Let’s look weekly roundup of productivity articles in last week.

15 Habits That Will Totally Transform Your Productivity

In this Inc article about productivity, Stephanie has listed 15 habits that one can develop to improve productivity. Here is the list of points I personally found useful

• De-clutter your desk: One of the things, one should do is keep his/her desk tidy/organized. When Stephanie says organized, it not only means keeping things in place, it also means giving it a thought to rightfully place them. The example, author has given is of unread book on desk. It can be tempting to read unread book and can lead to procrastination. So, keeping things organized means, keeping such things place such that they will be quick to locate when needed and should not cause procrastination of priority activities.
• Avoid spoilers/ productivity killers: The world we live is full of productivity spoilers. It takes mind control to avoid spoilers like cell phones, texting, social medial notifications, gossip, internet, emails. Having a specific and limited time to such non-necessary activities will help you focus on important/high value activities
• Start prioritization and keep it consistent: Every day we will have hundreds of things to do/complete. But given a limited time we have to make trade-off. And we can make trade-off among these activities by prioritizing those. Making a habit of constantly prioritizing daily/routine activities will internalize over a period and you will be able to focus on important activities first.

• Focus on High Value Activities (HVA): Since we have only 24 hours every day, it is absolutely necessary to focus on activities which are of high value to you. It is also another way to look at prioritization but few also consider it has eat-that-frog way.
• Start working out, get good amount of sleep: It is important to be in good state of health and mind to be more productive. So it is necessary to have enough sleep. You may have to overwork occasionally but one should not compromise on sleep and also should start working out, exercising regularly.

 

Productivity Secrets of People Who Have Achieved Inbox Zero

When I came across this article, I remembered one of my colleagues from earlier organization. He was very particular about his inbox and at any point in time, he will have only handful of emails in his inbox. And the main point to note is: he would not miss out important communication/ project delivery schedule.

Similarly, Jessica the author of this article, must have come across people who managed to keep their inbox empty. Jessica has shared their email management secrets.

Archive Everything: We live in the age of information overload. We keep receiving hundreds of email regularly. Email experts have habit of filing received email that is marked as FYI or needs to be referred again. Rest emails find their way to To-Do list or redirected for further delegation or removed from inbox.

Email Filtering and Unsubscribe: Sometimes we subscribe to certain email newsletter for specific work and over the period that email newsletter has no relevance as we change job or change role. Email gurus remove periodic emails which are no-longer read. Email gurus apply email filters to make sure important emails lands in your inbox.

Quickly Respond & Take It off Your Shoulders: Email experts quickly decides whether to respond a given email depending on priority, urgency. If it can be responded within a couple of minutes, they would respond immediately and remove it from their list.

Einstein’s Secrets of Productivity

Note: This article isn’t about time management or productivity.

Going by the title, I expected James Altucher’s article to be about productivity improvement from the life of Albert Einstein. It turned out that this article isn’t about productivity (somewhat misleading) but I wanted to post it here, for the perspective it offers. You may want to read it further: the power of saying ‘I Don’t Know’. All the great people made discoveries and innovations by not knowing it and exploring those things with passion.

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