You can’t really become efficient with “efficiency tools” or “time management skills”

Procrastination is not something you can change. You should learn to accept it and focus on developing good habits to improve efficiency.

Shenzhen Translation Bureau is its compilation team, focusing on technology, business, workplace, life and other fields, focusing on introducing new foreign technologies, new perspectives and new trends.

Editor’s note: In terms of efficiency improvement, many people like to rely on and try various efficiency tools or time management methods, hoping to achieve personal efficiency improvement through this “shortcut” approach. However, in this process, many people have a beginning but not an end. Not only has there not been a significant improvement in efficiency, but also wasted time and energy on the meaningless search for favorite tools or methods. The original title of this article was 4 Habits That Will Dramatically Improve Your Productivity, and the author Nick Wignall emphasized that if you want to improve efficiency, you don’t rely on skills and methods, but develop better habits. Nick shared 4 quick and efficient habits to improve efficiency in the article. I hope it will be useful to you.

Image source: Pexels.com

If you want to increase personal efficiency quickly, the guiding principle you should follow is: Less is better.

Most people who want to improve their efficiency, their time and energy are basically wasted in finding various low-value efficiency tools and stupid time management skills.

It’s like a writer. Instead of sitting down and sitting down and writing, he spent hours reading articles and books about how to become a writer.

We are always addicted to finding various efficiency tools and techniques, and there are countless various techniques and skills for organizing collections, but in reality, very few are actually used, so in the end, these contents may not be What practical significance.

So what you really need is not tricks and methods, but better habits.

If you really want to make yourself more efficient, you can refer to the following four habitual suggestions from a psychological perspective to quickly improve your focus and efficiency.

1. Don’t do anything to get rid of procrastination,You should learn to accept it

For all of us, we tend to procrastinate. Our response and approach to procrastination may be the “culprit” that really prevents us from becoming more efficient.

In fact, the idea of procrastination is very normal, and it is not too much to say that it is healthy. Procrastination reflects a consciousness that expresses your inner desire for novelty and curiosity. No matter how devoted you are to a certain task or work, from time to time, you still want to put your work aside for a while, to enjoy something more comfortable or interesting now.

To stay productive, you must change your perspective on procrastination.

People who are always struggling with procrastination are usually very unfriendly and critical in their perception and perception of procrastination. And these unfriendly attitudes are basically presented through negative self-talk:

What happened to me? !! Why can’t I cheer up and focus on what I want to do!

Here it is again! I really hope I do n’t delay any longer!

Look at Tom. He’s almost like a machine, sitting and working intently, completely unaffected by other things. I also want to stay as focused as he is.

The problem with this negative self-talk is that it will increase your negative emotions based on your experience: in addition to making you feel that you don’t want to work, you will feel ashamed, disappointed, and even angry .

In this case, your procrastination may become more serious, because diverting your attention through worthless entertainment may quickly make you forget the negative caused by negative self-talk. mood.

To get out of this vicious circle, the most fundamental way is to change and reflect on your tendency to procrastinate. Specifically, I have the following four suggestions:

Watch your procrastination. At the same time, pay attention to whether there are some involuntary thoughts and feelings in this situation. This method is called meta-cognition, which means thinking about yourself. This method is very effective, because it can slow you down, and it can also reduce or prevent your habitual negative self-talk.

Classify objectively and fairly and accept your tendency to procrastinate. You just needAdmit that you feel your tendency to procrastinate. But what you need to let yourself know is that acknowledging your tendency to procrastinate doesn’t mean you have to fix it immediately.

Verify your procrastination. Remind yourself that it is normal to feel your tendency to procrastinate, and that there is a tendency to procrastinate, and it is not just you. If this reminder is helpful, you can also think about the situation in which you have been able to get the job done well despite the tendency to procrastinate. This can help you increase self-confidence and self-efficacy, so that you can continue to work even if you are prone to procrastination.

Allow your procrastination tendency to coexist with you. Tell yourself that you are willing to allow procrastination at work. By positively accepting (rather than deliberately avoiding) procrastination, you can train your brain to treat it as something at least neutral rather than a threat. This can also reduce the intensity it gives you when you encounter this situation in the future.

