How to Start Using a Simple but Efficient Productivity Technique

The search for a productivity technique that will make you more efficient and effective will be something of the past after this article.

Searching for the optimal productivity technique is valid for any type of organization or activity in life. Often we set an efficient productivity technique equal to a complicated method.

In fact, it can often be the opposite. Think about it. If an efficient productivity technique aims to be productive, complicity by nature holds back the efficiency.

Before diving into the method, let’s understand the two primary drivers for a high level of productivity.

Efficiency And Effectiveness Are The Two Pillars Of Any Productivity Technique

There exist multiple descriptions of efficiency and effectiveness, and you can even measure the performance. But to make a straightforward and dictionary-like interpretation, the following description by Peter Drucker would serve perfectly well the purpose of this article:

Effectiveness: doing the right things

Efficiency: doing things right

What does it mean in real life? Let’s take an example from somebody going daily to the gym to lose weight and get stronger muscles.

If you are spending most of the time talking to friends in the gym or chatting on your mobile phone, then your effectiveness level will be low. Your chatting, no matter how fun and exciting it is, will never support your goal of losing weight or building up your muscles.

Sweating hard with the gym equipment but lifting weights with a wrong correlation between repetitions, number of series, and the weight you are lifting, the efficiency level will not be optimized.

Doing the same example with your business, it could be something in this way:

Your target is to reach out to as many baby boomers as possible. You make a massive effort on Instagram, which is the social platform where fewer baby boomers are hanging out. The effectiveness will be low. If, instead, the same attempt is made on Facebook, the effectiveness will increase.

With a plan for how to approach the baby boomers on Facebook, you start the work, but during the day, you get distracted and check out your emails or do other things that have nothing to do with your Facebook campaigns. Your efficiency level will suffer.

Planning Is The Effectiveness Key To Your Productivity Technique

As a passionate marathon runner, I learn everyday things that I can use in my business. To run a marathon (42.2km or 26.1 miles) is nothing you can do successfully without a detailed training program with a well-defined goal.

Why should your business perform differently? Well, it doesn’t!

Before ending a working day, you should work out the working plan for the next day. Make it easy! List the six most important tasks to do and prioritize the tasks. The next day starts with the first task and ends with the last one.

This way of working has a name and is called the Ivy Lee method.

If you couldn’t work through the complete list during the day, at least you have done the most important ones. The remaining tasks form part of the new menu for the next coming day, and who knows, maybe those “old” tasks now get a higher priority on the list for the following day.

The effectiveness will improve considerably by applying this straightforward and simple method. In my marathon training, the consistency is vital to the success.

Efficiency is always about how you use the time in the best way. After all, an hour is still an hour. Read my article “How Much Is An Hour?”

Among all the methods you can find, the most efficient productivity technique is, in my opinion, also the simplest one. I love the method for its simplicity. It’s called…..

The Pomodoro Technique

The name of the technique comes from the word tomato in Italian. Francisco Cirillo, who developed the method, used a tomato-shaped timer to measure the time blocks that form an essential part of this productivity technique.

An Efficient Productivity Technique

In a nutshell, the Pomodoro method consists of:

Choose a task to work through. If you apply the effectiveness priority list mentioned earlier, there shouldn’t be any doubt about which task to choose.
Set your timer for 25. (Sometimes, I use to apply time blocks of up to 40 minutes.) Start working without any interruption of any kind. If necessary, close your email and turn off your mobile phone.
Work laser-focused on your selected task until the timer rings.
Stop working when the timer rings. It doesn’t matter where you are. Just stop working! Put a checkmark to know exactly where to start when your second block starts.
Take a break, rest, breathe fresh air, drink coffee, and even go for a short walk. During this resting block, it’s important to disconnect from what you were working on. Your brain will recover more quickly, and you will continue more relaxed with time block number two and keep your efficiency at a high level.
Start the second working block in the same manner as the first one. Repeat the process at least four times. After you get more experience, you can probably do 5, 6, and maybe 7 working blocks.
No matter how many working blocks you decide to do, you need to take a more extended break, 30 to 60 minutes after four blocks. You can be flexible here, and often, I used to squeeze in between the 4-block sessions and a training session for my running.

Can you see a familiar pattern here? Right, it’s the same method most schools are using. The Pomodoro method is based on how the brain can take in information and the peak point for efficiency.

A Proven Productivity Technique And Then What?

Have you heard about “Walk the Talk?” It’s all you need to do to get this extremely simple productivity technique to work.

All the benefits like:

More work in less time
Less (maybe completely erased) anxiety
Better time planning

….will be worth nothing if you don’t “walk the talk.”

To get an extra turbo effect on all you’re doing, obtain the necessary tools to get results even faster.

You can achieve your goals in many different ways. The only way that doesn’t exist is to give up.

As a runner, I always try to get the best tools to make the coming race to be optimized in all senses. Everything from running shoes, food, training programs, and coaching enter into the bowl of possible supporting ingredients.

My online business follows the same path.

A complete system and platform to get your business up and running as fast and as efficiently as possible are crucial to reaching the goal.

An autoresponder to manage your customer base and to be able to communicate with your customers according to your plans, is essential to get your business growing. Click the banner to the left and get a free test drive.

Finally, as a world citizen who does not have English as a native language, you need to have a tool that easily can suggest corrections to all text you are using. You should never hide that English isn’t your mother tongue, but at least you should use this tool to avoid misunderstandings due to a fatal error in spelling and grammar.

No matter how many tools you add to your work, it all comes back to the same:

The success will finally depend on you, the way you work, and the way you apply the productivity technique.

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