How to Be More Effective?

Hello my friends, welcome back!

In this blog, I’ll tell you how I work on my progress of being more effective with my duties, work, and even hobbies. I hope you will also get some idea, how to be more effective with you daily tasks. 🙂

Are you ready? Here we go!

Get A Headphone

Yes, I know… This is not the advice you were waiting for. Earphones can be:

• unhealthy, – due to loud music and the thing is always in your ears, blocking the natural clearing mechanism of it-,
• dangerous on the street, – don’t forget to always double-check around the crosswalk if you wear earphones-,
• rude, – just take it out when somebody talks to you-.

Among the bad points, there are several things headphones can provide you no matter what. Privacy, self-time, focus, concentration, joy. You are able to rule out the outside, whenever you need extra focus time. Forget the loud and/or rapping music. Try with something smoother, which has absolutely no words sung in it, and it will bring you to the next level of focusing.

When I am at the office and some urgent task comes in, I always make sure, that I put my headphones on, start the music for boosting my focus until I get the job done. My co-workers know that this time I’m not there to talk but to achieve.

When the task, job, or creative work is done, I’m good to be more approachable again. 🙂 Please check out my blog about how to be more approachable, and how it changed my life for good.

We live in a time when everything is super fast and focus-killer around us. We need this escape to be able to maximize our attention on our tasks.

Pomodoro technique

Honestly, I haven’t got any big experience with this technique. I remember I used it once 5 years ago for one of my university exams. It worked out really well. I passed the exam with a really nice mark. Since then, I was not using it, but I heard about the technique so many times that I needed to try it again.

At work, I had some problems with my time management on my tasks, and I was wondering what can I lose if I try this technique to solve the problem? Needless to say, it worked really well again. I could solve problems efficiently while giving my brain some time to recover.

This technique may not be useful for everyone, because not everyone has the same projects and tasks. This is why it is good, that you adjust the technique for your own. For me, the most effective was 50 minutes work and 10 mins break, which is basically a double session of the original.

Later on, I may bring you my results of using this technique for longer-term, so be tuned. 🙂

List 3 Point Out of Your To-Do List – The “List of 3” technique –

Everyone has a list of what he or she can follow. Someone writes on a paper, or a journal some others use applications for that. If you are feeling that the list is just expanding and you are not going anywhere it means you are not productive but keeping yourself busy. There is a huge difference between the two.

I’ve been and many times I am still in this situation. Unforeseen events come and go, new tasks pop up, and so on. I desperately write my to-do list, which becomes that long, it could be a novel soon. The stress gets bigger as well because I do not feel that I do any productive work. We can call this the “folder-mover” state. It means, you do something, which is not useful or productive.

I decided to pick three of my main tasks, which are going to be also rated from 1-3, depending on the urgency level of the task. Let’s call this the “list of 3” technique. If I manage to get done only one out of these three-peak tasks, I can already call the day productive, since this will move me ahead as I’ve finished my most important task of the day or week.

As soon as I finished the three tasks, I can move forward and choose the next three elements. You can easily adjust the orders of the tasks, but try to be consistent, because if you move too much among them, it will lead back again to the “folder-mover” state. 😀

This technique worked so well for me, that I can recommend it to you warmly. Oh, and don’t forget to use the headphones when you work on the list of 3. 🙂

Batch The Tasks

Tasks can be totally variant from each other, but you can always make some kinds of categorization and also there are tasks that are identical with each other. For example, with my blog, there are different tasks regarding the posts. Researching, writing, creating the podcast, and publishing them.

I can choose between two approaches. Firstly, the one-by-one approach, when I create everything for one topic from scratch till the end, or secondly, to batch the work.

Each technique has ups and downs. I personally have been always the zero to hero guy. If I start something from the beginning I cannot stop until I finish. This can be good and bad since creative work often needs a second view or opinion. This opinion can come from a different person or from yourself after some time. Therefore, if you pressure yourself to push from start to finish everything, your view on the project will be shady.

So nowadays, I try to batch the identical processes. It means when I do the research, I automatically do it for 2-3 posts ahead since I dedicated my time for research, Thereby, I am not forced to change my approach during my work. Whenever I am ready with the research, I start to work on the writing one to another. Again I’ll keep myself in the phase where I can concentrate on the writing only, and so on.

Honestly, this batching approach is really new to me, but I can see the positive effect on myself. I am more likely to progress with my project rather than finish one task and let it be for weeks.

I hope using all these strategies and habits, I’ll be able to deliver more consistent content for you. 🙂

If you like my work, please subscribe to my website with your email and have a look at my other posts as well.

Thank you!

Have a good one! 🙂

Márk