The Number One Productivity Hack!
By Anubhav Srivastava ( Register for his Workshop – Build Super Confidence For Super Success!)
We all want to become more productive but most of us are far from operating at our maximum productivity levels. Even through everyone has 24 hours in a day, the fact is that most of us do not utilize our time properly, which partly plays a role in the differing levels of success that everyone has.
The one who is productive often gets more accomplished in two hours than other people might accomplish in the entire day. As a result, he or she can then devote the rest of their time to other tasks that they need to focus on, while the second person keeps “busy” with the first one itself. No wonder the first person achieves things at a much more accelerated pace!
In this article I am going to share with you a method that has been immensely useful to me and thousands of people across the globe to raise their levels of productivity. When I had not come across this method, my productivity was quite limited. Ever since I have implemented it, my productivity has gone through the roof as compared to what I was able to accomplish previously.
The method I am going to share is called Batching.
Batching is a technique in time management that allows you to work at the tasks at hand with extreme focus and efficiency. It is one of the best ways to get things done and avoid procrastination. Basically, batching means doing a group of similar tasks that require input/work or resources that too are similar in nature in order to ensure they are completed efficiently.
One of the reasons why most people are not able to accomplish tasks on time is because they allow room for distraction. Most of us are trying to do several things at one time. Even though multitasking is glorified as a great trait, in reality it kills productivity.
At work, most people spend their time, less on the task at hand and more on idle chit-chatter with colleagues or on social media or surfing aimlessly on the Internet.
Even when people are technically “busy” with work, more often than not, they are trying to work on several things at the same time or switching up tasks so often that they are not able to properly accomplish any of them on time.
It has been shown that every time you allow yourself to become distracted (with either real distractions or work that is different from the task at hand), the actual loss of productivity is more than the amount of time you believe you spent on the distraction. For example when you are in the midst of accomplishing a particular task super fast, and you take time out to check and respond to an email or respond to a message on Facebook or Whatsapp, even though you may think that process takes two minutes, the real cost of time is much longer than that.
It has been shown that even if you allow yourself to get distracted from work for five minutes, it takes close to twenty minutes to get back to what you were doing with complete focus. I have experienced that whenever I allowed myself to take a five minute break, the speed and efficiency at which I was doing the earlier task vanished even when I got back to the original work. It was not until I was back to work for close to 15-20 minutes that I got back into my hyper productive state again. I am sure you may have experienced this yourself at your work.
Through minimization of distraction and clubbing together of similar resources for a longer period of time, batching immediately leads to your activity levels shooting up.
So how can you implement batching?
Well you can do it in two ways.
The first thing you can do is you can “theme” your days. Theming your days basically means that you split your work week in such a way that you only focus on one particular task on one particular day and ignore all other tasks, unless there is something extremely urgent at hand.
Theming your days is a strategy that is used by some of the most successful entrepreneurs. For example Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter has talked about how he tries to focus on only one particular area on one particular day while running his company. On one day he focused on product development, the next day he focused on Marketing, the day after that he focused on developers and partnerships and so on. What is more is that he is also the CEO of two other companies. But this simple strategy allowed him to run Three Companies with extreme focus.
Even at Apple, Steve Jobs implemented a culture where there were team meetings on Mondays and Marketing was discussed on Wednesdays.
If you are an entrepreneur, theming your days will be of great value to you as you can focus on one thing at one hand and go at it with great focus. Even if you are doing a job and cannot fully control your work schedule, it is a good idea to pick one particular big problem area for one day and just go at it on that day. Of course you have the flexibility to do something different if something urgent comes up but do not let your themed days be affected with distractions you invite yourself.
If it it gets too boring to only do one thing on one day and you are the kind that likes variety, then you can shorten the chunks of time and instead of devoting the entire day to one task, you can devote a half day to it and then devote the other half to something else. Even in this scenario you are batching your tasks together and clumping them up so that you can work at them with focus without getting distracted. At the same time, if you get bored doing the same thing, you have given yourself the liberty to do something else during the latter half of the day!
I hope this article has been useful to you. If you are serious about upping your productivity levels, do implement this technique. I know for a fact that it is not just theory because it has worked for me and made me much more productive as compared to before. This is a practical and very useful technique that has worked for some of the most successful people across the planet and it will surely work wonders for you!
About the Author
The author of this article, Anubhav Srivastava is an author, motivational speaker and the director of Carve Your Destiny, a first of its kind inspirational documentary featuring some of the most famous personalities from diverse fields, who teach the viewers how they too can make all of their dreams come true. The movie itself has been seen on Youtube by over 1.3 Million People. Anubhav has also been featured in numerous International and India Media outlets such as BBC , The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Rediff.com, Leicester Mercury and many others.
Email Anubhav Srivastava for coaching, consulting or motivational speaking queries at anubhav101@gmail.com. Facebook Profile: http://facebook.com/anubhav981
Watch Carve Your Destiny, the super inspirational movie by Anubhav Srivastava for Free at