Some people will say that they worked for 12 hours, so they worked hard. But did they really?
Time is not the best measure of our productivity. You can spend an hour and do a brilliant job or waste a week to achieve nothing. Working smart matters more than working a lot.
It’s important to organize your time properly. Focus on your priorities and use your time well.
If you have a goal, pursue this goal until it’s done. Don’t let other things distract you. It’s easy to get stuck checking emails, watching videos, or browsing social media. However, this means that you are letting your time go to waste.
Our brains are quite fickle. When we get distracted, it takes a while to focus again on the previous task. It’s annoying when others interrupt us and force our attention away from work, but we are more than ready to interrupt ourselves.
It’s useful to organize your work in blocks where you can focus completely on a single thing. Turn off notifications, get off the Internet, and put your attention where it needs to be.
The results will be amazing.
Another thing to keep in mind is that multitasking is a bad idea. Unless you absolutely have to, avoid it like the plague. It makes our work worse and wastes a lot of time needlessly.
When our mind starts to wander, we can take longer to finish a task. When we procrastinate or turn our attention elsewhere, we do a worse job.
So, use your time in an effective manner. Don’t let your mind get away from you. Make your environment free of distractions.
The best way to work is by immersing ourselves completely in the task. You have felt it at points, this state when the work seems to engage and challenge. Time flows when we are focused.
To cultivate this level of immersion, reduce the distractions around you. Set a specific time during which you will focus only on the task. Whether you will do it for 15, 30, 60, or more minutes is up to you, but keep that commitment.
You will see the results quickly. When you are engaged, you can do your best work.
Time is not the best way to measure productivity. You need two things, the results and the process, to show how good your work was.