Some advice on Productivity

We live in an age of productivity. We try to be productive at work, we try to be productive at school, we try to be productive at living our life. Productivity is becoming more and more popular, because of the zillion books, which are out there and even on youtube productivity is growing day in day out with creators like Ali Abdaal, Thomas Frank and Matt D'Avella. With all this content and advice out there it is hard to actually focus on the essential stuff, which actually makes you more productive. In this article I want to focus on the rules and advice that changed my relationship to productivity and that made me actually more productive.

First of all I want to talk about the Pareto Principle, which is also known as the 80/20 Rule and you probably already heard about it. It basically says that 80% of the outcome, comes from 20% of the input. This rule can be applied to many fields. In a shop 20% of the customers are responsible for 80% of the revenue, in marketing 20% of the advertisement is attracting 80% of the potential customers and so on and so for. You can apply this rule to your work, to your studying and to every aspect of your life. Figure out which 20% of the work you put in, bring you 80% of your results. This might take some time to figure out in the first place, but once you broke it down to the essentials and consistently focus on those, you will save a lot of time and you will 10x your producitivity. We often fall for perfection and focus to much on the little details, instead of just focusing on the key 20% that actually bring us to the goals that we want to achieve.

The daily highlight is a way to actually implement the 80/20 Rule into your life. Pick one task for the day, which is most important and it will put you closest to the goal, you are trying to achieve. Set this daily highlight every sunday for each day of the upcoming week and try to get this task done first thing in the morning and I will guarantee you if you consistently get this daily highlight done every day for a long period of time, you will move closer to your goals, even if you don't get any other task done this day. Further more you can go to sleep each day satisfied, because you got your most important task done this day. The best way to get your daily highlight done every day is to find the time in the day, where you can get into deep uninterrupted work, where you can get into the state of flow easily and where you have absolutely no distractions from the task you are doing. Find a deep work slot in your day and schedule it in your calendar. Time Block those specific hours and you will get your daily highlight done each day.

To round things up I want to talk about the Parkinsons law, which is another truly lifechanging principle you should keep in mind when trying to be productive. Parkinsons law says that a task expands according to the time you give yourself to get this task done. If you give yourself one week to finish a project, it will take one week to finish the project, but if the dead line is tomorrow you will find a way to finish the project in one day. This rule is really powerfull, because we can use it to our advantage. We can set ourselves artificial deadlines to get our tasks done and we will try everything to get it done in the given time. We often let perfectionism get in our way by spending to much time to get the last two percent of the project done we are working on. It often makes no difference and it is often far more productive finishing a task than trying to make it perfect, because in the time you are spending to make your project perfect, you could have already started a new one.

I hope you learned something new in this article and you can improve your productivity by implemeting those principles into your own life, but always remember that life is not about ticking tasks of your to do list, it's about working on actually meaningfull stuff, that adds value to your life and to the world you live in. Remember to take breaks and schedule some fun time with family and friends in to your calendar.

I wish you a wonderfull day.

Emil Tyborski