Time Management: Productivity

The Challenge of Staying Productive

Staying productive can be difficult. Between school, work, and social life, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and let important projects slip through the cracks. Check out these tips for staying productive and keeping yourself on track for being the best you can be.

Tips on Productivity

Eliminate interruptions

• Dedicate chunks of time to do your important tasks.
• Identify potential interruptions and eliminate them.

Examples could be turning off your phone or putting a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door.

Get organized

Keep yourself organized throughout the semester. You’ll save a lot of time if you don’t have to go searching for your notes or find a file on your computer.

Plan your day in advance

• It takes 10-12 minutes for you to plan out your day and this small investment of time will save you up to two hours in wasted time throughout the day.
• Get one major thing done before you start your day. This will increase your daily productivity level and it will give you a feeling of accomplishment to begin the day with.

Turn off the internet

The Internet is helping you procrastinate. If you have to use the internet for your work, use apps/websites to help you block distracting websites.

Stop multitasking on important tasks

Multitasking is more like task-switching, where we move constantly from one open task to another, and back, and back again. Jumping around like this results in more errors than if we simply worked on a single task, without interruption, to completion.

In fact, the act of constantly switching back and forth can reduce our overall productivity by 40%. In other words, when we multitask we’re not faster — we’re slower!