Are you a productive professional? Here are three tips that might help you become one.
1. Make to-do lists – but not insanely long ones. To-do lists are great for organizing your day and for keeping yourself organized mentally, but if you put every little email and chore on your to-do list, it can be far too easy to find yourself spending all day taking care of the little things instead of taking on the hard work.
2. Just do it! It’s so easy to get sucked into doing things that seem productive, but that you know deep down are not. Email, for instance, can be a big time drain – and many emails are unnecessary. Don’t spend time making “necessary” phone calls and writing “necessary” emails if you sort of feel like you’re letting yourself off the hook by doing them – usually that’s a sign that you’re just procrastinating and avoiding doing real work.
3. Get the hard tasks out of the way. Doing the hard tasks in the morning is a great way to get yourself in a productive mind-set for the entire day. Plus, your brain is fresh in the morning and you aren’t just watching the clock and waiting to go home, so it can actually be easier to knock out tricky tasks at the start of the work day.
