We all want to increase productivity and achieve more in less time.

But we each have different Productivity Personas.

Some of us are super productive in the morning, whilst other small business owners I talk to can get a huge amount of productive work completed in the evening.

If you work from a home office, creating a productive morning routine can really set you up for a focused day.

Others use a powerful evening routine to set themselves up in advance for a productive day.

How to increase productivity 

The key to increase productivity is to understand and implement the productivity system that works best for you.

Here are 3 simple productivity tips you can use to increase productivity and allow you to achieve more in less time.

To help reduce overwhelm, plan your day more effectively, download my FREE Daily Productivity Planner to help your stay focused and productive DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE PRODUCTIVITY PLANNER

By following this framework, it will ensure you end every day with a sense of real achievement.

1. Reflect and recharge to increase productivity

During my previous life, as Managing Partner in a successful marketing agency, there were times when I struggled with managing my time and getting the most important things done.

I was trying to build the strategy, drive the business forward, dealing with clients and make myself available to everyone within my team.

This meant I struggled a bit with delegation and wanted to ensure that everything was being actioned and completed and the client was always happy.

Eventually I realised this wasn’t working and I needed to find a better way, a more strategic way to increase productivity.

How to increase productivity

To solve this, I started carving out more strategic thinking time, usually 30 minutes every day’.

This productive thinking time gave me the ability to spend at least an hour each day thinking big picture and outlining the bigger life and business goals.

Time often expanded to two hours usually at the end of each quarter.

Sometimes I did this in the morning and sometimes late at night.

The key was that I did this consistently.

It helped me increase productivity significantly.

This thinking time dramatically changed how I worked within the company, with my team and with my clients in two fundamental ways:

Remove distractions to increase productivity 

Having this time for thinking meant no emails, no firefighting or just dealing with stuff.

My team took more control of the day to day running of the business and the relationship with many clients.

This gave them time to think about how to maximise my time to produce the biggest results we wanted to achieve in the business.

Focus on longer term vision

This thinking time, gave me the chance to focus much more on long-term strategy and planning and focus on the shifts and opportunities available to grow the business.

I was able to focus on bigger goals and prioritise much better.  A number of very successful campaigns came out of this thinking time.

What would 30 minutes of thinking time every day do for your business?  How would it increase productivity?

2. Focus on the things that matter most

With the hectic lifestyles we now lead we are surrounded by distractions – at work and at home.

Emails, meetings, interruptions, social media updates, a huge To Do list.

It can feel never ending.

For many entrepreneurs it’s all about hard work and hustle and cramming a huge amount of things into your day.

With so many things buzzing around our minds how can we focus on the most important activities and remember the most important things?

If we see an article or video that will help us in our business or personal development what do we do with it?

We need help getting information out of our heads and into mental or remote buckets that we can focus on when needed.

Increase productivity by doing a brain dump

If you want to increase productivity, get everything that’s running through your mind down on paper.

Here’s how to do it:

• Build up a list of places where you can store the information and create categories for each idea
• When someone has recommended a restaurant I’ll place it in my restaurant list and bookmark the website for future viewing.
• If I really like an article I’ll email it to myself and save them to Pocket to view later.
• When I love something, be it an inspirational video or business article, I’ll save in my bookmarks under different categories.  I’ll create ones around personal development, inspiration, learning, things to do, productivity etc.
• If someone has recommended a book to you keep that information somewhere so you can refer back.  This could be as simple as bookmarking the page or adding it your basket on Amazon

The point is that you want to store this information quickly and make it easily accessible.

3. Make a decision and stick with it

One of my friends asked me the other day “Which book should I read first? Book A or Book B?”

The answer I always give is whichever one looks good to you.  The most important act is just to start, not to spend time procrastinating.

We have so many choices to make fuelled by recommendations, or reviews of the next big thing or a sense of fear of missing out (FOMO) is other people are doing things we’re not.

We often want to make the “perfect” decision or create something that’s perfect or in this instance read the perfect book.

Actually, the decision to start reading and choose to read consistently can be more important than the books you actually read.  It is just the act of starting.

Our choice perfection happens every day. We:

• Read numerous restaurant reviews before picking the right one
• We explore 10 sites or watch numerous videos to find ways to boost our social media presence
• We spend weeks analysing the best weight-loss programs or books instead of just picking one to start

Once you crack the code to increase productivity by just starting something, taking action and making a choice you’ll feel more liberated and free from some of life’s minutiae.

The most important thing is to make a choice stick with it and start doing it.

This will increase productivity instantly.

Focus on one idea or one thing.  This is worth far more than 100 great ideas that you, more often than not, will never take action on.

What action have you taken to increase your own productivity?

About the Author

Mark Pettit is the Founder of Lucemi Consulting and a small business coach to business owners who want to simplify their time, energy and focus so they can multiply their freedom, impact and results.

Get more articles, tips and tools to help you simplify your time to multiply your results on the blog.

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