How to stay productive every day? 3 essential tips everyone can use.

Getting things done is probably the most useful skill of today. With so many available distractions, we often fall off track and get nothing accomplished at the end of the day.

So, how do we stay productive so that we can get things done?

At the end of this article, you’ll be ready to accomplish things more than ever.

N°1 Improve Your Physical Condition

In the article How to start what you want, I talked about how nurturing your brain is as important as nurturing your body. Here I am focusing on the body and your physical condition.

If you want to stay productive, there is no secret. 

First, you have to adopt a relatively healthy lifestyle. 

A bit of exercise 

Practicing sports assiduously has only advantages. More than shaping your physical appearance, it helps the mind: accelerate the metabolism (burning fat at the same time), improve the quality of your sleep, stabilize your blood pressure, fight against stress and anxiety, etc. 

You don’t need to follow an olympic program but several cardio training per week is necessary.

According to a medical report, people aged between 18 – 65 years old should:

• 30 minutes at least of moderate physical activity (such as walking), 5 times a week.
• Or 75 minutes at least of intense activity (running, tennis, etc.) per week.
• Or a mix between moderate and intense activities.

The most difficult part is to find the time and the motivation to do it. Which is why I talked in other articles about the importance of creating habits. By creating a workout habit, you’ll be able to reach those goals. 

I usually workout twice to three times during weekdays, doing individual sports like boxing or badminton. For weekends, I prefer team sports and more entertaining activities. 

By having a regular sport activity, you are increasing a great quantity of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is an energetic resource of the human body flowing in your blood. This provides more energy to your body and your brain.

Be careful with your food

Physical exercise induces “good nutrition to follow”. If you really want to be productive, you’ll aim at boosting your metabolism. 

By adding sports activity to your routine, your nutritional requirements might change. You do not need to increase unreasonably your caloric intake but mostly, try to focus on having a healthy diet: fruit and veggies are the greatest sources of vitamins. 

Don’t worry, you can still have some burgers. Just try to limit their consumption. 

Your body will be happy and your mind as well. You’ll feel way better. 

I know especially in the Philippines how junk food is affordable. But veggies also can be if you buy from local farmers. It just takes more discipline to prepare the food and to make it yummy.

A little tip is to have a rice cooker with a steamer to get your carbs, lots of steam veggies and on the side, you can cook some tofu marinated with ginger and soy sauce. 

Steaming is one of the best methods to preserve easily damaged nutrients, such as vitamin C and many B vitamins. Please don’t boil or fry your vegetables. 

It is not a cooking blog. 

We are still talking about productivity and business. But, how you feed your body is too important. We cannot avoid this topic. 

If you want to stop being lazy or if you feel unenergetic. It’s maybe not because of the amount of work or the lack of purpose at work, but probably your unhealthy lifestyle.

So, stop getting Starbucks or Mcdo, don’t add sugar to your drinks, salt to your meals, prepare your own food, etc. Your mouth palate will adapt.

Sleep enough

To close the physical topic, let’s talk about sleep. 

When you sleep, your brain is cleaning itself deeply. A rested brain is a more productive brain.

We cannot be efficient if we are exhausted, so sleep! 

Stop binge watching your favorite series before sleeping, get some infusion, read a book, talk to your partner (if you have), and then go to sleep. 

The worst is probably video games. Your brain stays stimulated from the excitation of the game  and it gets harder to sleep. Plus, the blue light from the screen prevents melatonin, your natural hormone of sleep. 

This is maybe obvious for some of you but many are still not educated to it. 

I am also writing for them. My advice is for people who truly want to be more productive. People that are thinking of starting a long-term project and needing help on making sure they’ll achieve their goal.

You can moderate my words by starting little by little and maybe not strictly implementing all those behaviors.

Maybe you can try this on weekdays: no junk food, no video games, no series. Then on weekends, you are allowed to cheat a bit. 

N°2 Take Care of your Psychological Condition

You can be very healthy but if your mind is not following, you’ll never use the most of your potential. 

To stay motivated, to keep improving yourself, to build your own business, to be better at work, there are essential points to have in mind:

Enjoy what you are doing

It is probably easier said than done.

Many are stuck in a job they do not really like but they took the opportunity because they needed to.

So, I’ll speak from experience. Be patient. I tried a lot of work: real-estate, B2B consultancy, marketing, sales, volunteering, project management, events, founder of a digital marketing agency, head of Asia-Pacific of a corporation, etc. 

The greatest I was at work, was only when I truly enjoyed doing it. 

If you are thinking that this is not something you want to do or that you took a wrong career path.  

That you are following courses because someone told you, you should. Rather than choosing them by yourself. 

It won’t be too late to pivot. 

If you are afraid to lose your current situation. You’ll be fine, it happened to me several times. You struggle a bit but you end up in a better situation than before (I couldn’t go lower I was already at the bottom). 

But again, you can still start little by little: Do something you truly want as a side activity. 

Time is our most precious resource, make sure to spend it on the things you are truly enjoying and that brings much more purpose to yourself and to the world. 

There is nothing worse than bullshit jobs where boredom and gloominess are ruling. 

Do something that you are passionate about! And if you have not found your passion yet. Try stuff. Experiment, there are so many industries, activities and opportunities. 

Myself had a hard time finding something I am truly passionate about. Which is why I got (and I am still) involved in many different projects. 

Instead of chasing your “passion” as every guru talks about. Just try new things every day. And when there is something interesting to you, get more involved in it.

The usual scheme is I have a passion, I will pursue it. Maybe like me, it will work reversely: I am doing something, I am starting to really love it, I guess it is becoming one of my passions.

Set goal

One of the most powerful processes to motivate yourself is to use goal setting.

