5 Low Tech Tips for Boosting Your Productivity

This past November, I noticed that I had fallen into a rut. I had several big projects to work on, yet I would often only work on one project each day. I was getting behind, and I wasn’t even making good progress on my one daily project. Typically, I was getting bored and taking too many breaks. I might hit a good work grove only to find that it was time to clock out and end the work day. Something had to change, otherwise each day in the office was going to be an uphill climb against an avalanche of deadlines.

Fortunately, after wasting my time trying a couple of scheduling and productivity tools, I discovered a very simple solution: a hand-written daily schedule. This simple process has given me a 70% productivity boost during the past two and a half months*. Now, I’ll share how this low tech method works and how to implement it in your day.

1. Take Five Minutes to Schedule Your Day
Spend your first five minutes in the office writing out your day’s schedule on a sheet of paper. For example, try scheduling a project for the first hour and a half. Then break things up with a thirty minute break for emails. Then work another hour or more before a thirty minute lunch break. After lunch move right into another project. In the early afternoon, take a break for fifteen minutes and answer some emails for another fifteen minutes. Then you can either hit a third project or return to one of your other two projects from the morning.

Breaking your day into hour and a half to two hour blocks, means you can easily get in four to six solid hours of work on big projects. Plus, working in blocks keeps you from getting bogged down by momentary problems. Rather than spending your day “spinning your wheels” trying to solve one particular problem, shifting to other tasks means that you will return to your projects with a fresh outlook, often resulting in you finding quicker solutions.

Finally, the key to this step is to not take more than five to ten minutes planning your day’s schedule. Keep things simple by using just a pen and paper. That way, should the need arise, you can quickly and easily adjust your schedule.

2. Don’t Check Your Email
At least I recommend not checking it first thing when you get in the office. Instead start working on a project for an hour or more. This way, you can get some good work under your belt before you start dividing your attention between multiple emails.

(Tip: Gmail users – looking for ways to speed up your time processing email? Check this post. Plus, even if you don’t use Gmail, the general principles still apply.)

3. Stick to Your Schedule
I’ve found that keeping my schedule is a key to boosting my productivity. Of course, there will be times when I must diverge from it; however, sticking to my general outline helps me maintain focus.

Plus, as I finish the blocks and tasks on my schedule, I will check them off. This shows me where I stand with my todo’s and gives me a sense of accomplishment. In other words, at the end of the day I remember what I’ve accomplished rather than wondering if I really did anything productive at all.

4. Email Frequent Updates to Your Clients
Scheduling my day means that I will get work done on at least two or three projects everyday. Once I’ve completed a significant amount of work on a project, I send my client a short email keeping them abreast of my progress.

Sending these emails keeps me ahead of my clients and has them responding to me rather than me getting behind and constantly wrestling with one project after another trying to meet an endless string of deadlines.

5. Don’t Over Work
If you do a good job making and keeping your daily schedule, this means you should get in plenty of work during a typical work week. Therefore, at the end of each day, make sure you clock out at a regular time. Furthermore, if you come to a nice stopping point fifteen or thirty minutes early, go ahead and clock out. Resting your mind from your work will have you coming back refreshed for your next work day.

Conclusion
Having implemented these tips during the past two and a half months, I’ve been amazed by how much work I’ve gotten done and how my office attitude has changed. Keeping highly scheduled days helps me give better project time estimates to my clients, and it lets me easily work in new projects and tasks. In addition, these techniques have me writing fewer notes and remembering more. This is because sticking to my schedule keeps me from getting “buried” in a particular project detail while forgetting to keep a “big picture” of all the tasks I’m working on.

* To calculate the increase in my production I calculated the percentage increase in my actual hours worked from three months before and two months after I implemented my daily schedule technique.