Being More Productive in 15 Minutes a Day
Your day has 1,440 minutes in it, so what difference will 15 minutes make? At just over 1 percent of those potentially available minutes, it seems like no time at all. For starters, it’s long enough to get something done, and short enough to make sure you can chisel it out of your schedule.
If you’re prepared, you’ll be surprised to find you can get more done in 15 minutes than you can in an entire afternoon.
Here’s how:
It starts with the night before.
Make a list of things you want to accomplish the next day and write it down, either by hand or with an electronic to-do list.
- Do it last: The end of the day is a great time to assess what you accomplished and what you still need to do. It can help you stay on track, and if you do it after completing the day’s other tasks, you will be clear and focused. One of the beauties of this method is in the way our brains are wired. Oftentimes even as we sleep, our brains will keep working on a problem and do some of the work for us, so when we wake up, we find a solution to the problem that frustrated us the day before.
- Keep it short: You’ll want to keep the list small, preferably no more than three items. Keeping your list small helps increase your motivation. A few things are manageable and give you a sense of accomplishment when you complete them, while a long to-do list can leave you feeling behind and overwhelmed before you’ve even started. Another reason for keeping your list short is focus. When you try to do too many things too quickly, you end up frazzled and find that some of those tasks weren’t accomplished as well as they could have been.
- Check ‘em off: Not every task on your list will be a mission critical item. There are often small jobs that hang around your neck like an albatross until you get them done. Sometimes it makes sense to get these tasks out of the way, so you can accomplish your other goals with a clear head. If you stick to your list, at the end of the day, you will have accomplished three core tasks that help propel your business forward. And as you check each task off your list, you’ll feel more motivated to accomplish the next one. Achievements build on the backs of other achievements.
- Make it count: Your 15 minutes can be any time of day you choose, as long as it’s free, uninterrupted time. No shuffling papers, pounding out emails or updating your social media sites. Go for quality. If you have to, make it known that you are in a ‘do not disturb’ mode. And when that 15 minutes rolls around, focus with everything you have on the task at hand. You’ll feel amazed at how much you get accomplished.
15 minutes. What will you do with it?