Anyone can double their productivity by making a few simple changes. Whether it's practicing, writing, studying, or completing a project.
1. Set aside a dedicated time block to complete (or make major progress on) one goal. Anyone else in the house should know that you are not to be disturbed.
2. Leave your phone outside the room. It's not enough to turn it off. Literally leave it in another room.
3. If you're doing work on the computer, turn notifications off and use a content blocker to resist the allure of the internet. Cold Turkey is a great one.
4. Make the rest of your work environment as boring as possible. A small glass of water is fine. Anything more, and you'll have to use the bathroom and wade through any number of distractions to get there and back.
5. Plan the how of your work session. What you're going to do to complete your goal, predicting obstacles and how you'll handle them, and imagining what life will be like when the project is completed.
6. Set a timer and get to work!
7. After the work session, reflect on how it went and how you might improve on your workflow tomorrow.
Follow these steps, and it's inevitable that you will accomplish more. This process takes care of a couple things that hold us back from getting more done.
First, we're eliminating all distractions.
We can't help ourselves. If we hear a text or email, our brain opens a story loop. We're already unfocused because we need to know who it's from. And then, once we look at it, we're already distracted.
Second, we're focusing all of our attention on one thing.
When we switch from one task to another, it's not as simple as we think. There is such a thing as "residual" attention, where some of our attention is still on the task we just left, taking away from the current task.
We do this all the time in our daily life, but it's terribly inefficient for important work.
This process of deep work brings us into a flow state (Check out Mihali Csikszentmihalyi for more about flow.)
This is a state where it's not even about the final product anymore. It's about losing ourselves in the process of creation. The process of practice. And developing our concentration.
A great read on this topic is Deep Work by Cal Newport.
Check it out. It's good stuff.
But what do you think? Give it a try for an hour or two today.
Come back, and let us know how it went in the comments below.