Timing Your Activities: 5 Ways to Stay Super Productive [Part 3]

By Bonirulzz @bonirulzz

I’ve read good amount of books/ blogs/ reddit threads on productivity.

Mainly, I was inspired to work on improving my productivity after reading the book – 4 Hour Work Week.

It has been almost a year now practicing & improving my Productivity and today, I want to share with you some of the best ways (or say my experiments) that can dramatically improve your productivity!

Note: I’ll be sharing the tips in parts (i.e. one tip every week).
Reason: So that you can consume all the tips well! These are ACT Exercises and hence won’t be good if I share all at once!

I’ve already shared two strategies! If you haven’t read it – Go through it once! [Strategy one & Strategy two]

Time for the Third Strategy/ Way to Remain Super Productive!

3) Eggtimer

Have You Ever timed Your Work Activities?

Nope? I assumed so!

You will be amazed when you will learn the actual time you take to complete a task.

When I started timing my activities, I learned that I am spending more amount of time on certain activities than I  should. And I used that to free up my time.

For Example

After using eggtimer, I learned that I invest 3 hours of my time  every week in preparing the marketing report. [I used to assume that it takes me only an hour or two to complete the report]

Now that’s a huge amount of my day time.

And the day I learned that,I did two things for the next week:

  • Delegated some part of the reporting to my colleague
  • Reduced the time spent on other activities for that day [so that I can work with ease & focus on preparing the report – otherwise at the end of the day I would complain about other incomplete tasks]

One line Summary: It allowed me to prepare better reports [i.e. more quality time was spent in preparing the report – since other task were reduced] in less time [since I had delegated part of my work].

Note: I still spend close to 2 hours in preparing the report, however, nowadays I put more thought of what goes into reporting and plan my activities pretty well

How it works?

  • Go to eggtimer,
  • Enter the time you think the task will take to complete and start the timer.
  • Keep that tab away from you view so that you are not distracted & start your work
  • You will either complete your work before the time or the eggtimer will notify you that your time has expired!