Taylor Haskins - Work Smarter, Not Harder: The Best Hacks to Make You More Productive, More Effective, and More Innovative

Work Smarter, Not Harder: The Best Hacks to Make You More Productive, More Effective, and More Innovative

By

Taylor Haskins

2017 Taylor Haskins

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What is Productivity, Really?

The pace of our everyday lives is increasing all the time. Were facing more and more demands on our time and energy and less and less time to fulfill those demands. Its easy to, as a result, get caught in the frantic trap of busyness, which saps our attention and time away from those goals we should really be focusing on.

This cheat sheet will show you (without any fluff and with actionable advice) how to protect your focus, manage your time, and manage your energy so that you can perform at your peak productivity and accomplish those things that are most important to you. From goal setting and prioritizing, to selection of mental models, to minimizing distractions and entering a state of flow, to using creativity and innovation to propel yourself forward, you will find in these pages everything you need to eliminate unnecessary timesucks and zone in on the tasks and projects that are most important in helping you achieve your goals.

Before we get started, though, it would be useful to take a look at what we mean when we say productivity.

A very simple definition of the term provides that productivity equals value divided by time and/or resources. In other words, productivity is the efficient use of time, resources, materials, energy, et cetera . Productivity, put most simply, is what we call our attempts to find the best and highest uses of our time and resources with the least wasted effort. Its a matter of output measured against input.

Those who have higher productivity are able to provide or attain more value with the same amount of time/resources/materials/energy than are those with lower productivity. It follows, then, that one can improve his or her productivity by either (1) increasing the value create using the same amount of time, resources, and energy or (2) decrease the amount of time, resources, and energy used while still creating the same amount of value.

There are all sorts of complicated ways to view and measure personal productivity, but, really, it comes down to one thing: how much time do you have to use to do things that matter less in order to be able to do the things that matter the most? This is where the difficulty liesit can be tough to balance these (often countervailing) forces, but this balance is so important. After all, we each only have one life, and its up to us to figure out how to use it as best we can.

Why Control Matters

Productivity begins with motivation. It takes motivation to examine the way were using our time, energy, and resources. It also takes motivation to decide how to reallocate those things and then to actually do it. And motivation, according to Charles Duhigg, the author of the bestseller Smarter, Faster, Better , starts with control. More specifically, it starts with where we perceive control to lie.

Since the 1950s, psychologists have been studying the effect of our understandings of our own locus of control. They have found that people with an external locus of control perceive the general direction of their lives to be outside of their control and believe that life is something that happens to them. People with an internal locus of control, on the other hand, perceive themselves to be in charge of their own destinies and attribute success or failure to their own efforts. As you can imagine, those with an internal locus of control invariably get far superior results in life and careerthey achieve more professionally, have happier relationships, and are less stressed and depressed with longer life spans.

Fortunately, locus of control is not something that is fixed. Its not something were born with. Its not an innate personality trait like introversion or extroversion. Instead, says Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, its a learned skill that can be practiced and cultivated, like reading or writing. The key is forcing yourself to take control of your own choices. You want to trigger a will to act. You want to adopt the mindset that one concrete choice necessarily leads to another. So when youre facing an overwhelming project, this mindset propels you to decide on one small step to take to get started, then take that step. When you have a mile-long list of phone calls to make, you just pick one number off the list and dial. If theres a difficult conversation you need to have, decide on your opening line, then deliver it. The point is to find a choice that allows you to exert control and move forward.

Control and motivation are inextricably mixed. Our belief that we are in control of our actions and our surroundings is a prerequisite to motivation. If we dont feel as if were in control, its hard to be motivated. When we do feel we are in control, we are more likely to work harder and push ourselves further. And how do we convince ourselves that we are in control? We make decisions. Sometimes we modify and work around instructions. In doing so, we have a sense of self-determination and autonomy. We make what may feel like a chore into a meaningful choice. We learn to see these choices as expressions of control, but also as reinforcements of our goals and values. Eventually, an internal locus of control emerges after all of this becomes a habit.

SMART Goals and Stretch Goals

Another key factor in self-motivation is our ability to set goals that both inspire us and translate directly into immediate action. We need to link our larger aspirations to smaller tasks that move us toward those aspirations. This seems like common sense, but it is easy to fall into the trap of making To Do lists itemizing a series of short-term objectives and allowing our brains to dwell on the short-term satisfaction of checking things off these lists, regardless of whether the tasks move us forward in any one of our most important goals. We all have a need for closure and, unfortunately, this can cause us to fixate on completing a task or a list of tasks without asking ourselves whether we are really pursuing the best course of action. The resultwe spend hours doing work that is unimportant and trivial in the big picture (but satisfying in the short term), while delaying or ignoring those key projects that actually fall in line with what we say we want to accomplish.