6 Hacks To Improve Your Productivity That You Can Start Right Now

6 Simple Ways To Get More Done In Less Time

There always seems to be more tasks and demands than we have time for. So how do you get everything you need to be done completed?

Understand that there are 24 hours in a day.  How you prioritize how you use those hours can dictate your productivity and output.  So how do we improve our productivity and decrease the amount of time we need to do the task?

Specifically to writing, there are 6 tips that will help you become more efficient, getting more writing and in less time.

The 6 Tips To Writing More, Faster

1. Set a Deadline:  Nobody likes deadlines, but the make us get to work.  Think about school.  You had a paper to write for a month, but you waited until the night before.  Your procrastination game was strong. And it probably still is, so setting a deadline is critical to actually getting your work done.

2. Outline: Having an idea and the flow of how you plan to explain your thoughts is crucial.  It will help keep you on track, and will give you ways out of stumbling down the wrong avenues.

Know the Who, What, Why and How for your reader and most important, know your subject.

3. Write In The Flow: Think stream of consciousness here.  You decided on an outline, but get lost in the process.  A meandering brook will run to the sea eventually.  The trick is using your outline to guide your writing more efficiently, but you still should get lost and wander when you have the room.
It makes your writing more interesting and with a momentum than just sticking to your script. It makes your writing more human and natural sounding to the ear.

4. Edit:  This is the most time demanding of all.  As the carpentry maxim says: "Measure twice, cut once," editing is more of a 1 to 2 ratio.  In other words, write with the flow, but spend at least twice the amount of time in the editing phase.

Good writing is the process of great editing.  Great writing is learning from amazing editing.

5. Set a Timer:

Other wise known as the Pomodoro Method, what you need to do is set a timer for a limited amount of time, say 20 minutes, to write in a highly intense segment. Once the timer is over, take a short break of 5 minutes (80% work, 20% recovery). But the break needs to be adhered to for your next segment to be as functional!  

By focusing ton he processes discussed above, you'll find you'll be able to write better prose and at a faster pace.

It takes dedicated practice over sustained time to make a new habit, and learning to write faster is no different than any other skill acquisition.

Foundations Of A Great Blog Post

How To Cure A Writing Hangover

In this post, we'll discuss how writing without a plan can be a lot like a long night out drinking. And we'll examine the benefits of building a solid foundation for your blog article by identifying the WHO, WHAT, WHY, and HOW to prevent the hangovers.

At the beginning of March, I set out to post a new blog post every day until the end of the month.  That would equal 31 posts for the month.  3-1 posts.  That's a lot of original content to come up, write about, set images to and promote.

And as I got into the project, I found it harder and harder to meet my deadlines.

It was thrilling to attempt that much content - I even planned (and had) extra posts written, just sitting around as drafts as just-in-case scenarios that may have come up.

And I still failed. 

Still, when thinking about it, I wrote a ton of words, but the failure to miss a publishing day felt much like a hangover.

I wrote about how to set and achieve goals, time management tips and how to improve your productivity by defining your passion, commitment and establishing discipline.

There were posts about how planning is a central cinderblock to success.

Again, I still failed.

It was an ambitious goal of mine, especially knowing my personal weakness. It was a fun ride while it lasted, a little too fun.  And by failing - even by a couple of minutes as I did on Saturday (posting at 12:03 am Sunday) - I didn't write yesterday because of a writing "hangover."

Confidence Is Experiential: How Doing Builds Our Ability To Do It Again

When this project started, I wasn't sure I would be able to pull it off.  So I announced the plan publicly even though research suggests that by announcing my goals, I had less of a chance to pull it off.

But there were a number of things I learned along the way that will help me continue the challenge, or in my next one.

For example, in trying to be something, I'm not - a more prolific writer - I learned the power of planning, outlining, and still fell short.

Yup, I'm a slow writer - slow in the sense that I like to churn ideas around in my head for a while, making it condense and solidify for great effect and flavor - it's a lot like making ice cream.  If you go to fast, the ice cream doesn't freeze, too slow and the ice cream becomes too frozen, like ICED cream.

For me, my style is that I like to gestate an idea for days before committing it to paper.  Thinking about the factors that will allow the story to have a solid foundation, timeline, and a complete arc to the concept takes me a while.  Like a great pot roast is best at low temperatures and over time, my writing is like slow cooking.

Think about the foundations of your posts as needing to include:

Foundations of A Great Blog Post:

• WHO: Who is going to read this post?

• WHAT: What is the idea you're trying to convey? 

• WHY: Why should they care about your post?

• HOW: How is the post going to help your reader?

Once these foundations are established, you can then go about shaping your article.

Thinking about your reader and what idea you have to share with them, as well as why they should care and how the idea/topic/concept will help them, will go a long way to helping you, the writer, stay on task and create something worthwhile.

