Stop Burning The Midnight Oil: Work Smarter Not Harder With These Productivity Hacks
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1. Make smarter to-do lists.
I used to have a love-hate relationship with to-do lists. Writing them made me feel organized, but they never made a big enough difference in my productivity. What I realize now is that I was treating every item with the same urgency, which didn’t help at all.
Rather than putting everything on one to-do list, arrange all your must-do essentials. Which are high-impact tasks? Which bite-sized ones will move you toward the completion of big-picture goals? See which items consistently get overlooked. The problem might be the way they’re worded or that they’re too broadly defined. Or perhaps these tasks belong on an employee’s to-do list and not yours.
2. Hack your inbox.
Every entrepreneur has an inbox whose clutter can inhibit efficiency. To sort the important stuff from the rest, use Gmail’s label function. This allows you to better determine what’s need-to-do versus good-to-do. Remember that your email program probably has a ton of useful features that you haven’t considered.
You can also use your email in tandem with your must-do planning. I use ActiveInbox for my to-do list management inside Gmail. Have an item to add? I email myself. I check my emails and new to-dos once or twice daily, marking them as needed and then knocking them out. In David Allen’s Getting Things Done style, if a task will take two minutes or less, I do it right away…..
Read More | You Don’t Need to Burn the Midnight Oil. Use These 5 Productivity Hacks Instead | Inc.com | https://bit.ly/2L6gCmM