1. Plan Your Day

Matt Mayberry believes that planning your day the night before “is a total game changer.” Just spending 15 – 20 mins every night to create your to-do-list for the next day and setting tasks priority will give you a head start enabling you to achieve more in the same amount of time.

 

2. Stop Multi-Tasking

If you want to be more productive, stop multi-tasking. As Nancy Young puts it, “the division of our attention has a negative impact on productivity, concentration and energy”. Therefore to be more productive one has to stop multi-tasking.

 

3. Minimize Distractions

As Niro Thambipillay points out in her article, you might be loosing upto an hour everyday just because of distractions like phone, email, instant messaging, status updates, sms etc., which means 10 hours or more than one whole day of lost productivity in a fortnight. Save this precious time by minimizing distractions as much as possible.

 

4. Use Productivity Tools

In his article, Emil Shour suggests to “Use tools to make your life easier and help you work more efficiently”. Tools like Evernote, Dropbox, Rescue time will help you in organizing your tasks better and increase productivity.

 

5. Set Deadlines for Important Tasks

According to John Rampton, “For open-ended tasks or projects, try giving yourself a deadline, and then stick to it.“ This will help you keep on track and yield very positive results.

 

6. Utilize Your Prime Time Efficiently

Brian Tracy suggests that one way to increase productivity is to do the “creative work during your internal prime time.“ Internal prime time is that time of the day when you are most productive. It is different for everyone. Identify the time times of the day in which you feel at your best and schedule all your high priority tasks during that time to get more things done quickly.

 

7. Stop Watching Too Much TV

“Americans spend around 34 hours per week watching TV, according to Nielsen”, says Amit Chowdry in his article for Forbes.com. Not only does this affect your productivity but it also affects your health. This doesn’t mean that you should not watch TV at all; rather it would be better to put a limit on TV time and spend the time you save on more important things.