’m waiting for you……
Still waiting…….
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