7 Quick Hacks To Improve Your Productivity

7 Simple Hacks To Better Your Productivity

How do you become more productive?  Is it something that is undefinable or is there a way to improve your productivity?

There are all types of definitions on productivity and various metrics on determining what makes someone more productivity. For example, in Chron magazine, they define the concept of productivity through the metrics of employee output divided by the hours taken to accomplish that specific metric.

1 - Do What You Can Complete The Fastest: 

A task like taking the trash out should only take a couple minutes.  Get it done as early as possible.  The point is to get it done so that it doesn't interfere with your workflow later. Additionally, as discussed on the Simple Programmer blog, doing the easiest tasks first gets small, incremental gains accomplished and gives you momentum toward accomplishing more difficult tasks.

2 - Stop Multi-Tasking:

Concentration and focus are twin engines toward accomplishment.  The idea that we are more productive juggling different tasks is just plain wrong.  Try reading a book while talking about a topic completely disconnected from the material you're reading.  It's an impossible task.  Our brains can't handle that type of input/output effectively, it takes an extra-level of concentration and while you may be able to masterfully handle one of these tasks, you can't master both.

3 - Tackle The Most Difficult First:

There's an article on Lifehacker that details the importance of tackling the most difficult tasks first. In it, the discussion is about knowledge acquisition and how when we first set out to learn something, we read about the details until we grasp them.  Slowly mastery of the subject grows, but the emphasis is on the idea that to learn the concepts on a meta-level, you first need to take on more challenging tasks to learn.  Second, with a finite amount of will power and energy to devote to any particular task, doing the most difficult tasks first will allow you to complete more tasks overall.  Why? Because getting the difficult ones out of the way first, we devote large amounts of energy to them, so that when we get to simpler tasks, we are utilizing an appropriate amounts of will power to those tasks.

4 - Break Large Important Tasks Into Small Ones:

Every marathoner knows that in order to train for a marathon, you have to segment your training into smaller, more manageable distances.  The reasons for this are two-fold: First, it's extremely taxing to run the distances, and Second, the amount of time needed to recover is built-in to this training concepts. You need to think big, act small to better your productivity output.

5 - Use The Pomodoro Technique:

The Pomodoro Technique is a tactic that the person utilizing it sets a timer for a short amount of time, typically 20 minutes.  During the length of time allowed, the person works as intensely as they can and at the conclusion of the timer, they take a short break, typically 5 minutes, from the tasks. This is the 80/20 rule broken into time.

6 - Pace Yourself - Set A Time Limit And Take A Break:

Even as you implement a technique like the Pomodoro one discussed above, research is proving that more productive work is done after an immediate break or vacation. The reason for this is the recovery time allows you to regain energy stores much like an athlete or author.  For the athlete, they know that they have to break down their training into cycles and phase those with proper recovery time.  Ideally recovery needs to be 6x the work load, i.e. 2 hours of work, 12 hours of recovery. Every author knows that while they don't want to break the momentum of their writing, they also need time to think and relax from what the work they were doing previously.

A recent article in Entrepreneur magazine discusses the importance of breaks influencing productivity. The New York Times emphasized the point even more in their article titled "Relax, You'll Be More Productive!"

One way to recuperate and speed up your recovery time is simple: Get More SLEEP

7 - Don't Believe The Myth Of Hyper-Productivity:

We all have limitations. Limitations can exist in our physical endurance, mental willpower, finances, genetics, even sociability. We also only have the same amount of hours as everyone else.  24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That doesn't mean that you can be productive the entire time.  It's a falsehood, one that is perpetuated by the stereotype of the "Puritan Work Ethic."

My Kindle Publishing Journey Updates

 Announcing Another Short Story 

It's Not The Things We Say

When I started my Kindle Publishing journey, I released a short story titled The Ballad of John Walker: A Short Story and there was a decent amount of steam behind it.

Many of you picked it up, some even left reviews!

