Master Your Day: 7 Little-Known Hacks Highly Productive People Use Daily

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Deadlines should help you plan your work in daily tasks. But most times, you won’t plan anything at all. On the contrary, you will ignore the deadline until it’s too late and then work over hours to hit it.

That’s a great example of feeling overwhelmed, and generic productivity advice suggests you should plan your work first. Great! But how?

This year, my manager introduced a new way of tracking yearly objectives in our team. So, I will borrow his technique. For each of us, he started with the final objective and a deadline, the end of the year. Then, he broke that goal into four quarterly sub-goals. Each of those goals had three tasks, one for each month. This way, we could know if we were ahead, behind, or working at the right pace to hit our goal (and get the extra money).

That’s what reverse scheduling is all about.

• Take your next big goal.
• Write its deadline.
• Map out milestones backward.
• Split those milestones into tasks.

Split those tasks into subtasks if it's a long-term goal. From my experience, weekly subtasks work better because they give you a sense of progression but also enough freedom to work whenever you have time.

Here’s an entire article talking about milestones splitting with an infographic to track it.

As I write this newsletter, I am sitting on my balcony with a hot cappuccino, and nobody around. I haven’t checked my phone once in the past 30 minutes, and I didn’t open any social media on my laptop.

There’s only me, my cappuccino, the sound of a few cars passing by, and many birds singing aloud. This is my quiet hour. And all of us should have at least one a day.

Generic productivity advice suggests you aim for 3-4 hours of deep work in the morning and a little less in the afternoon. But that’s not a necessity — it’s a goal.

Start smaller. Set aside one distraction-free hour for deep, uninterrupted work. That single hour will stretch up until you achieve that deep focus. But start small.

• Plan your quiet hour first thing in the morning.
• Bring a distraction reliever (in my case, the cappuccino I sip every time I want to pick up my phone).
• Pick one task (it’s better if it’s just one to avoid context switching).
• Take your time to reach focus. Don’t expect it right away.

Context-switching is a creepy enemy. It slips in behind our tasks, splits them, and takes advantage of our vulnerable moments to distract us.

Many studies show that context switching can kill your productivity. But what if you avoid it instead of managing it?

You can minimize context switching by grouping similar tasks. For example, you could schedule an hour a day to answer all emails. You could group all your administrative tasks. Or you could schedule all your calls one after another.

• Identify categories of similar tasks each day.
• Schedule specific blocks to complete them together.
• Leave safe time boundaries if a group of activities takes longer so you don’t have to return to it later.

Many people love to work from home these days. But working in the office has become a pleasure for me in the last few months. And I think most of this pleasure comes from the micro rewards I get there.

When I’m at home, I rarely take some time for myself. And when I do, I spend it on social media or watching dumb stuff online. But working from the office, I take a break every two hours — it became a habit. I speak with people, laugh, and make jokes with them. And those bursts of networking help me continue.

• Make a list of five small rewards you may get during your day.
• Match them with a regular task.
• Prioritize active rewards like networking to passive ones like snacks.

We all journaled at least once in our lives. And we all tried time tracking. But have you ever tried time journaling?

Journaling helps you understand yourself better. It allows you to elaborate on what happened during the day and how you reacted. And it can become a powerful self-help tool.

Time tracking, on the other hand, is a powerful productivity tool. It helps you understand how much time a task will take and how to schedule it better in the future.

But what’s time journaling?

Track your daily tasks to identify hidden time wasters — that’s time journaling.

• Keep a simple log where you track all your activities of the day.
• At the end of each week, analyze that data.
• Find repetitive tasks that steal your time and decide what to do about them.

Projects around the world use task boards every day and succeed with them. They are invaluable when managing many people, that’s true. But even having a visual task board for better visibility and focus can be a game-changer.

I am a big fan of visual boards. If you are a long-time reader of The Challenge, you know that. I build many tools for visual tracking, from free infographics to premium Notion templates (upgrade your subscription to get them) . Visual boards are my way of being productive — and they can help you, too.

• Buy a simple whiteboard to design your custom visual board.
• Outline your weekly tasks in one corner, then split them into subtasks.
• Fill the board with the subtasks and move them from Todo to In Progress to Completed.
• Check out my Productivity Mastery Notion templates. They will save you a lot of time.

Some time ago, I shared my 24-Hour Do Nothing Challenge. It was a bit extreme, I know. Yet, for some people, taking time for themselves became a necessity.

You don’t want to get there. So, let’s start with something simpler. Let’s prevent needing a full day of doing nothing to recover from long nights without sleep.

Schedule breaks and leisure time to maintain productivity instead of recovering from it. Many entrepreneurs often share their practice of scheduling downtime. And if you want to become more productive, you should follow their lead.

• Plan and schedule your breaks each day.
• Don’t feel guilty — it’s only strategic rest.
• Spend your leisure time however you wish.

You now have a few new productivity tips to experiment with. If you are tired of the old but gold consistency rule — try something new. Refresh your routine with different takes on productivity and see how it goes.

If it works, great for you. You found a way to become more productive for some time.

If it doesn’t work, you will have learned something new. That’s a win, too.

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