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How to be productive
and not just busy…
If you’re part of the human race then you’ve probably experienced a
day in your life where you’ve done naff all other than watch cat videos,
look at Facebook and scan emails with no intention of replying to any
of them. We’ve all done it; and usually it’s caused by being too busy,
to the point where your brain stops working rationally; but what is the
difference in being productive and being busy

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Below are three different ways of changing busy habits
to focused habits.
Busy people have lots of priorities, whereas productive people have few priorities.
The Pareto principle is that 80% of your desired results come from 20% of your activity.
Order your priorities in “baskets”.
Imagine you have a large basket, a medium basket, and a small basket.
• In your small basket you can put two items. These are your non-movers, your most
important jobs – but note, they are not always the biggest jobs.
• In your medium sized basket, place three items. These are your movables, the things
you have to do at some point in the near future but that you can move around.
• In the large basket you stick five items. This can be writing up the coffee and tea
preference list, or making sure you remember to order stationery supplies.
These are your filler tasks.
If at the end of this task you have lots of other priorities then shelve them, or delegate tasks.
Remember that you are only one person.
Productive people focus on one task at a time, busy people multitask.
Growing up my parents taught me the “timer test”; but I still use it in my adult life. You set
a timer to twenty minutes and chose one task. The aim is to get to the end of the twenty
minutes without being distracted from that one task; this means by anything. Answering an
email, getting a glass of water, checking twitter, reading a text, anything. Every time you get
distracted you have to reset the timer and start again. It’s a killer, but it’s a very effective way
of training your brain to focus on one task at a time.
Busy people say yes quickly, productive people say yes slowly.
This also ties in with the principle that productive people make time for what is important;
whereas busy people make time for everything.
Knowing when to say yes is just as important as knowing when to say no. It’s important to
pull your weight in a team or do your fair share on a project, but at what cost? Imagine your
life is a long piece of string, you can be cut up into a few pieces and still be useful, but if cut
up too small you fray and fall apart.