5 Tips to Be More Productive

Whether its the start of the year or years of living with the pandemic, I started to feel I wasn’t keeping up with my projects. So I attended a webinar for ideas on how to cope with feeling overwhelmed and pressed for time. It was an invaluable experience and these are a few of the key takeaways:

Plan out your day. Ideally, this will happen first thing in the morning or the night before. Try to include both work and personal tasks. This will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed.
Write down your top three. Don’t put an exhaustive list of everything you need to do. That might be helpful to get everything out of your head and on paper – or virtually in a project management software, but not for planning your day or week. Sure, last minute things may come during the course of your day, but you can get back on track when things come up.
Try time blocking. The pomodoro method suggests scheduling 25 minutes of work time, followed by a 5 minute break. Or, perhaps 50 minutes of work time and 20 minutes for a break. Don’t forget to turn off all notifications during that time so it’s distraction-free and you can really focus. And alternately, relax.
Use a timer. Of course, when you are in the flow of things, it might be best to keep working, but try to get that break in so you’ll have more energy and better concentration when you return to work. Getting outside and in nature to clear your head and get more ideas flowing, works well for me. To help you keep track of time, you can easily use your phone’s timer or choose from one of several available apps.
Stack your habits. I first learned about Habit stacking in one of my designer resource groups and it works very well for me. In essence, you “stack” something you don’t like to do or tend to put off with something you do every day. For example, if you exercise every day, you could stack your phone call list or other task you tend to put off right after that.

Speaking of time, I want to share a recent project that helped my client save time – an interactive checklist to help HR Managers stay on top of the onboarding process for new hires:

I hope these tips are helpful and you can find time to try one or two. An even easier way to save time? Partner with me on your marketing projects, allowing you to work on your big picture items instead of the small project details.

All the best,

Jen