Three productivity hacks we learned by visualizing our work hours

For the past few years I’ve used RescueTime, an app that monitors which apps you use and rates you for how ‘productively’ you spend your computer time. While the reports and graphs that RescueTime delivers are great, I’ve never gotten in the habit of regularly checking on them.

How To Find Your Most Productive Hours

Not all hours are created equal. Sometimes an hour is enough to blaze through a massive project, and other times all you manage is to tiredly send a couple of unimportant emails.

How to Organize Your Entire Life with Trello

Trello is an awesome project management tool that makes collaboration easy and, dare I say, even fun. But this visual list tool can do so much more, whether you’re organizing work projects, family chores, travel plans, or just about anything else.

10 habits you should break to be more productive in 2017

These are the bad habits you most likely cling to but should rid yourself of. It will enhance your productivity and make you feel better. 

5 Questions Productive People Ask Themselves to Stay Focused

It happens to everyone. You sit down to finish a project, but before long your mind wanders to something entirely new. Facebook starts calling. You begin browsing on Amazon. And somehow you end up watching cat videos on YouTube. Don't worry; you aren't doomed to forever be a scatterbrain.

On the Complicated Economics of Attention Capital

In recent years, I’ve occasionally tackled an intriguing question: are distracting technologies partially to blame for our economy’s sluggish productivity numbers?

5 Incredibly Effective Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder

Regular readers know I definitely believe in the power of hard work. As Jimmy Spithill, skipper of Team Oracle USA, says, "Rarely have I seen a situation where doing less than the other guy is a good strategy." But we can all work smarter, too.

Until You Have Productivity Skills, Productivity Tools Are Useless

Back in the days of paper based planners, I depended on mine to help me stay on top of my to-do list and commitments. Making the switch to electronic tools was difficult and disruptive, and initially I didn’t want to do it.

A complete guide to designing your morning routine to double your productivity

On average, each of us wake up to 25,000 mornings in our adult life, which means we have 25,000 days to maximize how we spend it. Your morning defines the rest of your day.

Life’s Constantly One Big Rush! How To Create More Time

My feet don’t touch the ground. I’m stressed. Works mental. I’ve got to balance kids and a real-life job and a relationship and seeing family and a mortgage and paying bills.

The Case for Investing More in People

“Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything,” wrote Paul Krugman more than 20 years ago. “A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise output per worker.

5 Time-Saving Productivity Hacks, Reviewed

Deciding to be more productive is easy. Figuring out where to start is a bit more tricky.

Most productive people: 6 things they do every day

Ever feel like you’re just not getting enough done? Know how many days per week you’re actually productive?

The Physics of Productivity: Newton’s Laws of Getting Stuff Done

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking book, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which described his three laws of motion. In the process, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics and redefined the way the world looked at physics and science.

How to Plan Your Perfect Day for Superhuman Productivity

Most of us suck at planning and it’s assumed that we all know how to do it. After years of trial-and-error I want to show you a proven framework that we use at Asian Efficiency that allows you to plan the perfect day with an advanced tip at the end that will change the way plan… forever.

7 Behaviors That Will Make You Insanely Productive

Productivity is not doing lots of stuff fast. You can do lots of stuff and get nowhere closer to your ideal. Most people are living their lives this way. They are burning themselves out running in a million different directions. Our society has become obsessed with constant doing.

To-Do Lists Are Not Effective: Here’s What You Should Do Instead

It seems like we are busier than ever. There is always something to do—between email to meetings it’s hard to actually get any work done. To deal with doing more we often resort to sleeping less, or even worse, the to-do list. This is not the answer.

3 ways to squash burnout and boost productivity

You have no problem keeping busy. No problem crossing things off your to-do list. You multitask like it’s going out of style. But the weeks continue to fly by and you can’t help but be dissatisfied with what you’ve actually accomplished. Not only that, but you’re exhausted.

Most Productive People: 6 Things They Do Every Day

Ever feel like you’re just not getting enough done? Know how many days per week you’re actually productive?

6 Subtle Things Highly Productive People Do Every Day

Ever feel like you’re just not getting enough done? Know how many days a week you’re actually productive?

Supercharge Google Calendar: 30 Tips, Tricks, Hacks and Add-Ons

Google Calendar was likely the second Google app you tried, right after Gmail, when you got your first Google account. With a history dating back to 2006, one that's overshadowed by Gmail and Google's other apps, it's easy to overlook Google Calendar's deep set of features.

The ultimate efficiency hack: Have kids

In my late 20s and early 30s, I thought of myself as an efficiency machine. I got up early to run most days, worked long hours, and frequently had breakfast meetings and evening drinks with sources. I wrote a lot of stories. I doubted her.

