How to Be More Effective at Work – 5 Simple Keys to Improve Your Productivity

It doesn’t matter whether you still got to 9-5 working for some company, or you are working on your own business.. We all sometimes get to the point where we don’t feel like working. That can be for any reason, sometime we don’t even know why it happens.

When it comes to content creation, it may get to the point where we find ourselves sitting behind the computer for 3 or 4 hours and doing nothing productive.

Does this sound familiar to you?
Well it certainly does to me. I am sure many of us to some extent are more or less guilty as well.

So, how to be more effective at work?

I have spent hours and hours reading and watching stuff about concentration because I wanted to find some key elements that would improve the  efficiency (or productivity).
I have put together 5 following steps, which I think are essential when it comes to the productivity.

1) Setting Goals – Be Specific

You have heard about setting your goals already like millions times, right? Yeah – me too. If that does not work, maybe we have not been specific enough. And if that does not work either, let’s start with mini goals. For example today I want to write 500 words article. I am specific in the number of words. I lets say I want to break down the article in 3 different paragraphs.

The same strategy applies to bigger goals as well, including money goals.

You can’t just say I want to have enough money to have a freedom. “Enough” is not a number. It is not specific. Your brain does not see the connection with the “enough”.

Or when you say I want to have as much as possible. What are the steps to achieve that unidentified sum? There is no plan to reverse-engineer for such bizarre amount.
So be very clear about what is it what you want.  If you are not able to identify what you want you most likely will not achieve it.

Napoleon Hill, in his book Think and Grow rich, talks about setting the goals. What is the exact amount you want to make, time when you want to make it, how you want to make it.

Besides being specific, you should already see yourself in possession of the goal. Like you have achieved that goal already. If you have not read the book, I suggest you to get one and read it. You can also listen the audio book available on YouTube.

It has more than 10 hours. Of course you don’t have to watch right now 🙂 I have read the book several times. Now I listen the audio book in my car, using my smartphone connected to the radio via blue-tooth.

Now we are getting to the second point which is visualization.

2) Practice Visualization

I will get right to the point.
It is good to do it before you go sleep at night. Visualize how things can be different. How you want your life to be in near future. What you want to accomplish in your business. Visualize the growing traffic to your site.

If you want to learn how to practice visualization there is a good book from author Shakti Gawain – Creative Visualization.

It is powerful method. And If you think about your past. I am sure, to some extent you did experience it already. Maybe not consciously.

“Be careful what you wish for, it might just come true”

There is also other saying that goes: You become what you think about.
When you focus on thing, more you visualize it, it is more likely that it will happen. And I don’t mean that it will just happen if you sitting on your couch.

I mean that your brain will prepare for that thing in future and will adjust to it. Then it will help you with your actions to achieve it.

If you are interested I recommend you that book from Shakti Gawain. There are also plenty videos on YouTube you can watch about visualization. For example if you building your online business, you can visualize how the traffic to your site grows.

And you can practice the visualization even in personal life. I will not go to the details of visualization here.

3) Productivity

This is a big one. When I look in last year I can tell that my productivity really sucked. I do not want to go deeper into that, if you are interested you can drop me a question in comment section.

So back to productivity.

You decided to write an article so you are about to sit down turn the computer on, but suddenly on your screen all this notifications popping up, and you go to Facebook and Instagram because you want to know “what is new” and 2 hrs later you find out that you have not written a single word in that article you were about to write.

There are many things that trying to pull out your attention away. You have to realize that you need to make a conscious decision about what  to really want to achieve. Meaning, how you are going to spend next 10 minutes. Is it going to check Facebook, or you will do something productive. Like adding new post into your website, or setting a new campaign – something towards your goal.

You should be productive every single day. Even if it is only 10 minutes. Do it every day and soon you realize that you can easily focus on your say content creation for 50 straight minutes.

Remember that our brain is like a muscle. It can be trained and it becomes “stronger”

Also big role in productivity plays the time during the day.

Figure out the time zone in a day where you are at peak energy peak focus and try to be productive as much as possible in this zone.

For some it can be early in the morning, for some during the day or in the night. We all are different, so you need to find your most effective time zone, that works for you.

As a part of productivity we must mention a noise reduction. And I mean especially the environment where we work. Both your computer and your physical office or room.

You want to keep it simple. You don’t want to have a bunch of magazines at your sight where you constantly wanna look. Yo do not need a books or courses which are not related to your current project.

The same thing applies for the environment at your computer. It may sound silly, but really minimize the bookmarked sites, email accounts you do not use anymore and so on.

Do you still own a domain you don’t use anymore? Stop paying for that – let it go.

I just recently put my old domain on flippa. I can sell it and even if get only couple hundreds for the site it doesn’t matter. I do not have to worry about that anymore.

So keep only those things in your work environment which are mission critical.

4) Proper Execution

Many people have great ideas. Even me I have great ideas every day. I am sure you too. You know what? It is nice , but ideas itself do NOT pay the bills. They do not take you to vacation

No matter how many ideas we have, they are useless until they put into the action.

You want to focus on one thing at a time. Let’s say you are building a website. 2 month later you have this idea about a new niche. You set up a 2nd site. You write 4 posts and you realize that you have abandoned the 1st site.

You go back to the 1st site and back and forth, back and forth. Those 2 did not work out, so you go to setup a 3rd site. 10 months later, and you still got no sales from any of those sites.

You know where I am getting with that.

You need to focus on one project. It may be painful sometimes, but that pain means that you are growing. When you go lift the weights, you feel pain at first but later you enjoy it and you lift even more.

So once you finished 1st project and it already generates income for you – you can go ahead and focus on other project. You can even use that income to delegate the work on 1st project – you can now outsource the work. So you can concentrate on your current project only.

5) Reward yourself

This is probably the best one 🙂

It is very important to reward yourself when your business is growing. You will see that your hard work makes sense, and you can enjoy yourself because of that.
But again, be careful here. You do not want to go on $3,000 vacation when you made $2,500.

Do something proportional to what you made.

Spend 30% of your profit  – go to restaurant, take a weekend in nice hotel at the beach or buy a new shoes.
This is very powerful – your brain has to see the connection between the effort you put in and the results. The growing numbers at your bank account just does not to the job.

You want to enjoy a life as well.

Conclusion

So these are 5 key elements to keep in mind. Try to incorporate in your life at least one. Then week later apply another two. You will see the progress in  your efficiency and eventually you get the momentum. Few weeks later you will have all these keys automated so you do not have to think about hem anymore.

Also I would like to finish with a short video where Dr. Jordan Peterson explains how to be hyper-efficient.

I do believe that you find lots of value there.

Let me know how you doing with these keys, or what do you think about them?  How do you improve your efficiency.