PANDHY’S™ Business Fitness Program 02
In this weeks Business Fitness Program edition, we are going to talk about productivity techniques! The recent events force us to stay in home-office duty and the temptation is huge to lay-in just a little longer and slowly, but surely the hours of the days seem to be flying away much faster than normal.
So let’s see our tips for productivity!
Let’s use these quieter times to build some business muscles 💪🏼
The pomodoro technique
The idea of the Pomodoro technique is quite simple:
You should break down your daily work and complete it in intervals separated by short breaks. You should work for 25 minutes, which is called one Pomodoro, and then take a 5 minutes break. After 4 Pomodori, you take a longer break of 15 – 30 minutes to recharge.
Following this technique will give you enough focus and recovery to maximize your productivity and to not feel overwhelmed by all of the work at once.
You can track your Pomodoro technique with a simple timer on your smartphone or you can use one of the following apps:
The Eisenhower matrix
Once you have figured out the time-frame in which you are going to work, you should break down your to-dos into actionable tasks. Then the tasks need to be prioritized. A great way to do this is the The Eisenhower Matrix, which is one of the most popular frameworks for prioritizing tasks. This matrix recommends arranging tasks in one of the four quadrants:
- Urgent + Important (Do first)
- Not Urgent + Important (Schedule)
- Urgent + Not Important(Delegate)
- Not Important + Not Urgent (Eliminate)
Urgent tasks are the ones that you should first react to (like emails, phone calls, meetings etc.) and tasks that are time‑sensitive, this means you have strict deadlines.
Important tasks, on the other hand, are the ones that will belong to your long-term goals. Important tasks are the ones that are part of your business and mission.
Of course, you should always work with urgent and important tasks. It’s important that you spend most of your working time in this quadrant (urgent + important). The important but not urgent tasks,you should schedule in your calendar and do them at a quieter time. All other tasks you should delegate or simply delete.
Bite-sized tasks
Now that you have figured out a way to use your time and a method to prioritize, we can get to start doing the actual work.
Now, you might feel an initial resistance.. how to get this out of your system? Start to program yourself to break the tasks into smaller pieces and just get yourself to do the first one in the row.
For example — Going to the gym — becomes:
- Preparing your gym gear
- Putting your clothes on
- Leaving your home
- Getting to the gym
- Putting your gear on
- Warming up
- Doing each exercise set
- Stretching
In most cases, finishing the first task will cause you a happy momentum, and that will make it easier to complete the remaining mini-tasks, and by default the primary activity you started with — which in this case is a successful gym session.
Now, just take any task you tend to procrastinate on the most and apply this suggestion to it 🙂
To-do lists
To Dos, task lists, task management… we have all heard from these and we all probably have some kind of opinion about them.. However, without a doubt these apps or physical lists can really help you to stay organized and manage your day-to-day work. You can use various apps with different structures to make shopping lists or task lists, take notes, record collections, plan an event, or set reminders to increase your productivity and focus on what matters to you.
There are a lot of different versions, we recommend Microsoft To Do or the Todoist as these are great and free versions to track your tasks to do.
The X - method
The majority of goals that we pursue don’t require any special talent, or working a 12-hour a day — in most cases, consistency would be enough to have. This is where the X – Method comes in handy as it is probably the easiest, yet the most effective way to make sure new habits stick.
All you need to do is to take a big wall calendar, each month on a page and place it somewhere where you are always going to see it. For each day that you do the selected new and positive habit or stay away from doing a negative one, you can put an X on that day.
This works well because, after a week or two, you will have a chain, and you will love the sight of that chain of X’s so much that you will do everything you can to keep it growing! From this point on, your only job becomes to make sure not to break the chain.
