Turn Your Productivity on Autopilot

Forming great habits is key

Have you ever wondered how some people get so much done? You may think they have superhuman willpower, but I’m here to tell you that’s not the case. The most successful and productive people know how to make habits work for them, and you can do.

While reading this article, you will learn how to:

Supercharge your productivity
Feel less frustrated by daily decisions
Save your mental energy for the most important decisions of your day
Form and nurture productive habits

First things first: get into the right mindset.

Think of your willpower as a battery. When you wake up, refreshed from a full night’s sleep, your willpower is at full charge. Now, as you go about your day, your willpower is drained by almost every conscious decision you must make. “Conscious” is the key word here.

Treat your willpower as a valuable, fleeting resource.

If every morning when you wake up, you are in the habit of brewing coffee, taking a shower and brushing your teeth, then those actions are already ingrained and not something you need to make a conscious decision to do. These activities are routine, or habits, and do not tax your mental willpower. Battery still at full charge.

On the other hand, if eating breakfast is only something you do when, say, you aren’t running late, and today you happen to be running on time, and then you decide you are going to, in fact, eat breakfast before shuffling off to work, then this situation is a different story entirely. Since you don’t always eat breakfast, you now have to decide what you can prepare depending on what’s hanging around in your kitchen. You must also consider how much time you actually have to prepare said meal. Don’t have anything at home? Now you need to decide what drive-thru or cafe you’re going to stop by, and of course, pick something off the menu when you are there.

I should have gone with the bagel. Photo by Nathan Cowley from Pexels

Whew. That’s a lot of brainpower for something you think should be easy. It’s not even 8 am and you have already had to navigate a complicated decision about how to feed yourself. This entire thought process has effectively drained a little bit of your precious willpower, and you haven’t even set foot in the office (or insert workplace here), where, for most, the more difficult decisions will start to arise.

You want to keep your iPhone battery as class to 100 percent as possible, and you should want the same for your willpower, especially since your decision-making capacity doesn’t come with a lightning cable. Willpower is precious! You need to preserve where you can, so when the you face hard decisions or difficult problems, you’re able to stand strong and work through them.

So, we’ve established you absolutely should start your most productive part of the day with a full battery. But how?

Formed habits don’t drain your willpower.

Let’s circle back to the beginning of the breakfast-decision example. Remember how I said that taking a shower, brewing coffee and brushing your teeth were ingrained parts of your morning routine? Well these ingrained actions, or habits, are a magic productivity tool that allows us to get shit done without having to overthink it.

Overthinking everyday decisions sucks. It wastes unnecessary mental energy and causes us frustration over things that don’t really matter. Habits are awesome, because they help us create routines and accomplish productive and/or necessary tasks without giving it a second thought.

When you think of your daily routine, how many habits come to mind? Here are a few common things that most of us do daily: bathing, shaving, applying make up, getting dressed, making your bed, eating breakfast, preparing lunches for yourself/partner/children, drinking coffee/tea, commuting to work, etc.

Now, how many of the things that you do would be considered routine? How many of these do you have to consciously make a decision about? Knowing where you stand is a good starting point. Take a sheet of paper and draw a table with two labels: UNCONSCIOUS decision and CONSCIOUS decision. Now take your daily activities and write each one under the appropriate heading. The more activities under the “conscious” heading means more willpower-draining decisions. We don’t want that.

If your table is heavy on the decision-making side, creating solid habits can move those tasks into unconscious territory and make your life easier on a daily basis.

I want to help you get into the habit of creating useful habits. The process of creating a new habit drains willpower, but only until it becomes ingrained. So how do we go about creating these habits?

Start small — focus on ONE habit at a time.

The first step is the most important step. You ready for it? Okay, you need to start with ONE habit you want to develop — yes, JUST one thing you want to change — and focus on making that one thing a totally ingrained habit before moving on the next. A lot of people overlook the importance of this first step and try to change a lot of things at once. This approach is overwhelming to most people and often leads to failing to implement any new habits at all (except in the case of what I call “habit un-stacking”, which I will get to later).