And amazon reviews are the gold standard for Amazon.  It acts as social proof and validation, and Amazon's algorithm rewards items and books with higher number of reviews.

Click Here To Write A Review

I discussed all the nuances, lessons learned and strategic decisions I made on a post earlier titled "The 3 Things I Learned Releasing 3 Stories In 3 Months." You can read it by clicking on the title above.

After I released The Ballad of John Walker: A Short Story, I quietly published a collection of 3 short stories under the title Mayonnaise and Other Stories: A Mostly Made-Up Account Of Life In The World Today.

Priced at $1.99 for 3 stories, the downloads have been alright but not as good as The Ballad of John Walker.  Reviews are less for Mayonnaise than for Ballad, but hopefully that will right itself in time.

Announcing A New Title - It's Not The Things We Say

What happens when you reach a point in a relationship when you just don't know how to talk to each other?

Tack on a tragedy and how do you overcome that schism?

That's the question I examined in the short story It's Not The Things We Say.



 It's on Amazon's Kindle Publishing platform and you can download it for $0.99 right now by clicking THIS LINK.

2 Simple Ways To Overcome Your Greatest Challenges In Minutes A Day

Become A Master In Just Minutes A Day

The greatest challenge to anything we want to achieve, whether it's my kindle publishing journey, an athlete trying to win a game, or a musician to master the lines of a play or musical score isn't what you think.

It's not money, or time, or passion.  Those are all great hurdles that must be overcome.

But for you to accomplish anything that matters, you have to over come one obstacle that is greater than the rest.

Doubt.

It's easy to doubt what we know in the heat of the moment, or what we have done countless times before.

How is it that doubt has such a strong pull on us?

Whether we're playing music, or as an athlete, a writer, actor or even a fireman, doubt serves a number of purposes.

We all experience doubt at some point of our lives.  It usually stems from a feeling of being overwhelmed, unprepared or not ready for the task at hand.

I recently published 3 short stories on Amazon's Kindle Publishing platform and wasn't sure how they would do.  These were stories I wrote some time ago and had multiple readers on so I was aware of how their general reception may be.

But I still had doubt.

Doubt in my abilities as a writer. Doubt in whether I could get them uploaded properly onto the Kindle Publishing page and promoted through Amazon.

Worse yet, I doubted whether anyone would notice.

Doubt is natural, yet it plays a malicious role in our minds.

However, on one level, doubt also serves as a survival mechanism.

It tells the baser, lessor part of our brains what traps to avoid, and what to fear.

In essence, doubt serves as the catalyst to fear.

For example:

It's 2 a.m. and you're dead asleep in your bed.  In the other room, the smoke detector sounds and you shoot up like a jack-in-the-box from bed with your heart in your throat and ears, deadening the sound. The room is still and dark. You don't smell any smoke and there doesn't appear to be the orange hue of flicker-flames lighting your room.  As the alarm stops and you listen. You listen some more. There's nothing but your breathing making any sound, and you still don't smell any smoke. Do you get out of bed to check around your place, or do you lay back down and fall asleep, only to wake again and again, unsure if the house is on fire?

Doubt can also prove to be a positive thing as in the example above.  Doubting whether all is calm, or whether you should examine your house for flames is a way of protecting yourself.

Doubt can also cause us to overreact.

Paralysis By Analysis: The Comfort of Staying On The Sidelines 

Paralysis by analysis, the process of overthinking before taking action.

Usually it's a coping mechanism that we use to stall our perceived fear of being unready, of being afraid to fail.

Too often it can dominate the mind of even the most accomplished individual.

To overcome this stalling technique, you need to leap before you feel ready.  There's always something more to learn, to study, to know.  But by taking small detailed steps, you can be confident in the area's you've mastered.



As athletes we can doubt our preparation.  The doubt could be in conditioning, or in the tactics or game plan.

We may worry about missing our relay exchange, or making a bad throw to a receiver, or missing the game winning free throw, even though these are relative tasks performed hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the daily ritual called practice.

