7 Ways to Be More Productive

You’re busy. Ridiculously busy. Your calendar’s rammed, your inbox is overflowing, you’re juggling seventeen different priorities, and yet somehow you’re achieving bugger all. You’re exhausted, you’re stressed, and at the end of the day you can’t actually point to anything meaningful you’ve accomplished.

Here’s the problem. Being busy doesn’t mean you’re being productive. You can spend twelve hours at your desk and accomplish nothing of value. You’re like the one legged man in an arse kicking contest. Lots of effort, no results.

Real productivity isn’t about doing more things. It’s about doing the right things. It’s about focusing your limited time and energy on what actually matters and ruthlessly eliminating everything else. And if you’re not doing that, you’re wasting your life being busy instead of being effective.

Let me give you seven specific ways to stop being busy and start being productive.

Avoid Interruptions

Interruptions fragment productivity badly. When you’re interrupted, you lose your train of thought, your creativity hits a brick wall, you lose your flow, and it takes an average of over twenty minutes before you fully return to the interrupted task (Mark, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2005) — and that time isn’t spent idle, it’s spent scattered across other things, which is arguably worse.

Think about that. A few interruptions scattered through a morning, each one dragging you away and back again, and you never actually reach sustained focus at all.

When I ran a busy GP practice, I noticed I was being interrupted roughly every eleven minutes throughout the day. There were times when I never got into full flow. I felt I was spending my entire day in recovery mode, trying to remember what I was doing before the last interruption.

The solution isn’t complicated. Block off uninterrupted time. Close your door. Turn off notifications. Put your phone in a drawer. Tell people you’re unavailable. If interruptions are genuinely inevitable, do what I did and get the receptionists to batch them together. Have specific times when you’re available for questions, meetings, and quick chats. The rest of the time, protect your focus like your productivity depends on it, because it does.

Avoid Doing the Easy Menial Things First

You know what you do when you sit down to work. You check your email. You tidy your desk. You make a coffee. You reorganise your to-do list. You tackle the easy, mindless tasks that make you feel productive without requiring any real effort or thought.

This is procrastination dressed up as productivity. You’re avoiding the hard, important work by doing trivial tasks that don’t matter. And by the time you’ve finished faffing about with the easy stuff, you’re tired, it’s lunchtime, and you’ve got meetings all afternoon. The important work never gets done.

Brian Tracy calls this “eating the frog” (Tracy, 2007). Do the hardest, most important task first thing in the morning when your energy and willpower are highest. Don’t warm up with easy tasks. Don’t ease yourself into the day. Attack the thing that actually needs your attention.

Remember, priority and productivity are partners in crime. If you’re not working on your priorities, you’re not being productive, regardless of how busy you are. Easy tasks feel satisfying because they’re easy. Important tasks feel daunting because they matter. Do what matters first.

Avoid Working Without Goals or Purpose

If you’re not working towards something specific, you’re running around in circles. You might be moving, you might be busy, but you’re not making progress. You’re like a hamster on a wheel. Lots of activity, zero distance travelled.

Every single day, you should know what you’re trying to accomplish. Not vaguely. Specifically. What’s the one thing that, if completed today, would make a real difference? What’s the goal that matters? What are you actually working towards?

Research shows that people with clear, specific goals are significantly more productive than people who work without defined objectives (Locke & Latham, 2002). Goals provide direction, motivation, and a way to measure whether you’re actually making progress or just being busy.

Without goals, you default to whatever’s easiest, whatever’s most urgent, whatever crosses your desk. You become reactive instead of proactive. You spend your day responding to other people’s priorities instead of advancing your own.

Avoid Multitasking

Multitasking is a myth. Your brain cannot focus on two things simultaneously. What you’re actually doing is rapidly switching between tasks, and every switch costs you time, energy, and accuracy (Rubinstein, Meyer, & Evans, 2001).

When you try to multitask, you do everything worse. You make more mistakes, you take longer, and you produce lower quality work. You’re not being efficient. You’re being frantically ineffective.