It turns your vision of the future into reality. By giving a concrete endpoint that you will be excited about. It gives you something to focus on.

When we know what we are trying to achieve, we always perform better, don’t we? 

To set goals, you must be realistic. We don’t want to set up illusions here. But real goals that will help you to stay productive.

Set daily goals. If you are starting a blog: try to write 300 words per day. This is feasible even if you have a daily job. 

If you want to work out: 30 pushups a day. Learning: read 50 pages a day.

By setting up short-term goals, you’ll be able to accomplish your long-term vision.

For a blog, if you write 300 words per day, you’ll get 9,000 words at the end of the month. 109,500 at the end of the year. If your typical article is around 1000 word-long: it’s a potential 100+ articles per year.

Obviously, you might need to rest some days, or they will be days where you’ll take some vacations so you won’t reach that number. Plus, you’ll need time to focus on other stuff like the quality of your writing and not only the quantity.

But it gives you a great idea that small goals can lead to accomplishing your long-term one.

By combining something you love doing with small goals, you can stay motivated and productive and you will enjoy the long-term benefits.

N°3 Stay Organized and Understand Why you are Doing Things

What you read previously is about creating the right physical and psychological conditions. Once those are set, we can get to the more operational part. 

To achieve the things you want and to get things done, you need to be organized. 

You must practice real strategies to be productive daily:

Cut Distractions

Cutting distractions such as reducing social media or deactivating notifications is essential to stay productive. Because they are the greatest enemies of your productivity.

It seems like nothing to scroll on social media’s feed, to check often your emails, to look at your last notifications. The amount of time we could save from not doing it and the amount of work we could do, is incredible.

• Keep airplane mode when you are not expecting an important phone call. 
• Focus on a specific task in an allocated time (writing a report for 1h) then take a break.
• Use a countdown timer if you need. Or a calendar to divide your day into specific activities.
• Open your emails less regularly: An email received after 6 pm is usually answered the next day, and answering at the first hour in the morning, signifies clearly your interest to your interlocutor. 
• Unsubscribe to a newsletter you don’t need to hear about and even mine, if you don’t read my articles. I’d rather have a committed audience seeking for improvement.
• Identify useless solicitations and small time wasters and avoid them if they don’t bring value to your day (a little nap is not a small time waster but a needed rest).

But you also need to go beyond this. You need to understand why you are getting distracted. 

Understand the Deeper Problem

Sometimes it is because of how we react. An obstacle is in front of us and instead of diving in the problem to solve it, we go on Instagram to feel lighter. 

You are not distracted because social media is a distraction. But because you want to avoid the big issue in front of you. You don’t want to do the deep work.

Maybe because you think it is too complicated and long to solve. Try to divide the tasks to do so that the problem doesn’t appear like an impossible challenge to solve.

Or maybe because you are not passionate about what you are doing and find yourself having little care for it. Time to pivot and find something else to do. 

Impose a clean environment 

This is a must to stay productive.

Your surroundings should be clean and optimized. Your work space is very important: your desk but also your desktop.

Sort your files by folders. Simple maths, if you have to look for a file 30s more than what you should, 8 times a day. It’s 20 minutes lost per workweek (a good workout session or an important meeting to conduct).

It’s just an example but this applies as soon as your work environment is messy.

The important logic is that unproductive tasks due to unorganization have to be limited as their maximum, else you are just missing productive opportunities, thus, potential wealth.

Use the Pareto Principle

You’ll see it in a lot of areas in your life. It is saying that 80% of the effects come from 20% of your actions.

Apply this to a business: 80% of its revenues are generated from 20% of their clients. 80% of your sales are realized by 20% of your sales investments (marketing or HR), etc. 

You can apply this to sport, science, daily life, etc. 80% of the results we get come from 20% of the tasks we have completed.

This is a theoretical model but it works well in certain cases. 

What we must retain is that our hourly productivity is always fluctuating. Sometimes, in less than 3 hours, you are creating an advertisement that will boost your sales exponentially for the next months.

And sometimes, you’ll spend days or weeks, finish a task which won’t really push forward your business or project.

Know your Strength and Learn to Delegate

If you have the chance to work with a team or partners. You can delegate tasks that they would do better and vice-versa.

It is the best way to be more productive. It is the basis of exponential growth: We need more people and you need to know what you can outsource or delegate. 

You need to identify what you are the best at. And this takes some time. 

Doing everything by yourself is great, especially at the beginning. You are growing your skills and it lets you understand what you’re good or bad at.

As for me, I need some design help as I am better at writing. Which is why I have hired a graphic artist to help me with the thumbnail or the images of my blog posts. But I am still writing every post because I don’t want to delegate this even though I could.

But before, I was doing everything by myself, I learned Photoshop and I just did it because I didn’t have the funds to hire someone. 

Now, I am winning more time and can allocate it to bigger projects and that’s how I grow.

Don’t hesitate to seek external advice. Use your friends, your network, etc. Lots of my friends helped me. They knew about SEO and they explained it to me, they helped me with the name of my blog, etc. 

Conclusion

To stay productive every day requires lots of discipline. The great thing is that the more you are doing it, the more it can become a second nature. 

And it always feels great to achieve the tasks that lead to your main goal. 

However, I want to warn people seeking too much productivity. More and more people are subject to burnout,  especially if you are living in the city with a work that puts high pressure.

This psychological syndrome that affects stressed managers and employees is a negative effect often caused by too much productivity. If you are experiencing irritability, loneliness, cynicism or insomnia, you might need a real break.

Life is not a sprint.

It can be a marathon. And like every marathon, you need to be in good health and mental condition, to manage your effort and to know your strengths and weaknesses.

If you think this article is worth the read, share it to someone who needs to read it.