Productivity Protips: How To Accomplish More Throughout Your Day

Let’s tackle distractions. These are easily one of the biggest factors in a loss of productivity. What can you do to get rid of these distractions? Firstly, turn off most notifications. Modern technology is all about giving us important info as soon as it’s relevant. You just can’t have enough of it and you’ll keep looking for more, such as social media, your email, news notifications, and such. These lull your senses into thinking that they deserve immediate attention; this goes back to the importance versus urgent discussion from the previous article. If these notifications are actually important to you, just turn off the audible and visual prompts then check on them during your break times, and be done for the day. This will save you a lot of time since you can see more at a glance rather than slowly being fed little bits of information.

Next, don’t overburden yourself. You might have hundreds of things to do, but the key to doing them all is to focus on a few specific things on a daily basis and complete those. Yes, this will leave the other tasks hanging but multi-tasking means less focus and very little progress for any of the tasks. If you try to multitask, one thing leads to another and another and at the end of the day, nothing has really been accomplished, or even worse, more work was added than done. Narrow down your daily focus to only a few goals at a time and get those accomplished.

Sometimes the best solution is to simply ignore some things. “Ignore” is a rather nasty word, but if you don’t learn to slow down the effects of distractions on your work, your important tasks won’t be receiving the attention that they deserve. Learn to postpone doing things that don’t need to be done immediately in favor of your important tasks. As long as you aren’t unhealthily stacking up your schedule before deadlines, this procedure won’t really change the end result since the tasks will be finished either way.

Important Takeaways: Distractions are easily one of the biggest factors in ruining your productivity. Some common distractions include notifications or the chain of work that comes from multitasking. For notifications, just turn them off then check on them all at once during designated breaks or freetime elsewhere. If you try to multitask, you won’t end up getting much done due to a lack of focus, and in the worst cases, you’ll create more work for yourself than you started with.

Just focus on a few tasks on a daily basis and slowly build up a bunch of check marks rather than checking off everything at once. Sometimes, you should simply be ignoring things that can be postponed for a later date. As long as you evenly distribute your schedule, what gets done now and what gets done later doesn’t matter since it’ll all be done anyways. Everything doesn’t need to happen in an instant, so just pace yourself and save your sanity.

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I'm Daniel Doan, the Co-Founder of Black Shell Media. Thank you so much for reading!

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