In todays busy world, every day, we struggle with work. Spend hours and hours but yet end up achieving nothing significant. We do not have a quality time with our loved ones and our health start going in a downward spiral. Overwhelmed with work, the entire life becomes a continuous struggle full of stress and anxiety. How can someone get out of this stressful working cycle. The way to do this is developing a productive work flow, which will allow us to have a stress free working routine, while having a healthy and a happy life. Here, I present 7 rules that I try to follow everyday to make sure I stay productive while being healthy and stress free.
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The first rule, kill all the distractions in your environment during your working time. It could be your mobile phone, the people around you, social media, the television or any other thing that will take your focus away from your work. As Cal Newport suggest in his book Deep Work, you can Schedule your distractions. Allocate a particular time of the day to check your emails, social media. Use an isolated environment free of other people to do your most important work. Make sure any of the distractions do not get in the way of your productivity.
The second rule is be efficient when you work. Most of our time is lost because we do not optimize our working methods. There are multiple ways we could make our work more efficient. Remember the goal is to getting the work done. Not spending time doing the work. One thing you can do is outsourcing simple tasks like preparing a powerpoint presentation, collecting data from a particular source or booking a bus, train or a plane ticket. There are sites such as fiverr where you can find freelancers to get these kinds of tasks done. If you do not have money for such things and the tasks are repetitive, you can develop certain skills so that you can make your work more efficient. For example you can explore the shortcut keys in powerpoint so that you can prepare the slides faster. You can learn a programming language like R so that you can easily extract data from sources with a code. Make sure you use the working time to the maximum so that you can spare enough time for other activities.
The third rule is learn to say no. This doesn't mean you have to be negative. If you pay close attention to your works, most of them may not serve your immediate goal. Some of them may be works you accepted when you had the ability to say no. This may not be always applicable if the person who assigns the work is your boss. But, still if you make a valid argument you may prevent working on that. For example if that task is not directly your responsibility or if it doesn’t serve companies immediate goals you can make a polite rejection with reasons. Apart from that if someone ask you to collaborate on a project or to do something as a help given that you will have to allocate more than 25 minutes to the task and the person asking the help is not your immediate family or a close friend, always make sure you say yes only if it significantly beneficial to you. If that is the opposite, say no.
The fourth rule is create action plans for your most important work. Do not create to-do lists which includes long lists of tasks without a clear view on what is the next action. Think what needs to be done to do the task. For example, if your task is completing the writing assignment on freshwater animals. First action would be to plan the article structure, then search for references, third action would be to read the first reference and making a mind map, this will be a repeating step depending on how many reference material are there. After you go through all the references, the next action would be to writing the first paragraph, then the second paragraph, depending on the number of topics you will have several actions like this. Finally you can have 2-3 revision steps. The final step is the submission.
The fifth rule is prioritise the most important and urgent tasks. You can create action plans for the task at your hand. But how do you make sure you do the right thing at the right time, specially when you have a lot of tasks to get done within a short period. Make a list of all the things you need to do. Give numbers to all of them according to the urgency and importance. If you have two tasks, both are urgent, but only one is important to achieve your most important goal. Give that task the priority.
This takes us to the sixth rule which is rest enough. Our brain needs rest. The time to work at maximum capacity without a rest is limited to approximately 20-30 minutes. After that our brain gets tired and start loosing the productivity, especially, in knowledge work. A technique that can help solve this issue is the pomodoro technique. I have a brief description about pomodoro technique on my website, which I have linked in the description. In this method you will work for 25 minutes straight and then you will have a 5 minute break followed by another 25 minutes of work. This must be repeated twice, which means you will have 4 25 minute working blocks with 5 minutes breaks in middle. After 4 blocks of work you can take a longer break. In this way you can maximize your working capacity. Remember, woking continuously for hours is as bad as not working if you are a knowledge worker.
The seventh rule is eat right. If you visit youtube you will encounter hundreds of diet plans. But I would advise not to follow them. If you are serious about having a proper diet plan, do that with the guidance of a dietitian. I am not a dietitian to advise you on a healthy diet. But from my experience I advise you to have two changes in your diet. First one is minimising the carbohydrate intake if you do not do any hard-work during the day. Second, make sure you fill about 80% of your stomach with each meal. Having a carbohydrate rich meal makes us feel sleepy due to the chemical change it makes. Therefore, we will not have a clear focus on our work. Eating only until 80% of our stomach is full actually comes from a Japanese belief. Okinawans recommend this as a one of the reasons to have a longer lifespan. This is found in the book Ikigai The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia. However, this also gives a short term benefit by not making a discomfort. Especially during the night. You might think what is my food has to do with my productivity, but believe me it will make a significant change in your workflow. You will always be more refreshed and active.
So those are the seven rules that I recommend establishing for a highly productive workflow. It helped me, although time to time I fail to stick to it. Hope it will help anyone who read this as well.