Four Productivity Hacks You’ve Never Heard Of
On the best time of day to write a to-do list and the task you shouldn’t tackle first.
I am obsessed with the idea of productivity. No lie. I am the ideal consumer of the productivity cult. I am absolutely one of those people who spends more time reading about how to be productive than they do actually being productive.
I plan. I mean, I plan. I have researched household furniture I want to buy (sometime in the future? never? who knows?) for hours upon hours. I have color-coded spreadsheets for days. I have generated whole systems dedicated to doing things more efficiently. And in all that time, what have I done? Accomplished? Acted on?
There’s a really big difference between being in motion and being productive.
I am constantly in motion (except for when I nap, which is excessively).
My ADHD means that sometimes I get easily distracted, and other times I hyper-focus on tasks that aren’t important or even necessary, really. My perfectionism means I’ll over-perform on a task for no reason; no financial gain, no emotional gain, no _____ gain. My tendency to lie awake thinking instead of sleeping means I consider the time I spend slumped on my bed like a beached whale each day the equivalent of meditating for 10 minutes.
If I sound stressed, it’s because I am.
And so, I devour productivity op-eds, how-to articles, and breezy DIY listacles with reckless abandon, intent on one day finding the thing, the method, the strategy, that will channel all of my positive, if misguided, energy in the right direction. And I will finally be that productive person — the one who has time to water all of her plants but works 70-hour-weeks, who has spent quarantine volunteering and decluttering and picking up new skills, who is never late, who is constantly photographed in big open white spaces, and who still handwrites thank-you notes after every gathering.
Yet here we are.
In all that time — hours, I’m sure — that I’ve spent reading about work flow optimization and time management, prioritization principles and best practices — in all that time, I’ve found that the majority of tips don’t work.
I say they don’t work when clearly what I mean is that they don’t work for me. If they work for you, great. That’s great. But the more I get to know about the productivity cult, the more I start believing that there are more people like me, those who are mostly scraping by, than people like them, productivity superheroes, the ones who have it all together.
And for people like me, a lot of the “widely-accepted” productivity principles simply don’t apply.
I literally never want to start my day doing the most difficult task first. I need a good 4–5 hours to be properly awake.
And making practical to-do lists can be challenging for me. I get far too wrapped up in the process of making the list, picking the right pens, making my handwriting look good, matching tasks to color-categories, and so on.
Making my bed doesn’t suddenly make me good at everything.
Tips like “focus more” and “block out distractions” offer me nothing, no clear steps to take or practices to follow. They all sound appealing, sure, but that’s why they exist: to sound good.
In practice, things start to fall apart. And soon I am set in motion again, as opposed to taking real action on the important things in my life.
That’s the reason why I wrote this article. Because so many productivity “hacks” have ultimately failed me, I’ve made it my life’s work (god, I hope not) to cull, vet, and edit the best tips for working smarter. Ones that really work.
Here are four that have fundamentally changed how I operate.
Schedule chores into your calendar
As a person who sets multiple reminders (calendar, email, even custom-labeled alarms) for any occasion, be it a family member’s birthday or a casual meeting for coffee, scheduling chores into my calendar — and even setting reminders about them — has enabled me to both better manage my time and regularly complete annoying daily household tasks.
If I write “wash dishes” on my to-do list, it won’t get done. I hate washing dishes. I’m never going to naturally prioritize doing something I hate.
But if I write “11 AM — wash dishes” and set a reminder on my phone, I am forced to complete the task: (1) the part of me that relies on external motivating forces to do anything is somehow satisfied, and (2) the part of me that is resistant to doing the dishes is more resistant to the idea of wasting that time doing nothing/finding something else to do. It’s like I can feel the minutes ticking by, wasted.
It’s like my brain is finally able to rationalize: the time is now, the task is there. Do it.
Leave your phone in another room
And because nobody can just leave their phone in another room, you’ll learn to trick yourself into doing this. Usually I’ll let my phone battery drop down to the single digits, so I have to go into the bedroom and plug my phone up. I only keep one charger in the house, and it’s always in the same socket in my room. I’ll plug it in and go do my skincare or something so I get distracted and forget what I was even doing in there in the first place.
Then I just don’t think about it. This may be easier or harder for you, depending on how naturally forgetful you are. I’m one of the lucky ones.
Don’t sync your messages to your computer, and don’t let new emails alert you automatically. Turn your phone on vibrant (or ideally, on silent). And leave it alone for hours.
If this doesn’t get you working more productively, nothing will.
Do the hardest task last
This tip goes against all productivity advice ever. Everything else you’ll read says, “wake up and attack the most difficult thing right away with all that positive early morning energy!” or something along those lines.
I don’t know about you, but I am not at my best until early afternoon.
And I also don’t know about you, but sometimes working on a few easy and rewarding duties early in the day can boost my confidence a little — make it easier to work up the tenacity to go after the most important task.
I’m not saying you should put it off until 9 PM. I’m just saying you should pick your most productive time of day and plan to do the hardest task then.
Make your to-do list the night before
After I started following this advice, I stopped wasting time creating beautiful Pinterest-worthy to-do lists, and instead made functional and plain to-do-lists. Partially because I am usually tired when I make them. Partially because my brain isn’t racing around and has the where-with-all to focus on prioritization.
I also find this tip makes it easier for me to sleep. Doing a “brain dump” onto my to-do list right before bed means I’m not lying awake, endlessly planning.
Finally, I find it helps to have three running lists:
(1) short-term (items that must be done within 1–2 days);
(2) long-term (tasks I want to complete but that are non urgent, like spring cleaning a closet); and
(3) a true “brain dump” list (things I scribble down, like a blog idea or note).
This saves me from experiencing the claustrophobic trap of a to-do list with more things on it to do than is humanly possible in one 24-hour period.
To be clear, I’m not against productivity. Remember? I even like it, the idea.
I think our obsession with productivity is equal parts generational trend and substantial topic for research and study. Living efficiently is an attractive end, but at times the means are hard to justify. A gift, a curse.
If these four tips help you, I’m glad. If they don’t, I am sorry. I’m not shocked; I’ve tried a lot of things that didn’t work for me.
And maybe that’s the best we can do right now, or ever — try to weed out what does work for us from the oversaturated and relentless productivity market, and just leave the rest alone.
