10 Life Productivity Hacks

During COVID-19, working from home has become the new norm. This is a new experience for many of us, and poses new challenges and distractions that can make it difficult to stay focused and productive.

I’ve been getting asked a lot lately about productivity, and so I thought I should dedicate an article to it.

In this post I will share my top 10 hacks for maintaining hyper-productivity every day.

1. Use Your Phone with Discipline

It doesn’t matter how focused you may be. With so many social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Fishbowl, your phone can destroy your focus for the day.

Checking your phone when you don’t plan to is a bad sign. It is almost a guarantee that you will check your phone multiple times later on. The more that cycle is repeated, the more your mind starts feeling mushy to the point where you can’t concentrate on anything anymore.

This used to get me every single time. And to this day, I don’t know how to regain focus once the cycle of phone checking has started.

In order to avoid checking my phone,  I only check my phone during designated breaks.

Want to take it a step further? Here is how to minimize distractions:

• Turn Off Notifications (including screen pop-ups): If a message is urgent, they’ll call you. If not, you will see the message when you check your phone in the pre-determined break.
• Delete Social Media Phone Apps: You don’t need to be in-the-know 24/7. You may think this is impossible, but deleting social media apps will make your mind feel so much clearer. Keep Messenger and LinkedIn since they are vital for communication. Delete everything else: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and …

Many people unintentionally waste dozens of hours a week on their phones. Even though checking your phone may just take a few minutes, the time adds up. Imagine what you could achieve if you had a few dozen more hours available to you each week.

2. Rise Early each Morning

The earlier you wake up, the more productive you will be.

If I wake up at 6am (and assuming that I’ve had adequate sleep), I have a stronger sense of “making the most out of it”. When noon comes around and I see everything I have accomplished and that it’s not even halfway through the day yet, I gain additional motivation to keep on going.

3. Exercise Regularly

If you have 14 free hours in a day, you should spend 1 hour exercising in the morning in exchange for 13 high-focus, high-productivity work hours.

Running and weightlifting are staples in my morning routine. I prioritize them over anything else because I know that if I miss my session, my productivity for the rest of the day will suffer.

Even during the heaviest consulting hours I’ve had thus far, I’ve never missed a workout. The key is to do it before work – when nothing can pop up to prevent you from exercising. Also, it really becomes too hard to find the motivation after work when you are both physically and mentally exhausted.

4. Clear your Mind

The more clutter in your mind, the more likely you are to become distracted, and the lower your productivity will become.

Here are a few easy ways to start de-cluttering your mind:

• Meditating – Meditate for 10 minutes every morning, right after you get up. Although this is the last thing you might think necessary to do after getting a good night’s sleep, regular meditation has helped to sharpen my focus.
• Journaling – If you don’t write it down, the clutter stays with you throughout the day and makes you more prone to distractions. I make sure to jot down my thoughts every single morning for 5 minutes. Whatever comes across my mind, I write it down. This helps to clear my mind of those thoughts. These could be my to do lists for the day, an addition to my bucket list, or even regrets from the day before.
• Jotting down thoughts and ideas – Whenever you have an interesting idea that you want to explore further, write it down. I have these come up during work all the time – I just quickly note it down somewhere, and get back to the task at hand.

The less clutter in your mind, the more focus you can give to the task at hand.

5. Set an Hour-by-Hour Schedule

Before you sleep at night, make a rough hour-by-hour schedule for the next day.

Having a plan gives me a sense of vision & clear goals for what I want to accomplish – a vital component of motivation. It can be difficult to achieve this as a consultant where meetings pop up from nowhere and work flows in sporadically. However, you need to get into the habit of it. Once you become senior enough to lead the full engagement, you’ll be the one who comes up with the plan, sets expectations, and delivers for the client.

When I wake up in the morning, at the point of my highest focus, I don’t waste that precious time by planning out my day and seeing what I “feel like doing”. I go straight to the tasks I told myself I’d do, in the order I wrote them down, and slowly but surely knock them out, one-by-one, within the planned timeframe.

Without a schedule, your productivity will be low by definition as you won’t have a clear focus.

6. Create a Productive Morning Routine

Your first 2 hours on any given day should be almost algorithmic.

For example, if I wake up at 6am, the start of my work day will look as follows:

• 6:00-6:05am: Make the Bed + freshen up
• 6:05-6:10am: Journal
• 6:10-6:20am: Meditate
• 6:20-6:30am: Make coffee
• 6:30-7:30am: Gym
• 7:30-7:55am: Shower and get ready
• 7:55-8:10am: Walk to Work

This is absolutely key every single day. If I break my routine, I’ve doomed my productivity for the day. How can I guarantee to mess up my productivity? Go on my phone as soon as I wake up. Or snooze the alarm. Or get distracted half-way through the routine and not complete it on time.

The more algorithmic your mornings become, the more tasks you will be able to knock out within the first 2 waking hours of your day.

7. Get Enough Sleep

No matter how busy life gets, you need to get enough sleep.

I have always gotten 5 to 6 hours of sleep, except on very rare occasions.

Similar with exercise, giving up an hour of sleep is not worth an extra hour of work if it means your productivity tomorrow will suffer. That effect alone undoes any benefits that an extra hour of work will bring you. Furthermore, that extra hour of work is presumably being done late at night, and so done with a sub-par focus.

In the long-run, lack of sleep can exacerbate mental burnout (been there, done that!). It’s a marginal boost in work output in exchange for both short and long-term negative consequences. Not worth it.

8. Knock over Tough Tasks in the Morning

We naturally have the highest energy in the morning, and it slowly decreases as the day goes on.

I tackle my most mentally-challenging tasks in the morning, leaving medium-difficulty ones for the afternoon, and leaving easy tasks for the evening. That way, I am efficiently allocating my time throughout the day, according to my natural energy levels, and knocking out a wide range of tasks as the day goes on.

However, I acknowledge that there are people who prefer to do the easy tasks first and then move on to the more challenging ones.

My tip would be to consider the priority of the work. Start with the more crucial tasks.

9. Take Breaks

As your energy is limited, an easy way to recharge is to take pre-timed breaks.

My worst days are when I work straight through the morning with no breaks. The morning and afternoon go by fine, but by the evening it becomes hard to maintain my focus.

I gladly take 10 minute breaks throughout the day in exchange for being able to focus for the entire evening.

In the morning, even if you don’t feel tired enough to take a break, force youself to take one anyway. It will help make your focus last for the rest of the day.

10. Eat Healthy

Last but not least, eat healthy. What you eat plays a vital role in shaping your body and mind.

Now that you are forced to work from home due to the global pandemic, you have more control over what you eat. Try to cook healthy meals or order something nutritious.

I tend to eat a light lunch as I feel bloated and drowsy otherwise. I fill my days with snacks like nuts and fruit.

Having a healthy body and healthy mind is the most important factor for being productive.

Final thoughts

As with anything that’s worth having in this life, there’s no magic pill to productivity. Productivity flows from daily self-discipline and effort.

I was never the most productive person, but I have learned to significantly increase my productivity over time. Hard work can be rewarded handsomely.

Jason Oh is a Senior Consultant, Strategy & Customer at EY with project experiences in commercial due diligence and corporate strategy planning. Previously, he was a Management Consultant at Novantas with a focus on the financial services sector, where he advised on pricing, marketing, channel distribution, digital transformation and due diligence.

Image: Pexels

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