For an actor or singer, flubbing a line that's rehearsed over and over again is akin to standing naked in front of the audience.  It ruins the moment, we "fall on our face" in front of a crowd.  Nothing is more terrifying than standing out in front of people you know, and some you don't, being ridiculed and recognized as a failure.

This doubt is an experience we all share.  The problem is that if we focus our energy on it, then becomes metastasized to something multiple times greater, fear.

And fear can also lead to paralysis by analysis.

"Paralysis by Analysis" is the process of overcompensating our fears by studying and preparing on our weaknesses without ever taking any action.

Thing is, once a little doubt creeps into our thoughts, it can grab hold and become insidious, wreaking havoc on your confidence in even the mundane tasks such as your personal warm-up routine.

It's a slippery slope, one that is easy to fall down.

Questions about out abilities and our preparation evolve from ones such as "am I good enough" to become "I'm not good enough to do x, y, z" in short time.

The onerous grip that doubt can play on our minds can lead to confusion, fear, and lack of action.

My own doubt about my writing and kindle publishing journey has made me rethink my ideas and how I've promoted my stories.

I've read countless books, blog posts and articles on the subject, trying to understand more about how to write, how to publish and how to promote the stories.

All because the doubt made me stand on the sidelines versus getting in the game.

So how do we conquer our doubt before it transmutates to overwhelming fear?

(Yes, I know "transmutates" is a derivative of tranmutation: the act of changing from one to another form and relates to shifting physical forms from one shape to the next. In physics it deals with the change that stems from an external force creating some new form or shape. As I'm using it here is a version I stole from a song that is a conjunction of transformation and mutation).

The key to overcoming doubt before it transmuates into something greater is to have detailed plans on how you prepare and to implement those plans in small incremental doses of time to allow mastery to take place.

Practice Makes Permanent  

Along with others such as Malcolm Gladwell and James Clear, I've written before about the concept of planning as relates to practice and mastery.


In order to achieve desired results that are born of confidence, you need to create small, incremental actions that are highly detailed for practice.

Perfect practice makes perfect.


So, in order to overcome doubt, there are two things we need to do.

1) First, create small, detailed lists of tasks that you can replicate over and over with regularity.  Think of a musician practicing their scales on the guitar.  You can go through the motions, learn the fingering and play a scale in a major key without problem.

But to become truly exceptional (or at least competently average) you need to practice a specific scale, in time, and with rhythm.  To play the scales forward, then back, perhaps only playing the root and second note of the scale, or starting at a different note and working around the scale from there would all be detailed tasks that you could learn to master in short time.

2) The second thing to building confidence and overcoming doubt is mastery through duration.

No, I don't mean playing the scales over and over again until rote memorization.  That may work for naming dates from a history book, but won't help you master the scales in any tangible way.

You need to work on a small selection of details that you hope to master in a short duration spread over time.

Our brains are an organ, true.  They are also considered a muscle and like all muscles they have a finite amount of energy and constantly need to be replenished.  To think that we can focus for long periods of time without fatigue is a failure of understanding of how the brain functions.

Short periods of highly focused time with breaks and rest-in-between activities is invaluable.  In past articles on time management, I've detailed the concept of the Pomodoro Technique - a technique that places focus on short intense periods of work, followed by short rest breaks.

Spend 10 minutes on a task.  Make your focus laser-tight. Take a short break from that activity and begin again.  Eventually you'll build up enough "endurance" to move onto another skill.

As Earnest Hemingway is credited with saying when talking about writing; "Write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence you know."

The concept of writing one true sentence a day is a better way to master the art and skill of writing than trying to sit down and write a 600 page Russian opus.

The volume of pages, the quality of writing are all too daunting.

It's the small doses of highly focused practice that makes the biggest difference over a long period of time.

In other words, short, intense durations of highly focused activity have been proven methods to achieve mastery.

As proof, Charles Duhigg writes in his outstanding work about the power of habit formation and the reason behind what we do in his book, THE POWER OF HABIT. He details the science behind how we build habits, and that the key to establishing new patterns is to understand how habits are formed in the first place.

