6 Sneaky Ways To Achieve More In A Day Than Most Do In A Week
All it takes is a few minor changes.
Ground Picture / Shutterstock When you have a productive day, it's hard to believe that your past self would never have achieved that much in an entire week. Maybe you work a full-time job, work out, eat healthy, invest, read, sleep enough, play an instrument, spend time with loved ones, and constantly explore new things.
But you don't have a timetable nor insane willpower; rather, you have honed systems, consistent habits, and optimized frameworks — and these are what takes a small achievement and revolutionizes it into productivity.
Here are 6 sneaky ways to achieve more in one day than most do in a week
1. Sleep well
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With the rise of the toxic hustle culture, being sleep-deprived has appallingly become something to brag about. Many people take sleep for granted.
As this research paper aptly titled "The Extraordinary Importance Of Sleep" explains, the effects of sleep deprivation are debilitating — affected cognition, hypertension, memory loss, disrupted hormones, cardiac risk, and obesity to name a few.
Sleep can make or break the next day. While 8 hours of deep sleep makes most feel like an inexhaustible machine, 6 groggy hours leave you barely functional. Without good sleep, you just cannot be productive.
So sleep enough and well. Here are 5 tips to do so:
- Choose a sleep time based on your preference and convenience. It could be as late as 12 a.m. or as early as 7 p.m. The time doesn't matter as much as the duration does. The key is to consistently stick to the same timings.
- Get rid of all electronic screens at least an hour before bed. The blue light emitted by electronic screens disrupts sleep by reducing melatonin production, the sleep hormone.
- Find a calming activity to do just before bed. Anything that puts you in a serene state of mind will work.
- Use your bedroom for only sleep. Our brains associate activities with places. And you want your bedroom associated with only sleep. So if you eat, work, chill, and live on your bed, there won't be any helpful association.
- Consider supplementing with melatonin. This is sort of a last resort, but it works for many. ZMA is another supplement that might help. But consult a doctor or a sleep specialist before trying these.
2. Ruthlessly prioritize and create 'two task-buckets'
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Twenty-four hours isn't enough to do everything we want to. And that's exactly what makes ruthless prioritization not only powerful, but necessary.
On normal days, just before going to sleep, decide 3 tasks to accomplish at any cost the next day. Before your "go the extra mile days," mentally commit to another 3 tasks. These are called primary and secondary buckets — the former 3 are to be achieved at any cost, while the latter ones only if the primary ones are done.
Three is a sweet number. With 7 or 20 item to-do lists, you'd be over-committing and scattering your focus; with 2 tasks or lesser, you'd be cutting yourself short.
This 2-bucket system also works better than just having a 6-task to-do list because of the additional layer of prioritization and the escape clause. You have to worry about your secondary bucket only once you're done with the primary one.
So before you go to bed, choose your 6 tasks and segregate them into your two buckets.
3. Chisel your tasks down to the finest level of detail
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Vague tasks are sneaky fellows, as they can mean nothing and everything at the same time.
You can interpret them in a zillion ways. A 10-minute brisk walking session is as much of a "workout" as a 2-hour strength training session is. And "writing" could be a 2-minute tweet or a 2-hour long-form batch writing session.
Steer away from all and any generality. Chisel down the tasks in your bucket until they're specific enough to make it impossible to interpret them in more than one way.
A simple technique is to satisfy the "5W1H," or the "Why-What-Where-When-Who-How," — the output will be specific tasks such as "Write an 800–1,000 word productivity article first thing after waking up" or "Complete a low-rep and lat focused pull-workout before lunch."
The point is to make sure your tasks are very detailed, so you don't miss out on anything.
4. Cultivate task-specific rituals
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It takes using rituals to understand just how powerful they can be. A ritual, in simple terms, is a unique series of actions that precede, signify, and prepare you for a certain task.
The unique part is crucial; you cannot use the same ritual for two different tasks. This is because rituals work by forming mental associations. And this is a lock and key mechanism — the same key won't work for different locks. So forge different keys.
You can make them as quirky as you fancy. For example, maybe before setting personal records during strength training, you listen to thrash metal.
The benefits of rituals won't kick in immediately; as a form of classical conditioning, your brain needs time and repetition to fully associate the task with its ritual. So form and stick to rituals.
Unleash your creative brain, think about the activities that already "prime" you for certain tasks, and play around.
5. Render it impossible to be distracted
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Focus is the center stone of productivity, and nothing kills focus as much as distractions do. Be it an Instagram notification flashing on your phone or your mother loudly bellowing at your sibling, it's hard to consciously avoid giving in to distractions.
So, choose the easier way. Eliminate all sources of distractions beforehand. Here are 4 ways to do just that and create a focus-rich environment:
- Turn off all notifications. Unless the task at hand relies on them, turn off all notifications — PC, phone, social media, email, everything.
- Find a calm and isolated environment. And let your friends, co-workers, or family know that you don't want to be disturbed unless there's an actual emergency.
- Put on a pair of headphones and play the same song on repeat. While music can help drown out other noises, the songs themselves can become distractions. So, loop the same song, as this will take your focus off the music.
- Use blocking software and apps. For general use cases, there's a ColdTurkey blocker. The best part is that you don't have to use blocking software forever. After a while, you become "trained" enough to work without them.
6. Alternate short bursts of deep work with pockets of leisure
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With laser-sharp focus and a peak-state mind, you'll now be able to tap into flow and perform deep work, which studies have reported to be up to 5 times as productive as normal work is.
But given the nature of deep work — mind pushed to its cognitive limits and your focus straightened into the thinnest strand — long stretches can burn you out and prove counterproductive.
This is where leisure comes in. If sleep is the first thing toxic productivists hate, leisure is the second one. Funnily, both are instrumental to productivity. Leisure replenishes everything deep work consumes — focus, mood, motivation, and mental energy.
And when you marry deep work with leisure, the child you beget is the epitome of productivity. So, for every hour of deep work, give yourself 10 minutes of leisure. With this, it's the best of both worlds — neither does work feel like work, nor does leisure feel like a waste of time.
Well, there you go — no stringent timetables, no insane to-do lists, and no stoic willpower required. Just pure productivity.
Implement this correctly and you will definitely be able to achieve more in a day than most do in a week. Also, think of this as just a starting point; as you discover tricks, tweaks, and optimizations, evolve and strengthen this.
People, after all, are as different as they come. And just like there isn't a one-size-fits-all attire, there is no universal plug-and-play productivity guide.
Neeramitra Reddy is a writer and editor of In Fitness And In Health, Wholistique, and MANXIMIZE. His work has also been featured on Medium, The Startup, and The Good Men Project.