Let’s start with an example: Janelle wants to spend less time looking at social media. She often uses it as a distraction from things she should be doing, and it is noticeably cutting into her productivity during the day.

Now, Janelle needs to make a conscious decision to focus on creating this habit. Once she’s set her intentions, she should start small. If she normally spend 3+ hours per day taking and sending puppy-dog filtered photos on Snapchat, it’s unrealistic that she could go all day without checking her snaps. Janelle knows this and vows to only look at her social media sites for a designated 30-minute period at the end of her day after she’s eaten dinner.

Don’t do it Janelle. Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels

Don’t let non-compliance be an option.

Janelle is going strong, but those negative thoughts slowly start to creep in…

“I could just check Instagram for five minutes, and then I’ll go right back to work.”

“I wasn’t going to look at Facebook today, but Maria got engaged and I have to see the ring.”

Sound familiar? These thoughts are going to run through your mind when trying to develop a new habit. The trick is to learn to banish them immediately. If you truly believe that failure is not an option, that it won’t be. Remember earlier when I said to get into the mindset of treating your willpower as a battery? Getting into the right mindset is super important here as well. You are strong and you can do this. Don’t let competing thoughts tell you otherwise.

Set yourself up for success.

So Janelle really wants to spend less time scrolling through Instagram like a brain-dead zombie, but she always has her phone on her (or she has to work on her computer in the office) and, girl, the temptation is real. So, what should she do?

There are a few things Janelle can do to tweak her environment and make success more likely. A few examples include, logging out of all of her social media accounts, deleting the apps off her phone (or even just removing them from the home screen), using an app that limits your social media time, placing her phone out of sight when working, telling her friends about her goal and having them call her out if they see her online.

Forming a new habit can be hard. Make the process as easy as possible, especially early on when habit formation is most draining.

You may need to implement “habit un-stacking”.

Janelle usually uses her 30-minute lunch break to grab a to-go gyro and scroll through her newsfeed, but this mid-day social media break is no longer an option. So what should she do? If you associate one habit with another habit, it may be time to break both.

I’ll use a a personal example here. Last year I decided to quit smoking. But you know what always, and without a doubt, caused me the urge to smoke? Drinking alcohol. If the smoking was to go, so was wine, so I ditched my buzz-inducing drinks for the first few weeks until association between the two started to weaken and fade.

Since Janelle already associates her lunch breaks with social media time, she should implement a new lunch break routine. Instead of going to the takeout place around the corner, she could walk to a restaurant a few blocks away. The extra time spent walking will decrease her thinking about getting online, and there’s the added bonus of getting some extra exercise.

Celebrate small wins and keep the momentum going.

Make it through the first day of sticking to your new habit? Instead of feeling overwhelmed that it’s only been one day, celebrate your accomplishment! It’s a much better mentality to look at how far you’ve come, rather than how far you have to go. If you feel proud of yourself, and recognize that small changes can lead to big changes, you are much more likely to keep the momentum going and stick to your habit.

What habit is practically universal for being successful?

Developing this habit can allow you to supercharge your productivity. So what’s exactly is this awesome habit we should all implement? Get into the habit of doing your most important task first before accomplishing anything else (that requires willpower that is). Yes, it’s that simple. This means that after you’ve gone through your set morning routine, you should tackle whatever your absolute must-do task of the day is. This guarantees that it will get done, and you won’t have a chance to procrastinate once your willpower is running on empty, and when the thought of a Netflix binge is almost undeniable.

For many of us, our most important task of the day can be the most tedious (say finalizing and submitting the budget for a new project) or mentally-draining (coming up with the overall creative idea for you next campaign). I can guarantee that tasks is not something you‘ll want to do after being at work for seven and a half hours, or running time-consuming errands all day. Tackle your most important task first and watch your productivity skyrocket!