The Productivity Super Tool We All Have

With the advent of smart phones, we live in a world of constant distractions and media competing for our attention.  It can be very hard to focus on what we are trying to do with continual notifications, alarms and ringers going off.  However, our phones can also be productivity tools like none we have ever had access to before.

The Power of the Calendar

Before we had smart phones, successful and productive people used a different tool to keep them efficient and effective.  They used an analog calendar.  Whether it was a free wall or desk calendar you got from a local store that you wrote appointments on, a pocket calendar or a full on “productivity planner” with a calendar, monthly agendas and daily to do lists, successful people all had one.

The benefits of these calendars were two-fold.  Firstly, you could keep track of all of your appointments.  Naturally, this is vital to appointment-based businesses like doctors, lawyers and even hair salons and day spas.

Effective Scheduling

The second benefit is that you could schedule other activities and tasks that you would like to complete.  This is where the calendar really shines.  If you had a task, you entered it into the calendar and when the time came, you did that task. 

Of course, goal achievement is much more involved that simply entering it into a calendar at a particular time, but it is a great leap forward from wishing that you would do something “someday”.

Electronic Calendars

Now, there are a variety of free calendar apps we can use, whether it is the iPhone or android calendar, google calendar, or another app.  The reason they are so powerful is because they can be customized and shared with others.

Families can use them to keep track of activities and appointments.  If you share it, everyone can see the calendar and add to it.

To increase your productivity, you want to start with a master list of things you wish to accomplish.  These can take all forms like personal goals to eat healthier, lose weight, save more money or business goals like getting more clients or a promotion.

After determining your goals, you would then break them down into smaller actionable steps.  In the case of eating healthier, you could come up with a list of healthy foods and research recipes to prepare them.  To save more money, you could check your bank accounts and credit cards to see where your money is going and then prioritize where you would like to save some of it.

Enter Them In

Now comes the magic of the calendar.  Rather than wishing you would do something; you actually enter it into your calendar at a specific time and date.  With an electronic calendar on your phone, you can customize the length of the appointment, add relevant website links if you need them and set up a reminder notification to let you know when it is time to do the task.

Much of this will sound familiar to those who use Outlook at work to schedule business meetings.  However, we can use the exact same principles for our non work tasks.

I have found that 15-minute scheduled time blocks work best at a minimum and you can use bigger blocks for bigger tasks.

For those of us who are concerned with procrastination or willpower, the calendar is a mighty tool.  It takes away our need to decide what to do at a given time.  If it is in the calendar, that is the task we are doing.  Certainly, it will take time to get to this level of accomplishment but having a scheduled time to do a task will go far in helping us to remember to do the task.  And once it is there, we are much more likely to do it. 

Pomodoro

Another analog productivity tool we can use to make the calendar more effective is the Pomodoro Technique.  This technique is to set a timer for a specific amount of time we have set to do a task and no more.  The reason this is so effective is that you can only concentrate on a task for so long.  Most research shows that after 40-45 minutes of focused work, our minds begin to wander, our work deteriorates, and we need a break.  Psychologically, it is also easier to work on a task if we know there is an end to it, rather than working on something for many hours.

Ernest Hemingway’s Secret

The great writer Ernest Hemingway was so disciplined in the technique that he would stop writing in mid-sentence when the timer went off!  He understood the power of focus and also that when he took up his pen again that he would have to read the sentences he had already written to get himself back to a creative mindset.  Hopefully he would pick up right where he left off in the middle of a thought.

There are any number of free Pomodoro apps we can get for our phones and some of them even look like the tomato shaped (“pomodoro” in Italian) kitchen timers they are named for.

So, to achieve more, start to break down your goals to actionable steps, enter those steps into the calendar on your phone with a reminder alert, and, when that time comes, set your Pomodoro timer app for the time you have allotted in the calendar, and then work.  When the timer goes off, even if you have not finished, STOP.  Then go do something totally different.  You can schedule another block of time in the calendar to continue an unfinished task.