Are you feeling that lately, you don’t have time to complete all your daily tasks on time?

We tend to believe that we could deliver more tasks than what we’re actually doing. But apparently it seems time is always against us and we get frustrated.

If this sounds familiar to you, this post will help you out. I will share 6 tips of easy to implementation, that will save your time and turn you into a more productive professional & human being.

1-Review your meetings

Meetings aren’t always the synonym of productivity. They might take several hours of your day and most of them are not as productive as they look.

• Understand the meeting purpose: Don’t step into a meeting if you don’t know it’s purpose. Meetings frequently change from the original purpose, remember to regularly ask this to yourself.
• Measure your impact: Don’t be afraid to decline the meeting invitation, if your presence won’t add anything relevant. You’re not being rude, you are being productive.
• Build a meeting agenda: Going to a meeting without a pre-work or a pre-defined agenda is a common mistake. Having a meeting’s agenda is a must to properly spend the time of the meeting. Don’t forget to rank the topics of the agenda, not all the topics have the same priority.
• Be punctual: Try to be punctual, start and end the meeting at a pre-set time. Finishing on time helps you stay focus and it doesn’t impact negatively the other activities/meetings that you do next.
• Create Clear Next Steps: Take a few minutes before the end of the meeting to set up the next steps. If you can’t come to one, it’s likely that the meeting was unnecessary.

2-Eliminate distractions

Distraction is a big enemy of production and time management. A study from the University of California Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task after getting distracted. It’s a lot, right?

There a few things you can do not to get distracted in the first place.

• No notifications: Turn off your phone, computer, slack, hangouts notifications. Setting a “Do Not Disturb” function helps your attention to be set in the right place.
• Hide your phone: Your phone distracts you even when you’re not using It, just by having it visible it may distract you from your tasks. So try to leave your cellphone out of sight. You’ll be surprised how not surfing on Instagram, LinkedIn and other apps for some period of time saves you a lot of distractions!
• Reduce Noise: Put your headphones on or go to a meeting room. Our body just can’t concentrate much with constant or loud noises. Also, people are less likely to approach those who wear headphones with non-urgent matters which helps you to stay focused.
• No internet for a while: The Internet is a wonderful place full of funny cat videos but it can be very distracting sometimes. Turn off your Wi-Fi if your task doesn’t require internet connectivity.

3-Organize yourself

It’s easy to get distracted or feel overwhelmed when you have an unorganized to-do list. There are great tools and apps that can help you on that matter like Trello, To do, Google Keep, Asana, To Do Ist… I personally use Trello.

4-Breakdown your tasks

If you have big tasks that require lots of hours, break it down into small sub-tasks so you can have continuous progress and daily quick wins. You’ll start to feel that finally, you are meeting your daily goals!

5-Prioritize it

Normally when you have so many tasks, you get overwhelmed and don’t know where to start. So prioritize your tasks: the ones need to be done today, the ones you should do and the ones it would be nice to get be done today. And always leave some spear time for unexpected urgent matters.

6-Block Your Time

Having free time for yourself it’s very important to focus and get the tasks complete. So, block a couple of hours on your calendar before anyone else does.

Hurray! Now you are ready to become a Smart Productive Person. Complete a lot of daily tasks can be tough, but the right management of time can help you a lot with getting things done. Working habits are difficult to change too, try implementing the tips above at least for a week, I’m pretty confident you will have more productive and healthier workdays. Feel free to share this article if you liked it. 

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