If you always habitually criticize yourself for your procrastination tendency, you will only make it harder for you to face your procrastination tendency, and you will continue to train your brain so that it will later your procrastination tendency Treated as a danger or threat. As a result, you may be more unable to work.

Instead of getting rid of procrastination, try to verify it and try to accept it.

2. Eliminate all kinds of digital interference completely

If you like to read articles about efficiency topics like this one, you may have your own bias of control. This means that you are more willing to accept that you actually want to become more efficient in terms of thinking, behavior, and achievement of goals.

However, the biggest factors that cause us to delay and distract are often our environment, especially the digital environment:

I just received a notification from social media software

Email that pops up from the desktop

The latest game app that I downloaded and installed yesterday on my phone

Lack of focus does not necessarily mean that our willpower muscles are very weak. It may only mean that the interference factors of your environment are too strong. And before you have time to think about boosting your willpower or self-control, your attention is directly affected by distractions, which prevents you from focusing on a certain job.

Improving willpower should be your last solution. The best solution is to change your environment, so that you do not need to maintain focus by improving your willpower.

Before you sit down and concentrate on your work, make sure that you are prepared for the environment in which you are working that will help you stay focused. Specifically, I have the following 3 suggestions:

First, adhere to the “habit of 4:55”. The so-called “4:55 habit” is a little trick that helps me reduce distractions and keep me focused on my most important tasks (because I get off work at 5pm every day and at 4pm At around 50 o’clock, I can basically finish the day’s work. Therefore, I started preparing for work from 4:55 at the latest, walked out of work mode from the mentality, and started family mode).

Our tendency to procrastinate is usually caused by preparations before we figure out what we are about to do. Opening an e-mail and searching for one of these plans will likely get you into the abyss of the Internet. When you think about what you want to do, the time has passed ten minutes or more.

My little trick allows me to spend at least 5 minutes every day before work to simply plan the next day’s work schedule, decide the most important thing or two to do after work tomorrow, and prepare The materials and tools you need to use tomorrow will be ready for you soon after you start work the next day.

Second, set your phone aside. It is undeniable that although the mobile phone is very fun, it is the biggest factor that affects our focus and leads to procrastination.

I don’t recommend trying to resist. In contrast, it’s better to turn off (or turn on Do Not Disturb) and set it aside. When I sit down and prepare for a very important job, I turn off the phone first, and then put it in the drawer. This means that I cannot receive any notifications, and because I cannot see my phone, it cannot interfere with my work.

Also, because I know it’s off, it’s artificially creating a hindrance. After all, if I really want to play with my phone, it will take about 20 seconds to boot up. So, thinking of this, many times may not have the idea of playing mobile phones.

Third, set the computer to single task mode. Now, almost all white-collar workers need a computer at work. However, you can also do all kinds of interesting things through your computer, which greatly affects your productivity.

I recommend that you keep onlyOne or two software that is absolutely useful for your work, and then close all other software. Make your computer do only one task, and then you will find that you are relatively harder to interfere with other factors.

Most digital interference factors actually give the illusion of “useful and harmless”. Therefore, we always like to keep these digital interference factors at work.

However, behind these digital interference factors, there is a powerful force that draws you to the abyss of distraction and procrastination. If you go to great lengths to resist and resist these interfering factors, you will actually only waste your time and energy on doing the most important things.

When you are doing important work, be sure to eliminate all kinds of interference factors, especially digital interference factors.

Image source: Pexels.com

3. Develop in-depth work habits

In the book “Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”, the author Cal Newport proposed the concept of “deep work” .

Newport defines the concept of “deep work”:

Uninterrupted, focus on a certain professional activity to make your cognitive ability reach the limit. With deep work, you can create new value, improve your skills, and it’s hard to replicate.

In-depth work can actually be understood as the peak of the mind.

It’s like you are working near full potential, allowing you to maintain an efficient and prolific state and achieve creative high-quality work achievements.