Finally, it's awesome you want to share with the world.

Trying to make sense of those people and events around us, about our existence and what it means, are the motivations behind many artists and why they get into the arts in general.

But understand, the reader can be selfish.  So tell them what they can benefit from and why they should care. It's by showing them your work, your process and that you're interested in helping them that will make the biggest difference in your writing.

Remember, enjoy yourself, but don't overindulge.  It's not about you. If you make it about yourself, you may end up with a hangover of sorts.

#showyourwork

Find The Solutions In Your Failure

Failure

We've all dealt with failure of some sort in our lives.

Defined simply as:

"lack of success."

Failure is simply anything other than a desired or expected outcome.

Perhaps you played a sport and lost a game that you coulda, shoulda, woulda won.

You tried out for a play but couldn't remember the lines.

In high school, you sat in class dreaming of asking Sam to a dance.  One day you finally get up the courage to ask.  So you approach with caution in the hall way, approach them at the locker and ask.  They laugh in your face.

Or you set out to accomplish a goal of publishing 31 posts in 31 days, only to fall short of the deadline one Saturday night by 3 minutes.  That means I didn't complete the task I wanted to achieve.

At the family birthday party you show up late and no matter how you slice the cake, there's not enough to go around.  So you don't get a piece.

Failure is only the end if we don't take what we learn and apply it to a new avenue, a new endeavor, a reset of the same goal.

Failure then, is when you quit.

The trick is to continue to find solutions where none appear to exist.

When discussing his problem with the electric lighbulb Thomas Edison is quoted as saying;

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that don't work." 

The Research Behind Why You Fail Your At Your Goals

How We Benefit From Incremental Gains

We set goals in order to accomplish them.  Or at least that's how the thinking goes.

We create plans on how we're going to get to the finish line.  We repeat these behaviors everyday hoping to see some improvement.

But more often than not, we fail.

Why is it that once we set a goal, we're more likely than not to fail?

Some goals we set may be too improbable, or impossible even.

It could be a lack of time, energy or resources.

Perhaps it was too unclear. The path to achievement too unsure.

Most likely we didn't focus on the right things.

If we focus our attention on micro-accomplishments, we have a much greater opportunity at succeeding on the goals we set.

When I started this blog, it was to document my process of using kindle publishing as a platform for my short stories.

Along the way I learned that short stories are a hard, difficult trek.

But I kept on writing.

I may not have published more stories lately, but I've published a number of blog posts covering a wide swath of topics (some may say too many topics): posts on how to improve productivity, goal setting, time management, and confidence building through experience.

But the point of this post is to focus on the power of micro-accomplishments as fuel toward achieving your goals.

The Power Of Micro-Gains

In a post on James Clear's blog, about the aggregation of marginal gains he tells the story of a coach for the British cycling team.  The focused on making just 1% improvements on the small details, from the obvious like nutrition for an athlete, all the way down to what type of pillow would allow each cyclist to get the optimal level of rest and recovery.

With proper execution, the goal was to finish as champions of the Tour de France in 5 years.

The coach was wrong.  It only took 3 years to be named champions.

The idea was that the aggregate amount of each of this small improvements were easier to accomplish, simpler to maintain and would result in a much greater output in results.

It was the ultimate implementation of the concept: "The sum of the parts is greater than the whole."

Seeing your goals through to the end is an important first step.  But knowing what steps to take in order to achieve your objective is even more important.

Plan The 20% Of Your Efforts That Yields the Best Results

What's Your Process

Productivity is a by product of efficient process.

Procrastination is another.

In a previous post we discussed how defining your passion would improve your productivity.

In another recent post we discussed the myth of hyper-productivity.

There've been articles and posts about how to improve your productivity, better time management tips and ideas for self-improvement.

All of these concepts are by-products of another concept put to action, and that is "process."

Process is defined as "a serious of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end."

 It is, in other words, what you do in a sequence of steps to achieve a desired outcome.

If you want to train for a marathon, there are a series of training methods and ideas to help.  Of course you need to train the requisite number of times - i.e. be "in shape" to best run a marathon, but a process of training would help you maximize your ability.

If you want to learn a foreign language, there are ways to learn quickly, but for most people and most learners, there's a process of language acquisition that takes a dedicated amount of repetition over extended time.

One of the more important concepts in the school of productivity and process is the Pareto Principle.

Otherwise known as the 80/20 rule, the Pareto Principle is the idea that you get 80% of your results from 20% of your actions.

Understanding this dynamic between effort and outcome is crucial to your overall success. By focusing on the 20% that yields the best 80% of your results, you'll accomplish more with less effort.

The trick then, is to develop a process that builds on the 20% that yields the highest gains.