The point being, by taking short focused actions, we can achieve mastery of smaller functions.  By mastering smaller functions, we adopt confidence in our abilities, which in turn gives fuel to our performances.

No matter how accomplished or studied we are, doubt creeps in from time to time.

For creative types, it happens moment to moment and second by second.

Doubt can serve as a powerful survival mechanism and it can also be debilitating.

Regardless of how you feel doubt, the key to overcoming it is in mastering small details.

How To Stop Sucking At Your Time Management

The Challenges Of Time Management

This is not a post about kindle direct publishing.

It is about a necessary skill to learn - time management.

Time management is a skill learned and honed through decisive actions.

It's a juggling act of three things: Prioritization, organization, and self discipline.

Finding the right balance will help you improve your productivity.


We all are busy.  Research shows that Americans LOVE - in all caps - to be, and feel busy.


Perhaps its the consumer culture we are raised in.  To keep up with the "Joneses", we feel we have to work harder to get more things.

It could be the poverty of time and how we perceive to be busy, even when we're not.  It's all perception born of leisure.

It could be the Puritan Work-Ethic we were taught as kids. It's a status symbol of dystopian proportions.

The first step in any journey is to get organized.

Self Discipline, Time Management And Increasing Productivity By Doing Less

Everyone of us knows what it's like to have too many tasks and not enough time to do them all.

It's like dining at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  You take a little sample of vegetables, some pasta, a little chicken or fish, some salad and bread.  Before you know it, you have too much food on too little a plate.

This post is more about self-discipline, time management, and tactics to help you improve your productivity regardless of your tasks than anything about my Kindle Publishing journey.

I believe that these are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Actions take discipline and discipline requires organization.

But what do we do when there's more than just one action that's required?

For a writer, self-discipline is just as much a struggle as it is for a tuba player.

Or a student with homework; or a UPS delivery driver just starting their daily route.

The Burden of Demands

With any task or job, it's easy to get a sense of overwhelming.

We all have someone we're responsible to, a boss, teacher, coach.  If you're independent, congratulations, that's great!  But with that independence comes a different struggle. That's the distraction of freedom.

Whatever the demands, the only way you're going to get anything of value accomplished is by self-discipline.

There's too many details in the report; there's not enough time to get that project done in time for close of business; I have too much homework are all great examples.

We all feel it from time to time, what I think of as "the burden of demands."

So how do we overcome this challenge?

By setting up an organizational outline that places emphasis on the important things and minimizes the less important tasks we have.

This is a process of prioritization.  It's an important aspect of time management skills.

What Is Prioritization? 

Prioritization is the process of putting order to things. Of making a choice.

The most important is first, then the next important and finally the least important thing comes in last.

The idea here is that you place what is of greatest value first.  It could be a homework assignment, or it could be a phone call you need to make to a supplier for your product line.

For writers, it's placing the order to how you're going to write that next chapter in your story arc. In a story, you wouldn't place the climax ahead of the character development and expect to elicit the same reaction from your readers.

Prioritization is instinctual, but for some reason we allow the burden of demands to overwhelm our thinking and short circuit our organization.

Once you've decided on the order of importance, you need to stick with it.  Don't let S.O.S - Shiny Object Syndrome - distract you.

Stay on task until you finish one, and then move on to the next one.

Again, don't let S.O.S. become your message.

I like to think of this quote I was given by a friend a long time ago: "just because it's important to you doesn't make it urgent for me."

Prioritization Is Set and Done, What's Next?

Once you have the order of importance set - prioritization - the next step is to take your task and cut it up into smaller, more manageable portions.

Think about it like a pizza.  You're hungry, with some cash in your pocket, so you walk into your local pizza joint and order a large pizza with the works.

After about 10 minutes the pizza arrives, hot and ready.

You can't just shove the whole pie in your mouth.  It doesn't work that way - besides, you'd burn the $h!T out of your mouth!