But the problem is that maintaining deep work is also tiring, so it is difficult for you to maintain this state, and it is even more difficult to maintain deep work regularly. Therefore, at this time, we have to mention habits.

As far as deep work is concerned, habits can solve two major problems:

It is impossible for you to sit down and expect that you can enter the deep working state, so as to achieve efficient and productive work performance. You have to achieve this result step by step. You need to train your brain to adapt to deep working conditions, which is very different from the way we usually work easily.

To maintain long-term deep work, you need a system. If your colleagues are always interfering with your work, or if you are always prone to procrastination due to the influence of social media, then it is difficult for you to achieve and maintain a long-term deep work state.

Cultivating a strong deep work habit can solve the above two problems well. In terms of developing in-depth work habits, I suggest starting with the following four aspects.

Consistent deep working hours. Ideally, you should develop this habit at a fixed number of days and times a week. For example, the first thing to do after arriving at the company on a weekday. No matter what you do, you have to stay in the deep working state for that period of time.

Deep work time increases gradually from short to long. At the beginning, I suggest you guarantee 20 minutes of deep work time. After a week, you can increase to half an hour. Ideally, you should be able to maintain deep working conditions for 45 minutes to an hour without any interference during this period.

Resolutely and say no to various interference factors. This was also mentioned earlier. But it’s important not to just focus on the interfering factors themselves (such as turning off push notifications for social software). What you should do is go to great lengths to find and resolve the source of the interference factors (such as turning off the phone and leaving it in another room).

Track your progress and reward yourself. Create a simple tracking management system for yourself, allowing you to follow up on progress in real time and reward yourself in a timely manner. I really like the method of American talk show comedian Jerry Seinfeld. After I finish the in-depth work, I will draw a circle on the calendar day, and then my daily goal is to keep the movement of the circle and guarantee “Can’t drop the chain” halfway. In addition, I will reward myself in time. If I do in-depth work, I will reward myself with a cup of coffee.

Deep work is a powerful efficiency solution. In order to improve efficiency through deep work, we must first develop deep work habits.

4. Take advantage of the strong push function

The so-called forcing function refers to a mechanism that forces you to take some action. It can also effectively solve problems such as lack of willpower or motivation.

When you are using your computer, suddenly an advertisement pops up on the desktop, which is a 50% off promotion advertisement for a brand new clothes. You now have only two options. First, click the very conspicuous “YES” button on the page to browse related content; second, you may need to take a moment to find the completely inconspicuous and extremely small “X” button to close the ad.

In the field of promotion marketing, the push function is a commonly used marketing method to increase the possibility of potential consumers becoming actual consumers. In addition, it can also be used to effectively improve personal efficiency.

For example, I sincerely hope that I can finish this manuscript by next Monday, but I have been delaying. In fact, I can bet with my friends. The content of the bet is that if I do n’t send him the first draft before 5 pm next Monday, I will give him $ 100, and he can take the money to buy what he wants .

This is a push function. Using $ 100 as “gambling money”, I’m actually forcing myself (or at least it can be counted as strongly encouraging myself) to persist in accomplishing the set goals, rather than distracting for immediate enjoyment.

The extremely efficient people are masters who are good at taking advantage of the strong push function.

We should all be aware that inattention is a very common phenomenon. Sometimes, our enthusiasm for doing things will be greatly diminished. Generally speaking, our self-discipline may not be as good as we think. Therefore, instead of having the best hope, it is better to have the worst intention and then act on it.

In terms of improving personal efficiency, here are four practical examples of pushing features:

If you want to get a lot of work done quickly, then you can just go out with your laptop and find a coffee shop to sit down and work. However, do not bring a power cord.

If you want to get more done while working from home, unplug your TV and uninstall all non-work related software on your computer.

Find a coach or sign up for a course and settle all tuition or course fees in the next few months in advance.

Let your assistant or spouse change your social media account password unless you complete a job or achieve a purpose, Or tell them not to tell you the new password.

Never rely on motivation. Instead, you should design something that works for you, and ensure that no matter what emotions and feelings you have, you can motivate yourself to work towards your goals.

Translator: Junyi

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