Use These Work Strategies To Dramatically Increase Your Productivity

What do you do daily to be more productive? originally appeared on Quora : the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world . After years of success in Silicon Valley, I suddenly became something of a wreck. I was procrastinating on projects big and small. My focus was floundering. So was my creativity. So my productivity was slowing to a halt. I realized that I had a problem. I’d become addicted to distraction. I was constantly multi-tasking, jumping between different tasks, and responding to every notification like Pavlov’s dog . I would also mindlessly scroll through feeds and reach for my phone even without any reason. To be productive, I would have to build a buffer against the ever evolving onslaught of distractions and self-inflicted FOMO (fear of missing out). I’d have to unlearn bad behaviors. It’s an issue millions of people are facing. In a Udemy survey , nearly two-thirds of workers said they spend about an hour each workday looking at their phones. Among Millennial and Gen Z people surveyed, 74% describe themselves as distracted at work. To overcome this problem, I experimented with different hacks. I found one that has helped me boost my productivity dramatically. Work in sprints It’s impossible to go from being easily distracted to suddenly having complete concentration all day long. You can’t fix this problem cold turkey. Instead, it’s best to take incremental steps that feel relatively painless. (I think of this as attention hacking.) The key is to start off by setting aside blocks of time in which you refuse to give into the temptation to pursue any distraction. Think of it as working in sprints, rather than going for an entire marathon. Harvard Business School recommends “two or three […]

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