New Years Resolution #1: Be More Productive

Most of us would like to be more productive, but it’s hard to resolve to be more productive if we think it means living with a cattle prod in our backs. There’s more to life than just work, after all, and most of us are already working hard enough as it is.

We don’t have to work harder, though, to be more productive. We need to work smarter, and it’s not as tough as it sounds.

Get up an hour earlier

Successful people tend to wake up earlier than everyone else. So do what they do. Get up earlier.

You don’t necessarily have to start work an hour earlier. You certainly can, but it isn’t required. Just get out of bed.

Take an extra hour for yourself to do whatever it is you’d be doing if you had the day off. Take a walk. Read a book. Go out for breakfast. Write another page or two in your novel.

When it’s time to start working, you’ll be fully awake, fed and relaxed while everyone else is rushing into the office with nothing but a to-go cup of coffee in their stomachs and sleep inertia clouding their minds. You’ll be that chipper morning person that everyone hates, but you’ll get more done and you’ll feel better.

Create your own deadlines

Deadlines are great motivators. They keep us on schedule. They force us to be disciplined.

They can also be sources of stress. Not once in the history of deadlines has anything good happened because somebody missed one.

So create your own advance deadlines. If a project is due in two weeks, quietly impose your own deadline in ten days.

Chances are, you’ll get your work done early. And you’ll be less stressed because if you miss the artificial deadline, no biggie.

Say no to optional meetings and other distractions

If you sit through an entire meeting at work without saying a word or writing anything down on your notepad, perhaps you did not need to be there.

If you work from home and find yourself making a grilled cheese sandwich during a phone conference, you’re either goofing around on the job or you could have better spent your time on something else.

We feel like we’ve accomplished something at the end of a meeting, though, even if we just sat there taking up space.

An hour-long meeting burns up more than just an hour of time. Chances are you won’t be doing anything productive for at least fifteen minutes ahead of time and for at least fifteen minutes afterward.

So if a meeting is optional, just say no and stick to what matters.

Stop pretending you can multitask

If you think you can multitask, think again.

“Humans don’t really multitask – we task switch,” says Eyal Ophir, the primary researcher on the pioneering Stanford Multitasking study.

“Our brains are serial machines, so we just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we’re multitasking. So when we found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a classic test of task-switching, it was like finding out that these heavy media multitaskers were worse at multitasking.”

That’s a bit counterintuitive, to be sure, but keep reading.

Recent research suggests that the cost of task switching is rooted in cognitive interference from the irrelevant task set: interference from all those thoughts about the task you’re NOT doing. Every task you do competes for your mental resources, even once you think it’s no longer relevant.

The more you do, the more you increase this competition. So that momentary interruption is still fighting for some of your mental resources even when you’d like to focus back on your main task. The more competing tasks you take on, the more interference you must overcome to fully dedicate yourself to what’s really important.

What may be worse is that over time you may be training yourself NOT to focus. You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner – behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the email you haven’t checked.

Take plenty of breaks

Seriously.

A long work day isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s longer than a marathon, actually.

The median time to finish running a marathon (26.2) miles, is a little longer than four hours for men and a little less than five hours for women.

The average workday, meanwhile, is eight hours long. Nine if you count the lunch break.

So don’t try to sprint through it. Even the best athletes in the world can only sprint for a couple of minutes before flaming out.

The human body can only run for so long before losing energy, and the human brain can only focus for so long before it’s running on empty.

“Our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself,” says Psychology Professor Alejandro Lleras at the University of Illinois. “Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!”

Turn off the Internet

When it is time to focus, however, you do need to actually focus. Checking your email or Facebook or your favorite blogs every five minutes is not the kind of break your mind needs at work.

Some of us have a hard time restraining ourselves, but there’s an app for that. It’s called Freedom. It will block any and all web sites on your computer for whatever amount of time you specify.

You can turn the Internet off for eight hours if you really want to go for it, but it’s probably best to use Freedom in 30 or 60 minute intervals. It will all but force you to stay focused during that time.

A pop-up window will tell you when the time has elapsed and you have web access again. That’s your cue to take the break your mind needs. Go for short walk. Refill your coffee mug. Chat up your friends in the break room.

Then get back to work!