14 Ways to Redesign Your Day for an Optimal Work-life Balance

For many of us, the balance between work and life has become so hopelessly out of kilter that getting a handle on it seems overwhelming and nearly impossible. But as the Japanese philosophy of Kaizen (改善) teaches, change doesn't have to happen all at once.

The Four Best Productivity Tricks I Learned At Google

When Google acquired the online photo editor Picnik in 2010, CMO Lisa Conquergood and the rest of the Picnik team went, too. They worked on the site until Google narrowed its focus and closed Picnik in 2012.

8 Scheduling Hacks to 10X Your Productivity

Let's face it - business owners have a lot on their plates. Whether you're managing teams locally or globally, your day-to-day thoughts and activities are likely consumed by the need to accelerate the growth of your company.

The Two Things Killing Your Ability to Focus

I used to wake up, stumble over to my phone, and immediately get lost in a stream of pointless notifications. This digital haze continued throughout the day, keeping me from accomplishing important tasks. I was distracted, anxious, and ineffective as a leader.

9 Productivity Tips from People Who Write About Productivity

In recent years, work has become infinitely more complex. Technological innovations have led to round-the-clock work schedules and mounting expectations. Our assignments have grown more collaborative, requiring more coordination, conference calls, and meetings.

How to Scale Yourself and Get More Done Than You Thought Possible

This counterintuitive advice is one of a dozen-plus productivity practices preached by Scott Hanselman, a program manager at Microsoft, author and avid blogger and speaker. Hanselman's not the person you'd to expect to hear encourage dropping the ball and discourage burning the midnight oil.

The automation myth

President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment. Sen. Marco Rubio said that the central challenge of our times is "to ensure that the rise of the machines is not the fall of the worker.

The secret to insane productivity? Will power

Think about your productivity levels throughout the day. Chances are you’re like me – you have a good idea of when you’re more likely to get stuff done, and when to avoid complex tasks.

Productivity Tips for People Who Hate Productivity Tips

“Traditional approaches to staying focused don’t work for me.” “I know what I should do to be more productive, but I just don’t do it.” I hear sentences like these repeatedly from coaching clients.

No, research does not say that you produce more when working 40 hours per week

Last week, a debate flared up on twitter on working hours in academia and there was the claim that it is irrational to work over 40 hours as output actually goes down. I do not believe this claim. People lie about how much they work.

How Much Sleep Do We Really Need to Work Productively?

Every one of us, on average, will be sleeping 24 years in our lifetime. That’s a pretty long time if you ask me and makes it even more important to know exactly how the phenomenon of sleep impacts us.

Working from home

I’ve been working from home full-time for more than seven years, and running my own business for the same amount of time. Many of us at least have the opportunity to occasionally work from home, and I daresay that many people would like the chance to do so permanently.

The Great Productivity Puzzle

I was going to start this column with some new productivity figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I realized that at least half of the readers would quit right there. Productivity is one of those subjects that fascinates economists and bores, or mystifies, almost everyone else.

7 Daily Tasks You Can Put on Autopilot

Putting your daily tasks on autopilot isn't just an efficient way to conduct your life: It’s the smart way. We're all triple-taskers nowadays, and it’s sometimes impossible to take a moment to catch your bearings and recall the laundry list of things you have to get done.

10 Lessons I Learned from a Year of Productivity Experiments

Over the last 12 months I have conducted countless productivity experiments on myself, interviewed some of the most productive people in the world, and read a ton of books and academic literature on productivity, all to explore how I could become as productive as possible.

Why Slacking Off Can Speed Up Your Productivity

Being busy is very often a waste of time. Slacking off can actually get better results. Just ask nature. A sidewinder snake camouflaged against the desert sand lies idle, doing not a lot at all. But when a mouse passes within striking distance, the effectiveness of the snake’s strategy is clear.

Are digital distractions harming labour productivity?

FOR many it is a reflex as unconscious as breathing. Hit a stumbling-block during an important task (like, say, writing a column)? The hand reaches for the phone and opens the social network of choice.

10 free online courses you can take to learn to be more productive

Increasing your productivity is a goal that many busy professionals, parents, students, and entrepreneurs share. Finding enough hours in the day to accomplish all of your tasks or goals can be difficult.

Four Basic Writing Principles You Can Use in Everyday Life

Writing starts way before you put letters to a page. It involves processes like critical thinking, communication, and creativity. Even if writing feels like pulling teeth, you can apply the principles of writing to many facets of your day-to-day life. Here's how.

