There are so many factors that come together with a seemingly laser focus on killing your productivity.
In the 2024 Executive Productivity Report, 52% of survey respondents reported stress as their top productivity blocker, 43% reported meetings, and 43% reported administrative tasks. No matter the cause, productivity blockers affect you every day. How are you beating them?
One way to get there is by adopting a productivity system.
Productivity systems are methodologies that aim to help you get more done in less time. They don't do the work for you, but productivity systems can help you organize and prioritize your tasks and make it easier to make progress. Here are some of the popular productivity systems and how they work.
Mark Forster developed the Autofocus productivity system as a reaction against the most common time management advice—prioritizing tasks based on one's opinion of their importance. Forster found personal prioritization unhelpful at best and harmful at worst.
Humans tend to focus on what they perceive to be most threatening, and the Autofocus system balances what is most threatening with what is most important.
This is an old-school notebook productivity system that consists of three simple steps:
We all know about the bullet list as a method of breaking down complex ideas into a series of short statements.
The Bullet Journal Productivity System organizes work using a set of logs. It helps you be more mindful of your daily tasks, prioritize the right things, and reflect on your emotions.
Unlike other planners, this notebook productivity system is designed for you to fully customize based on your unique goals. However, there are some key components every bullet journal must have:
At the end of each month, review your daily logs and mark the completed items.
Review the unfinished tasks and ask yourself, "Is this still worth my time?" If so, move it to the next monthly log.
For tasks due in the coming months, put them in the monthly log. You create a page number in your journal and add the item and the page number to the index.
The Don't Break the Chain productivity system comes from comedian Jerry Seinfeld. At the beginning of each year, Seinfeld would take a large calendar and put a big red X over every day that he spent time writing. It is that simple. This system works well for work that has the same output or goal every day.
Here is how the system works:
As you progress, you will see a chain of Xs across the calendar, and you will grow motivated to avoid breaking the chain.
The next productivity system is kind of the opposite of the Autofocus system.
And it has the most creative name: Eat That Frog.
The title comes from a quote by Mark Twain: "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day." The point is that you should start your day by tackling the most difficult or daunting task on your list. Once you get that out of the way, the rest of the day will be easy, and you will feel so much better.
What do you do if you have two "frogs" on your list? Eat them both.
The Eisenhower Matrix productivity system stems from a famous quote by former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent."
Here is how it works. You use a four-quadrant grid to rank tasks/decisions based on two key characteristics:
|
Urgent and important Do it first |
Important but not urgent Do it later |
|
Not important or urgent Do not do it |
Urgent but not important Delegate it |
Place your tasks in the quadrants and tackle them as follows:
The beauty of the matrix is that it applies to any role in any business. For busy executives, it can be an invaluable tool for remaining focused on what matters most.
Similar system: The Franklin Covey productivity system also uses the Eisenhower Matrix.
Do you spend hours searching your email inbox, trash, and sent folders for messages you did not save that contains information you now need? Motivational speaker Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to Be Rich created the Iceberg productivity system for just this kind of situation. It is practical and straightforward. You set up email folders for categorizing and storing information you find valuable but do not plan to use immediately. Examples Sethi provides include:
The goal is to take a few seconds today to save something that may otherwise take you hours to find when you need it. If the item did not come in the form of an email, you can paste a link in a blank email, send it to yourself, and store it accordingly. Your inbox becomes the tip of the iceberg, where you see one-third of your information repository. The rest is hidden from view but there when you need it.
One of the most trusted productivity systems is more than 100 years old. In 1918, Charles W. Schwab (no relation to the Charles Schwab of the financial world), CEO of Bethlehem Steel, was desperate to boost organizational productivity, so the story goes. He hired a business consultant named Ivy Lee to help. Lee asked for 15 minutes with each of Bethlehem Steel's executives. In those 15 minutes, he told the executives to do the following every day:
Similar systems: To-do lists.
Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen is one of the most popular productivity systems. Unlike structured systems like the Ivy Lee system, GTD features a flexible, five-step framework:
GTD begins with the premise that our productivity is related to our ability to relax. When our minds are clear and our thoughts organized, we achieve effective productivity and unleash our creative potential.
Kanban, which means "card" in Japanese, was invented at Toyota to streamline manufacturing. The system also applies to personal productivity. Kanban is a column-based project management system that conveniently keeps tasks and projects on track. You create three columns on a spreadsheet (or whiteboard):
Then, you create physical or virtual cards or sticky notes for your tasks and place them in the appropriate columns. Kanban works well for projects with multiple subtasks or for projects where teammates collaborate and the team needs visibility into the status of tasks. Applications like Asana, Monday, and Trello are online versions of the Kanban productivity system.
Similar systems: Agile, Kaizen.
The Pomodoro productivity system blocks off time in your schedule in increments of 25 minutes. Each 25-minute block is called a Pomodoro. Here is how it works:
Similar system: Timeboxing.
Multitasking is a proven productivity killer. Numerous studies show that it has adverse effects, including:
Yet 92% of knowledge workers multitask during meetings. The problem with multitasking is that switching between tasks and applications wastes time and attention. It takes about 20 minutes to refocus. With Single-Tasking, you focus on only one thing at a time. Here is how to do it:
Similar system: Timeboxing.
Zen to Done (ZTD) is more about changing habits to improve productivity and effectiveness. It was created by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits to help you develop habits one by one, step by step, and create a workflow management system. ZTD teaches you how to take a simple approach to improving your productivity by encouraging you to focus on forming one habit at a time.
Here are the steps in the ZTD productivity system:
Related: Health Habits to Increase Productivity in the Workplace
The million-dollar question is, how do you choose a productivity system that will work for you? A lot depends on your work style. For example:
The bottom line is that you will not know if a productivity system works for you until you try it. Getting started is often the most challenging part of adopting a productivity system.