2 Basic Productivity Lessons From “The Productivity Project” Book and It’s Realisation
Productivity Hack and It’s Realisation
The Productivity Project by Chris Bailey is the first productivity book that I bought. I always wonder how people can really optimize and manage their time usage to generate more accomplishments. And this book is shown in front of the bookshelf in the book store.
The cover and the title of this book already shows me that productivity is not only a matter of time management but also energy and attention management. I used to obsessed with time management back then and always assume that if I can manage the time really well then I can achieve many things. However, reading this book break this perception.
What I like about this book, Chris Bailey here did the experiment in a lot of variables such as nutritional intake, number of tasks, sleep period, and others, and conclude the impact of the variables on productivity. He also elaborate on the steps of his experiment as a challenge at every end of the chapter for you to try.
I slowly try to adapt and try all the challenges in this book. But the lessons and challenges that I always re-iterate are in the first part of the book which speaks about basic productivity. In this article, I elaborate on the lessons that I have been learned from this book and my experience for implementing this in my real-life condition.
1. Determine Three Main Daily Tasks
This is the continuation of the first point. The key to being productive is to remember what are the things that we want to achieve and focus in a day. Some people may make a laundry list of the things to do, it can’t help them to allocate their focus and energy to accomplish all of them. And that’s why there is a rule called Rule of 3 created by J.D. Meier.
This Rule of 3 allows you to choose three things that you want to accomplish on a day or a week.
Implementing this rule is really simple. You only need to ask yourself: What are the three things that you want to accomplish at the end of the day or week at the beginning of every day. And then, repeat it for each day or week. However, on the other note, you should also evaluate whether the three things that you have been accomplished are realistic or not to do it in a day or week.
By implementing this rule, can help you to stay focus throughout a day or week and diminish the other things that you don’t want to accomplish. As an additional note, if you focus to accomplish these first three first, then you can accomplish more even on the rest of the day or week.
Personal Realisation
Talking to my personal case, I still struggle to create the prioritize task based on the Rule of 3. As I work full time from 9 to 6, I can set the three things that become a priority and I can accomplish it in a day.
However, besides the professional task, I also want to achieve something outside of the office thing. This pushes me to make additional three things to be accomplished for personal projects. However, most of the time, I fail to accomplish my three personal tasks as my focus has been a drain for office purposes.
Rule of 3 really help me to allocate my focus for office work but when I still have side projects, I still have the challenge to implement this rule to satisfy both the works.
2. Optimizing the Prime Time
Human’s energy level will not remain constant across the hours in a day. You may seem heard about the two distinctive groups of people, which is Early Bird and Night Owl. In the first group, there is a bunch of people who have higher energy and focus levels during the morning, while for the latter on the night.
To decide the prime time, here, in this book, Chris Bailey did some experiments. The outcome of these experiments is to know the fluctuation of energy levels throughout the day. In these experiments, he cut out all caffeine and alcohol intake, minimize the sugar consumption, ate less, as well as woke up and fell asleep naturally. From there, he got the visualization of his energy level throughout the day.
This visualization can be used to decide the best time to do the most important task in a day. The takeaway is, we can use the time where our energy level on the peak level to do the most important task, while doing the less important task or boost our energy level when our energy level is decreasing. With this principle, we can schedule our tasks and allocate them to the right time based on our prime time.
Personal Realisation
In my personal case, I implement this principle to set the time when I need to allocate the task which requires a lot of brainstorming and calculation. As I’m working with a lot of data, I spend my day in the morning, when my energy level is at the peak, to process and calculate the variable that I required to generate the outcome. While at the noon, I use it for doing some administration tasks and downloading the data which I will process and calculate when my energy level has been recovered in the afternoon.
To sum up, by implementing this, I can allocate the time when my focus on the peak level to resolve the most important and challenging task that requires me to brainstorm. The outcome itself, the idea is coming more on this prime hour rather than on the other time and it helps me to accelerate my work to finish it.
Final Thoughts
With my current activity and implementation, I believe that I still need to find the sweet point to find my productivity with all of that variable and adjustment.
I haven’t explored all of the possible productivity variables and implement them into my daily life.
Every person has the factor that really drives their productivity. Maybe some of them are not included in this book. But I would say, all of his experiments in this book already become the must-go-to guide to know your productivity driving force and make you more productive with the effective usage of time, energy, and attention