You take a slice, cool it down and take one bite.  You eat the pie one bite at a time!

So micro-prioritization is the next step in your process.

So how does this work?  Let's say you have three projects to get done.

• First, list them in order of importance, that is, what is the one thing you need to get done.  
• Next, think about how you can break that task up into a couple easier manageable, smaller slices as it were. 
• Finally, take that bite-sized task and begin.

The Pomodoro Technique - 80 percent activity/20 percent recovery

By organizing your tasks into the order of importance and then breaking them up into smaller and smaller pieces, you're making it easier to be more effective in less time.

Your efficiency does have limits, however.  It's not just a matter of organization that will help you.

Understand that we all have limits on our productivity, our performance, and our attention spans.
The trick then is to take your tasks and manage your energy with them.

There's a little technique that is called the Pomodoro Technique.

It says that to increase your productivity, you need to set manageable tasks within a finite amount of time.

What the Pomodoro Technique stresses is high, intensive levels of activity but in short duration.

It's the Crossfit of time management!

For those that don't know about Crossfit, it's a H.I.I.T program of fitness.

The routine is High Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T) that calls for extreme action followed by intervals of short rest.

For those of you not too worried about fitness and wondering what that has to do with productivity, time management, and self-discipline, here's how it works:

Take a small project like we discussed already.

Say it's a chapter in your book. You've organized what you're going to write about, the general path you want to go, and you sit down to write it out.

You need more skills and organization than just the ability to write. You need to set manageable pathways that you can follow to become more efficient at your task of writing.  In so doing you'll increase your productivity.

Set A Time Limit

Before you begin to work, however, the technique calls for setting a timer. Preferably a short time limit, like 20 minutes.

When the timer goes off, stop writing and walk away.

Give yourself 5 minutes off.  No exceptions!

It's the 80/20 rule of time management.  80 percent of your time is actively focused with 20 percent completely devoid of that activity.

As you can break down the tasks faster and much more efficiently without any loss of concentration, you can slowly increase your time to work but need to keep the 80/20 rule in place.

The Rule Of Three

In writing, there's a principle called "The Rule of Three".

What the rule claims is that things that appear in three's are more appealing, funnier and easier to remember for the audience than any other combination.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a prime example of this concept.

The form dictates that there could be three lines, or three repetitive words. Three acts are better developed, have more action and more power than a novel or play with Four acts.

That's why when we talk about writing, we claim that there's a beginning, middle and end.

For Time Management And Self Discipline, the" Rule of Three" can be broken down another way.

In the popular blog, Paid To Exist by Jonathan Mead - he writes about time management skills from a different perspective.

In an article about morning routines titled HOW TO WAKE UP ON FIRE - he writes that you have to have a plan of action for the morning.

Furthermore he writes that the tips he has for being at his most productive is having clearly defined goals, setting down and getting to work and limiting actions to the most important things on his check list to just three things.

His biggest point is stick to the rule of three.

Get the three things MOST IMPORTANT done.  Then if you have time and energy you can do more.

But only after the three things are done.

Time Management Is Easy - If You Can Get Organized

Time management is not inbred.  We are evolutionarily designed to eat, sleep and procreate.  

Time and the demands we place on it are modern constructs, sacrifices we choose to live in a civilized world.  

And time management is a skill that is learned over time, one to be honed to a fine edge like a razor on the grindstone. 

Tasks, responsibilities and obligations can all seem like burdens that overwhelm us; a 50 pound bag on our shoulders while we walk through the metaphoric mud of the day. 

Finding the right balance between doing what we have to with the right order to do them is an intractable part of honing that skill. 

By using prioritization then breaking the tasks into smaller portions with focused attention for manageable durations will allow us to make huge strides in our productivity.   

Additionally, if we abide by the rule of three, we'll see specific metrics achieved easier and more efficiently. 

Combining these concepts will help you with your time management, become much more efficient in your day and increase your overall productivity. 

The first step is getting organized!