Elon Musk says, ‘You Get Paid in Proportion of the Difficulty of the Problems You Solve’. These Productivity Tools Will Help You to Get Much More Done.
Take a look at these 49 quick and easy productivity tools to get you on your way to getting more done in your day.
Tools 1-10
- 1. Meetings that are an hour can be changed to 45-minutes.
- 2. Just do one thing on the project and then watch the snowball gather momentum.
- 3. If you book your calendar like the building blocks of Tetris, then your day will be full of saying, ‘Sorry’, so leave small gaps between meetings.
- 4. Use text shortcuts on your laptop.
- 5. If you want people to do their actions, have more meetings & make them shorter, and then this way you are ‘holding their feet to the fire’ more often.
- 6. Use email templates for tasks that are regular and can be replaced by a template.
- 7. Send the meeting actions out instantly by typing them as the meeting happens.
- 8. Use 3 random words to create strong passwords, by looking at what is around you – ‘plant sky tea’, and include the spaces.
- 9. The 43 folders system is useful for putting physical items in a place to bring forward, e.g. concert tickets.
- 10. Search your Archive folder for ‘Unsubscribe’ and then review the emails and unsubscribe.
Tools 11-20
- 11. Say ‘No’ more often using the ‘No Tree’ model.
- 12. Identify why you are on the payroll because it is not all the tasks you do, it is the big thing that you make happen; sales, marketing production, etc.
- 13. When others just wait for others in meetings, use your time to re-write your to-do list, not to look at emails.
- 14. Arranging your inbox by conversations allows you to delete all the emails below the top email of each conversation.
- 15. Use a pad and pen to create your to-do lists because the endorphin rush of crossing things out on screen is poor compared to grabbing a pen and crossing it out.
- 16. Agree your working hours; 9-5, 6-6, 10-7 – whatever they are, make them the rule and work outside them by exception.
- 17. In meetings capture the actions as you go in a simple email with a simple format of ‘1. Mark…Create the sales presentation…10-09.’
- 18. Don’t write a woolly mammoth on your to-do list, which is a huge task, like ‘Sort big project xyz’, and instead write one small & practical action.
- 19. If you really don’t want to do something, this is the clue that it is probably worthwhile doing and will make a big difference.
- 20. Don’t use PowerPoint to prepare for a negotiation, use the Squaredance template instead.
Tools 21-30
- 21. Stop looking for ‘that’ absolute winning time management system because it does not exist and start understanding that time management is all about your mindset.
- 22. Stephen Covey, the author of ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’, told us to ‘Begin with the End in Mind’.
- 23. You will go to the grave with a to-do list, so what’s important?
- 24. BUSY = JOB.
- 25. You are using slides like a drunk uses a lampost, to lean against, but if you use it for illumination, you’ll achieve much more.
- 26. How good you are at ignoring distractions will equal how much you can get done.
- 27. If you involve everyone to make a decision then you have to wait for the last person to decide and they never do.
- 28. Everything is created twice; Once in your mind and then once in reality.
- 29. Just start.
- 30. If you can do it in under 3-minutes do it, don’t wait.
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Tools 31-40
- 31. Evaluate your week each week with a simple tool of; PMI – Positives x3, Minuses x3, and Interesting x3 and do it in under 20-minutes.
- 32. Stop all email notifications because you go to them when you are ready and not the other way around.
- 33. If you keep telling everyone how busy you are, stop, because behind your back you are called, ‘That Busy Person’.
- 34. Whatever you are working on, in 3 months will anyone care?
- 35. The 3 Toughest Mindset Challenges of Productivity are; 1. Saying No, 2. Stopping Procrastinating and 3. Making a Real Difference.
- 36. Make the space around you more productive by having what you reach for often, close (Printer), and what you don’t, not close (Envelopes).
- 37. Use a ‘To Do’ list for all the things you have to do.
- 38. Use a ‘Daily To Do’ list for all the things you have to do today.
- 39. Use a ‘Projects’ list for all the projects you have to do.
- 40. Use a ‘Waiting For’ list for all the things you are waiting for.
Tools 41-49
- 41. Bin the reading pile because you will never read it.
- 42. Archive all emails older than 3 months because everyone has forgotten anyway.
- 43. Use a dictaphone/voice memo in the car to capture your thoughts/actions.
- 44. If you live in your inbox, expect there to always be lots of emails.
- 45. Sign-up for google alerts to keep you abreast of clients’ companies, your company, your sports team, etc.
- 46. QFE – Quick, Fun and Easy tasks are how we start the day – something small and simple – but you need to get stuck into the big stuff quicker.
- 47. If you had theatre tickets for this evening, do you also find that you get more done because you had to?
- 48. The most successful people are the ones with the emptiest heads!
- 49. Choose one from the above list and do it, otherwise, this was very unproductive.
So there we have it, 49 one-sentence productivity tools for you to choose from! It doesn’t matter which you pick, and it doesn’t need to be all 49, because any of these productivity tools will make a noticeable improvement.