42 Bad Habits That Suck Your Energy

Ever have those days when you feel you're dragging a ball and chain behind you? Everything is a struggle. Your productivity has tanked, your energy is at rock-bottom, and you just want to crawl in a hole and suck your thumb. Sometimes it's easy to identify why we're so lethargic.

4 ways to get motivated when you don't feel like...

Every week I write up to three new articles like this one. And every week I struggle to find the motivation to get started on each article. On Sunday night I make my to do list for the week ahead, and think about how quickly I’ll get to work on this week’s articles.

Pmarca Guide to Personal Productivity

One of my all-time favorite guilty pleasures is indulging in productivity porn. Productivity porn (or, for those really in the know, "productivity pr0n") consists of techniques, tactics, and tricks for maximizing personal productivity -- or, as they say, "getting things done".

The 21 Best Productivity Tools to Add More Hours to Your Day

If time is money, productivity is like that Apple stock you bought decades ago – it has the power to make you a very rich Scrooge McDuck. I remember when I was younger feeling totally befuddled by the vast shelves of self-help books about time management. It all sounded like a capital snore fest.

Why Greater Productivity Leads to More Income

Productivity doesn’t just increase your efficiency. If you do it right, it can also increase your income. The problem is that traditional systems get productivity all wrong. They define productivity as the ability to do more and do it faster.

25 Web Resources That Will Maximize Your Productivity

To aid your quest for efficiency, here are 25 of the most useful web productivity resources we've found. Buffer — You share things all day on the internet, but you don't want to share them right away. Enter Buffer, a simple, robust utility for scheduling your social media. 

Top 10 Hacks for Automating Your Life

What if you were a wizard that could bend the entire world to your will? Chores would do themselves, bills would pay on time, and your appliances would obey your every thought.

7 Things You Need to Stop Doing to Be More Productive, Backed by Science

When I was 17 years old, I used to work and study for about 20 hours a day. I went to school, did my homework during breaks and managed a not-for-profit organization at night.

Great at Planning, Terrible at Executing: 10 Strategies for Becoming a Doer

Most people are pretty good at coming up with ideas for the future, and many of us are pretty good at developing plans to achieve those things. I know I certainly am.

Productivity 101: How to Use Personal Kanban to Visualize Your Work

The best productivity methods keep your to-dos in front of you and prioritized so you never wonder what to work on next. Some are complicated, but others make it easy to see everything, organized by priority—so easy you could use Post-It notes if you wanted.

The 5 Zeros You Should Achieve Every Day to Give You Peace of Mind

I’m lining up guest posts during my travels over the next two weeks. This post is written by Timo Kiander. Timo is a blogger, author and speaker who helps work-at-home professionals get stuff done fast so that they have time for living.

5 Twitter Tools to Boost Your Productivity

Do you struggle to keep up with your Twitter activities? Interested in tools to improve productivity?

The physics of productivity: Newton’s laws for getting stuff done

In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton published his groundbreaking book, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, which described his three laws of motion. In the process, Newton laid the foundation for classical mechanics and redefined the way the world looked at physics and science.

3 Novel Hacks to Kickstart Your Productivity

The only resource that none of us can get more of in this life is time. We get what we get, so we've got to make the most of it. For perspective, I have a full-time day job, a profitable online side business and I also write regularly for six different large web sites including Entrepreneur.com.

Medium’s Top 10 Posts of All Time About Productivity

What really got me hooked on Medium was not just the awesome posts I read daily but it was the amount of value I received after I took the time to go back to January of 2014 and read as many posts as I could from then until now.

Woody Allen and the Art of Value Productivity

As a graduate student I was known for being organized. I was reminded of this a couple weeks ago when I attended a computer science conference along with many of my old lab mates. What I also remember is that I always felt indifferent about this reputation. To be organized is a nice thing.

How to Better Remember and Make Use of What You Read

Have you ever read a book passage that you're certain could one day be applicable to your life? But, between your shopping list, work to-dos, and your aunt's upcoming birthday, the passage quickly fades from your memory causing you to draw a blank when you really need to reference it.

Too Busy? 7 Ways To Increase Leisure Time, According To Science

Feeling overwhelmed? Are you constantly running from thing to thing but never getting it all done? When researchers survey people, they say they’re too busy — about everything.

12 Quiet Rituals of Enormously Successful Humans

May your actions speak louder than your words.  May your life preach louder than your lips.  May your success be your noise in the end. The result of enormous success is often pretty noisy – lots of people talking, writing and sharing stories about it.

The Most Effective Way of Organizing Your Files and Folders

One of the simplest and most overlooked aspects of being organized is getting your computer files organized. It’s something that’s easy to take for granted, especially when you forget that most people don’t use their computers like us crazy systems-people do.

