There’s a common misconception about being productive — that productivity is about completing a lot of tasks each day, and therefore, to become more productive, all you have to do is complete more tasks. Of course, this is not true.

Becoming more productive means doing work that matters so your measurable output increases. Completing two tasks that move a project or goal forward will produce far better long-term results than completing ten tasks that have no impact on any of your important projects or goals.

Stop picking the low-hanging fruit.

We have a natural tendency to go after the low-hanging fruit. To check off the easy tasks because doing so makes us feel good. We get that dopamine hit, which puts a smile on our faces and makes us want more. So we populate our to-do lists with even more easy, non-important tasks we can check off and get that dopamine hit. It becomes a vicious circle. We put more and more unimportant tasks on our to-do lists, hoping for more dopamine hits.

We tell ourselves we are completing essential tasks. After all, we must have a clean desk to focus better on our work and ensure we have enough staples in our top drawer just in case we run out while stapling important documents. Oh, and we should check our email just one more time in case something important has come in.

Begin the day with a simple plan.

We all have easy routine tasks and hard project work to complete each day. Difficulties begin when we are not clear about which work is essential. Prioritising our work is a big part of becoming more productive. This is why starting the day with a plan based on what current projects are important is vital. However, routine work can quickly take over the day if we are not careful.

Assign time each day/week for your routine admin work.

There are a couple of ways to ensure the less important routine work does not take over your day. One way is to assign one day each week for admin work. This could be Friday afternoon, for example. Fridays are notoriously difficult for focusing on important work because we are often thinking about our plans for the weekend. If that is the case, you could assign Friday as your admin and clean-up day (you could even make sure you have enough staples in your top drawer).

This means you only have easy tasks to do on Friday, and you don’t need much focus to finish them. Another way is to allocate a time slot each day for your admin and routine tasks. Giving yourself one hour a day to complete the routine and easy tasks will help you focus on the critical project work for the other seven or eight hours each day. I assign one hour a day for all my routine admin work. I usually give the end of the day to do this because I don’t need a lot of concentration to do it. But you can choose any time of the day or week to do it.

Focus on your desired outcome.

The key to better productivity is to focus on the outcome you want, not the tasks that will get you there. We often add unnecessary tasks when we are planning out a project. For example, “send email to get 2024 planning template”. Nine times out of ten, a phone call would get the desired result faster. You might also find you have tasks such as “talk to John about the presentation order” and lower down your list, have a task saying “ask John for the 2024 sales forecast”. These two tasks could be completed by one phone call or walking down the hall to talk to John, but because the tasks are not grouped together, you miss the second one. That means now you have to communicate with John twice instead of once.

When you set up a project, you want to be clear on what you are trying to achieve. What’s the desired outcome for the project? In Getting Things Done, David Allen writes about this, and Tony Robbins, in his Time Of Your Life course, puts a lot of stress on outcome thinking. The tasks help; they are signposts along the way, but more often than not, the shortest distance between where you are now and completing the project is not through completing all your tasks in the correct order; more often than not, the fastest way to completing the project is a simple phone call or going out to see the client or customer.

I use Evernote to plan out my projects and not Todoist. I can add tasks and steps I think will be needed to complete the project in a list at the bottom of my project note, and once I am satisfied I have everything required to complete the project, I go through the list, removing tasks I feel are unnecessary. What I end up with is a list of essential tasks. This often reduces the number of tasks required to complete the project by half.

If you are serious about becoming more productive, focus less on your tasks and more on what you are trying to achieve. The goal, the completed project and the desired outcome are what you are looking for, not completing ten tasks so you feel like you have accomplished something. As Jim Rohn said, “Don’t mistake movement for achievement. It’s easy to get faked out by being busy. The question is: Busy doing what?”

Thank you for reading my stories! 😊 If you enjoyed this article, hit those clapping hands below many times👏 It would mean a lot to me, and it helps other people see the story.

If you would like to receive the best productivity and time management tips and tricks each week in one convenient email, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter here.

You can also learn more about what I do here on my website