Five favourite productivity habits
At Lasoo we spend a lot of time thinking about the habits and routines of high performing teams. Here are five of our favourite productivity habits that can help you better manage your work.
The Daily Highlight
In their book "Make Time", Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky discuss a productivity habit called the Daily highlight. With this habit we start our day by asking ourselves "What do I want to be the highlight of my day?". Our primary goal for the day then becomes to make that daily highlight happen.
Practicing this habit ensures we make something impactful happen every day. This results in a sense of progress and satisfaction, and helps to focus on what is important.
2. The 5 Minute Rule
The 5 minute rule is a cognitive behavioural therapy technique for procrastination. With the 5 minute rule you set a goal of doing the task you have been avoiding for 5 minutes, after which you are free to stop.
The 5 minute rule is an effective habit since setting the intention and starting the task is usually the hardest part. After 5 minutes of doing something it is often easy to continue until the task is done.
More information about this habit can be found in this article.
3. Make Time For Deep Work
In Cal Newport's book "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World", Cal defines 'deep work' as professional activity performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate.
Deep work is so important because without it, you’ll constantly find yourself caught in shallow, unimportant tasks and never make progress on anything that actually matters.
How to make time for deep work:
Find a location that’s distraction free and conducive to periods of focus
Determine precisely how much time you’ll devote to the task ahead
Set a structure for yourself and define what deep work mode looks like. For instance, will your phone be off or on? Will you let yourself check the internet? Can you walk to the kitchen to get a snack? How will you measure the success of a session (i.e. pages read, lines coded, words written)?
Requirements – After a few sessions of focused work, you’ll learn what you require to support your commitment to deep work.
4. The 2 Minute Rule
In David Allen's book “Getting Things Done”, he writes “if an action will take less than two minutes, it should be done at the moment it’s defined.”
The rationale for the 2 minute rule is that if a task takes less than two minutes it takes more effort to store and track the task than to actually do it.
The 2 minute rule helps to prevent procrastination and small tasks from piling up on our todo list and overwhelming us.
5. Batch Your Email
Keeping email open in the background as you work can result in a loss of productivity and an increase in stress. Batching emails by checking and responding to email less frequently can help free up attention to focus on deep tasks. Keep in mind how we use email is very personal and role-specific, what works for one person may not work for others.
How to batch emails:
Schedule times in your day to view and respond to emails. A typical frequency is twice per day.
Set notifications for emails that might be urgent or important.
Let others know that you will not respond to non-urgent email immediately.
