HOW TO BUILD A PRODUCTIVE DAY
SETTING YOUR DAY UP FOR PRODUCTIVITY
Part of being productive is setting yourself up to have a productive day in the first place, these are our top four things to set the foundations for a productive day.
HAVE A MORNING ROUTINE
A pretty obvious starting point for us, but having a morning routine 92% of highly productive people have a morning routine.
Building a Morning Routine that works for you is the key to productivity, it brings stillness and the ability to be productive by removing distractions, decision paralysis, and things that don’t serve you.
SCHEDULE YOUR TIME
We built out our morning routines because having set times in the morning gives you the best foundation and makes sure you’re on track with your goals and everything you want to achieve in life. This concept of scheduling your time can extend through your day as well.
The best structure to promote productivity is to know what you want to get done (see our basics on productivity to understand that what you want might be to watch rubbish tv in your sweats) and then block out your day to make sure you’re utilising your time meaningfully.
You can schedule your time within your workday as well, our daily schedule follows the same structure. Our Morning Routine, time for our most important task, meetings and deep work time split into projects or things we want to do, movement time and then something that brings us joy (at the minute it’s reading Still Life). During these blocks of time, turn off notifications and live in the moment of what you are trying to use your time for. We have small check in’s daily for notification checking.
USE THE 80/20 RULE
The first 20% of your time or effort brings in 80% of the results. Often called the Pareto Principle, this thinking is that you apply as much of your effort into the 20% as possible and eliminate the remaining 80% because this won’t serve you as effectively. Look through all the tasks that you could perform in your given time, now pick up the 20% that would be the most effective. Whatever time you have left in your scheduled time can be spent on the remaining 80% but you may have found that you’ve moved closer to your goals than necessary.
MANAGE YOUR TASKS
A fundamental building block in the foundation of achieving everything you want is the ability to manage your tasks. This is the final part of your productivity structure. You have a morning routine, the rest of your day scheduled and your first 20% of each block is used on your most important tasks, now the layer on this is the ability to manage your tasks.
This is something that we have put at the end of the structure as we tend to do it the night before. We (should) all have a big to-do list, and how you manage this will be the lever of productivity.
Your tasks should be properly written out (ie. clean the house is not a task, it is too big, a task is to hoover the floor, or wash the basin. Make sure that your tasks are actually tasks in the first instance.
Rank your tasks in order of priority, urgent, important, and low priority. This helps feed into both your one task for the day and your 20/80 rule
Remove any task that isn’t 100% necessary. Sometimes we have a brain dump and think we have a lot to do (some even revel in having a long to-do list). The best to-do lists are small and manageable. Remove anything that you don’t need to do
Now manage your to-do list well. We audit daily to make sure it’s well tracked and managed and we recommend you do the same. If your goals and morning routine is set up properly this will be a quick job that will set you up for the best morning the next day!
