Secrets #'s 5, 6, & 7 of Highly Productive People

Here are the last three secrets of highly productive people. Check 'em out and feel free to share your own tips on how you stay productive!

Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.

Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day. 

Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

Secrets #'s 3 & 4 of High Productivity

Distractions are inevitable as we wrap up the year... well, any time of year, really!  

Especially with the last of the holiday parties to look forward to, all of the last minute shopping to be done, and the last of the year's business numbers to report, it's easy to get interrupted or forget what we were doing when we've finished that phone call, but with all these we have demands on our time and energy, we still have to save some of ourselves for the fun stuff!  

Check out Secrets 3 & 4 below to make sure you can keep up during any hectic season!

Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.

Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.

Secret #2 of Highly Productive People: BRILLIANT!

Holy Cow! If this doesn't ring true for me!  Especially you guys with full-time jobs and full-time lives, you must check this one out!  For the full list of highly productive people secrets, click here.

Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned (thanks CNN!). When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women). 

Secret #1 of Highly Productive People

I don't know about you, but I am already thinking about next semester... maybe because it's the last one for me!

Having convinced myself to get a head start while I should be laying low and recovering from last semester, I have begun trying to blend my internship schedule with my class schedule while also trying to schedule the fun stuff - running, yoga and friends - to add balance and joy and to reduce the stress of the sometimes-grueling-but-always-busy grad student lifestyle.

(If you haven't noticed, blowing off steam is important! Make sure you include time with friends, working out, travel - whatever makes you happy! - when you set your own expectations for next semester!)

Just this morning, ironically, I saw Seven Things Highly Productive People Do on a news feed, and I think I may need to heed this one below as I already start taking on more than I can chew and foresee feeling overwhelmed - not uncommon among B-schoolers, I suspect!

Over the next few days, I am going to check out these Seven Secrets so that I can work smarter not harder next semester, and I'll pass along the gems to you! Enjoy!

Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks.
Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.