My first three tips for getting stuff done

Everybody seems to love both lists and life-hacks, so here’s my list about ways to increase your own productivity at work. I refuse to call them hacks, because none of them will probably be life-changing on their own (duh, very few things are), and because I dislike the quick-fix culture that seems to permeate the hack-scene. But I digress.

I currently work in the academia, so the absolute majority of my time is spent on writing either publications or code. Nevertheless, most of the following tips should be applicable to other professions (within reason; paramedics probably won’t be able to take a break any time they wish and so on), and why not the life outside work as well. With all that said, here goes, in no order in particular.

1.Ticking tomatoes

Use the Pomodoro method in one version or another. In the first, original, untainted Pomodoro you would set a red, tomato-shaped (the word pomodoro means precisely that in Italian) ticking timer for 25 minutes. You would work with suppreme focus for that time, while listening the ticker counting down with a sense of urgence usually seen in movies about bomb disposal squads. After the expl…ring, you would have a short break of maybe 5 minutes, and start all over.

To be honest, I’ve never tried the original version as such. I often need to few minutes to get my brain started on a problem, and I hypothesized that by having to do it all over every 30 minutes I would lose too many valuable minutes over the day. Thus, for me the ratio is usually 45/15 minutes. But, being all reasonable adults, you are of course free to play around a little.

The working period should make you force yourself to focus on your task and task only. So no music, no internet and definitely no Facebook. This can be a bitter fruit to swallow, but it’ll be made quite a bit easier by the knowledge that it will be over soon and some nicer stuff will follow. Indeed, during those 15-or-so break-minutes, you could easily catch up on some news or listen to a few songs.

There’s also an additional benefit. By depriving yourself of distractions and temptations for a pre-defined period of time, you have basically nothing else to do but work. So work you shall. And unless your job is horribly menial, after a few minutes of grinding away you will most often hit a nice peak of productivity and actually enjoy what you are doing. And yeah, in an ideal world we would enjoy work all the time, but this is obviously not an ideal work. Instead, as humans we are indeed very much human, and tend to enjoy things that make us fat or give us a headache afterwards.

A word of caution: the break is there for a reason. When I was first trying the method out, I was having a good flow for some reason and decided to skip the first few breaks to get more stuff done. And I did…for the first few hours. After that, I got tired and lost my focus, more than making up for the increased productivity earlier that day.

2. Breaks

Talking about breaks: have them. Even if you don’t have any ticking tomatoes around to remind you, it’s a good idea to stretch both your mental and physical legs every once in a while. I’m lucky to have our department coffee room one floor up from my room, so getting up to get a cup of tea is a nice way to get a bit of exercise.

Stretching is rarely a bad option either.

3. Coffee

Caffeine is well-known stimulant, and all tech-people run on it. However, having a daily (or twice-a-day, like we do) coffee break together with your colleagues go well beyond having an extraneous chemical yelling at your sympathetic nervous system. Indeed, being surrounded by friends rather than fellow wage-slaves will make any job a thousandfold better.

Don’t have that kind of atmosphere at your company? Force it. Say good morning to people, smile, ask everyone to join you for coffee, show feigned sympathy when their pet goldfish died of obesity. They will start to reciprocate. If they don’t, get a new job.

Check out the next three tips here!

My first three tips for getting stuff done