Do one thing. Do it well. Get it started and get it done. Then move on to the next thing. This feels slower because you’re not juggling multiple tasks, but it’s actually dramatically faster because you’re not wasting energy on constant context switching.

I’ve watched people spend two hours “multitasking” on three different projects when they could have completed one properly in 45 minutes. They feel productive because they’re busy. They’re not. They’re scattered.

Avoid Saying Yes

Every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. Every commitment you make is time and energy you can’t spend on something more important. Every project you take on is capacity you’re removing from your priorities.

Most people are terrible at saying no. They’re people pleasers who can’t bear to disappoint others, so they agree to everything and end up drowning in commitments they don’t have time for and don’t actually want to do.

Saying no is the key to success. It streamlines your efforts. It prevents you from doing stuff you don’t need to do. It protects your time for what actually matters. Warren Buffett is widely quoted as saying that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything (Schroeder, 2008).

You can’t do everything. You shouldn’t try. Say no to good opportunities so you have capacity for great ones. Say no to easy commitments that don’t align with your goals. Say no more often, and watch your productivity transform.

Avoid Decision Paralysis

Every decision you make consciously is attention you can’t spend somewhere else. It doesn’t matter if it’s a big decision or a small one — deciding what to wear draws on some of the same mental bandwidth as deciding how to handle a difficult client. The popular idea that willpower is a fuel tank that literally empties as you use it hasn’t held up well under scrutiny: a large multi-lab replication attempt in 2016 failed to reproduce the effect (Hagger et al., 2016). But the everyday experience of decision fatigue is real regardless of the underlying mechanism — by the end of a day full of small choices, you have less attention left over for the choices that actually matter.

This is why you’re exhausted by the end of the day even if you haven’t done any physical work. You’ve been making decisions all day. What to wear, what to eat, which email to answer first, whether to take that call, how to respond to that request. Death by a thousand tiny decisions.

The solution is habits. Get good habits. Do the right things habitually. Do them with unconscious effort, so the decision doesn’t have to be made fresh every time. Save your conscious attention for the things that actually matter.

Barack Obama had his suits picked out in advance and said so directly: he was trying to pare down decisions so he didn’t spend them on what he ate or wore (Lewis, 2012). Steve Jobs famously wore the same outfit every day too, though by his own account that had more to do with liking a personal uniform than with conserving decisions. Either way, the practical lesson holds: automate the trivial choices so you have more left for the ones that count.

Automate the trivial. Make routines for recurring tasks. Eliminate unnecessary choices. Your productivity will improve not because you’re working harder, but because you’re not wasting energy on decisions that don’t matter.

Avoid Doing for the Sake of Doing

Just because something needs doing doesn’t mean you should do it the way you’ve always done it. Just because you’re busy doesn’t mean you’re being effective. Just because you’re working hard doesn’t mean you’re working smart.

Ask yourself why. Look for better solutions. Think outside the box. Be creative. Most importantly, write down and capture your ideas at all times. Your brain often has its best insights when you’re not actively trying to problem-solve — in the shower, driving, falling asleep — and if you don’t capture them immediately, they’re gone.

Most of what you do could probably be done better, faster, or eliminated entirely. But you’re too busy doing it to stop and think about whether you should be doing it at all.

The Productivity Truth

Being busy does not mean you’re being productive. You can work 70-hour weeks and accomplish nothing meaningful. You can be exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed whilst making zero progress on what actually matters.

Real productivity is about focus. It’s about doing the right things, not doing more things. It’s about protecting your time from interruptions, tackling important work first, working towards clear goals, avoiding multitasking, saying no to distractions, minimising decisions, and constantly questioning whether there’s a better way.

Stop measuring your worth by how busy you are. Stop confusing activity with achievement.

Get productive. Do the things that will make a difference first. Everything else can wait.

Further reading

1. Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 321–330.
2. Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E., & Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763–797.
3. Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
4. Hagger, M. S., Chatzisarantis, N. L. D., Alberts, H., et al. (2016). A multilab preregistered replication of the ego-depletion effect. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 546–573.
5. Tracy, B. (2007). Eat That Frog! 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.