The 4 Ideas That Will Revolutionize Your Productivity

August 11th 2008

Recently, it occurred to me that there are four practices in my life that I use to great effect. I’m so used to thinking in terms of fully systems like GTD that I hadn’t thought about individual methods and practises that I use. Below I’ve detailed them and discuss how they all work together to great effect. As part of this it would be very interesting to see what you would choose as your four techniques, tools or ideas that boost your productivity. Share them in the comments!

Parkinson’s Law
Parkinson’s law essentially states that work will expand to fill the time given to it. If you give a student a month to do a week’s worth of work they will more than likely use that entire month to do it with the work being made increasingly complex and over-analyzed in the process. Besides not being an efficient use of time, the student will also get sidetracked and lose focus on the real point of the work. Give them a week (or less) to do the work and through necessity they will have to focus on getting the essentials of that work done.

The 80/20 Rule
This rule, otherwise known as the Pareto Principle, states in basic terms that 20% of our efforts will produce 80% of our results. While it should not be taken literally (the emphasis is more on the common inbalance between cause and effect, that is found in life), it is a valuable tool in cutting out a lot of the work and effort that produces minimal results. My home cleaning schedule is a prime example. There is no point in me regularly cleaning the spare room because it hardly gets used. However, the kitchen and bathroom are the main rooms that get the most messy. This basically means that those 20% of the rooms require 80% of my attention to keep clean and tidy, so I can plan my cleaning schedule more effectively.

Next actions
I’ve talked many times about the advantages of next actions so I won’t repeat myself too much here. Basically, you should break down your work into smallest, actionable chunks. For instance, if you have a project involving writing a report, a next action could be to take out research material from the library. Cleaning the bedroom would have a next action of hoovering the floor. Because the immediate work is so much smaller it makes it more appealing to do, easier to visualize how you’d actually do it, and you can juggle your workload better too.

Prioritizing by needs
This is something I learned myself and as I have yet to come across any better term I will refer to it as needs prioritizing. I introduced this concept a few months ago but the basic idea is that you prioritize tasks based on whether you want, should or need to do them. This creates extra fluidity to your prioritizing and takes time into account. Something that you should do typically becomes something you need to do if left long enough. Paying a bill is a great example. Though you should pay is quickly, you can leave it for a while. However, as the deadline for payment gets closer you need to pay it to avoid reminders, fines or worse.

How they work together
Now that I’ve explained the four principles it’s important that I cover how they all work together in my life to improve my productivity. Firstly, I apply the 80/20 rule to cut out all the crap and unnecessary work. Then I break the remaining tasks down into next actions. Next, I use my prioritizing system to juggle all those next actions and balance my workload. Finally, when I do one of those next actions I set tight deadlines to keep me focused on what exactly I need to do.

This all means that I only do the important stuff that moves my life forward; that the work I do is bitesized and manageable; that I can juggle my workload to suit my schedule, lifestyle and the time available to me; and that, finally, I can focus on getting the work done and off my radar with minimal fuss.