10 Things to Do Before You Go to Bed

Everyone is obsessed with how successful people start their day. And if you’ve decided to do something about the quality of your life, you’ll start working on developing a morning routine and trying different versions of it.

The Ultimate Guide To Organizing Your Workspace For Maximum Productivity

The key to being more productive is literally right in front of you.

Why you should manage your energy, not your time

For ten years, Lisa Congdon’s days were packed like a “can of sardines.” Juggling between five and 20 projects at any one time, the artist and author, based in Portland, Oregon in the US, tried to squeeze as much into her daily work schedule as she could.

10 Productivity Tips to Tackle, Track Your Goals

Productivity is often a nebulous concept. Knowing when you’ve achieved a productive state can be even less concrete. Evernote is a tool you can leverage to capture ideas and goals, and keep track of your progress.

Why Employees At Apple And Google Are More Productive

Companies like Apple, Netflix, Google, and Dell are 40% more productive than the average company, according to research from the leadership consulting firm Bain & Company.

A Night Owl's Guide to More Productive Mornings

Mornings are rough, especially if you're not the type of person who jumps out of bed ready to take on the day. Still, the sun rises whether you care for the AM hours or not.

How to Turn Gmail Into Your Central Productivity Hub

Most of us use Gmail as our main email service, but it's so much more. Gmail can act as your to-do list, your notes board, your reminders, your list maker, and all the other things you need to be productive. Browsers hog computer resources, so opening up too many tabs can strain performance.

10 Must-Read Books That Will Make You Ridiculously Productive

Ahhh, productivity. The revered topic in both the business and personal world. It seems we’re all looking for a magic bullet to help us get more done in less time.

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix: How to Distinguish Between Urgent and Important Tasks and Make Real Progress in Your Life

Do you sometimes feel like you spend all your time managing crises? That your life is basically spent putting out one proverbial fire after another? At the end of the day do you feel completely sapped and drained of energy, and yet can’t point to anything you accomplished of real significance?

How I Use Todoist And Evernote Together

I’ve long used Evernote for my resource and reference materials. all of my research is stored there, along with notebooks that contain living documents that I want to share with those who are helping build Productivityist and my virtual assistant.

20 Quick Reads that Will Change the Way You Live, Love and Work

Based on a recommendation from an old friend, who also happens to be a psychologist and a successful entrepreneur, I read John Maxwell’s book Failing Forward this past week.

6 CEO Productivity Tips to Steal for Yourself

Everyone knows that leading a company is one of the toughest gigs around.

Get More Done in 2017 by Tracking Your Time

The number of productivity strategies out there are innumerable. Every day, dozens and perhaps hundreds of articles are published online about how to get more done, both in work and in life generally. It can be downright overwhelming.

How Our Brains Stop Us Achieving Our Goals and How to Fight Back

As admittedly wonderful and fascinating as the human brain is, it definitely can feel like our brain is out to get us sometimes.

I Followed My Own Productivity Advice for a Week. Here's What Happened

When you write about the way people work for a living, it affects the way you work.

Stop Doing Low-Value Work

In the past, time management experts would recommend that you divide up your work into A tasks, B tasks, and C tasks. The concept was to do the A tasks first, then the B tasks, then the C tasks, when you can get to them. If priorities changed, you just changed the order of your As, Bs, and Cs.

Top 10 Tricks for a Healthier, High-Energy Workday

Working at an office can be surprisingly unhealthy. Between sitting all day, eating poorly, and enduring never-ending stress, your office can take a few years off your life. Here's how to stay healthy and energetic at the office (and make the day go by faster).

Ten Clever Uses for Plain Text Files That Can Increase Your Productivity

When it comes to keeping track of all your text and to-do lists, there's no shortage of apps to choose from, but sometimes the ease and simplicity of working with plain text files can actually be more productive. Here are ten clever plain text files that you might want to keep on hand.

I’ve posted a fair amount of research related to procrastination in the past, let’s round it up so we have a useful list to refer to when willpower gets low. Yes, that’s right, procrastination can be a good thing.

Why Is Productivity So Weak? Three Theories

More than 151 million Americans count themselves employed, a number that has risen sharply in the last few years. The question is this: What are they doing all day? Because whatever it is, it barely seems to be registering in economic output. The number of hours Americans worked rose 1.

10 Ways Happy People Prioritize Their To-Do Lists

This is one of the most common questions readers ask us via email, blog comments, and social media.  So today I want to share some simple, actionable ways to improve your happiness and wellbeing on a daily basis.