1.

Plan Tomorrow Tonight

The early bird only catches the worm if it plans the night before, says PR strategist Christina
Nicholson. "By filling out my specific planner the night before, I don't feel rushed or like I have to
get to something right away," an approach that some time-management experts endorse.
Simply having a battle plan is like waking up to find your work already started. Right away,
Nicholson finds, the start of her day has "already been scheduled for me"by her.
Simply having a battle plan is like waking up to find your work already started.
2. Write A One-Item To-Do List
"This past year, my work became infinitely more complex," says Brigid Schulte, author of
Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, who now directs the Better
Life Lab at the think tank New America. Her solution? Scrapping her long, unfinished to-do lists
and replacing them with a single daily goal.
"By acknowledging I had limited time, limited bandwidth, and too much to do, and forcing myself
to choose just one thing and getting it done every day, I wound up accomplishing some of my
most important goals," she says.
3. Go For A Stroll
"The more I walk, the more ideas I have," says Ellevest founder and CEO Sallie Krawcheck,
opting for a low-tech productivity approach. "I put on some well-worn background musicso I
only half pay attention to itand go. Sometimes I get only an idea or two, but sometimes they
come fast and furious and Ill stop repeatedly to write them down."
These impromptu solo brainstorms have proved surprisingly fruitful. "I can come up with four to
eight ideas for newsletter updates, business initiatives, website improvements, people I should
connectyou name itover a four-mile walk."
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4. Know When To Quit
"Some think that stopping work on a project is a failure," says Viv Goldstein, leader for global
innovation acceleration at GE, but backing away when youre no longer adding value is crucial.
"Dont be afraid to stop work," she says. "It creates capacity to work on things that truly matter
and ends up saving time, energy, and resources."
List six to 10 things that you commit to not do in 2017 because they are keeping you from
focusing on your best work. Think of them as your anti-resolutions.
This includes mental resources that can ebb and flow. Allen Gannett, CEO of the marketing
analytics company TrackMaven, says that just being "willing to switch between projects to
match my mood, I get much more done in a typical day.
"For example, if I'm working on a client presentation and I start to notice my attention waning,"
Gannett explains, "I'll go and answers emails for 30 minutes rather than just sit there pretending
to continue working." He hasnt given up for good, just for the time being. "Usually by the end of
that time, I'm ready to dive back into the presentationand I got a dozen emails done" in the
meantime.
5. Do Only Things You Love While Procrastinating
You may think that to truly be productive, you need to stop procrastinating, but it might be better
to embrace it. "I love procrastinating, and I've come to grips with the fact that I'll never stop
procrastinating," confides Tacklebox Accelerator founder Brian Scordato. "So I make an effort to
only do things I love when procrastinatingexercise, [spend] time with friends and family, etc."
Thats helped put his less productive time to better use. It "eliminates the time-wasters we
usually procrastinate with," so you can get back to work without feeling guilty.
6. Automate Scheduling
If many of these tips sound pretty low-tech, count on a futurist to change that. Liz Alexander
relies on a scheduling app to keep her schedule in order. "In an average week, I probably have
a dozen or more people wanting to get onto my calendar. It used to take three or four emails just
to nail down a single appointment," she says. But after outsourcing that "tedious back-and-forth"
to Calendly, Alexander says shes found more time "to do more revenue-generating work."
7. Shut Up And Listen
We waste inordinate amounts of time just yapping, says writer and designer Lisa Baird.
"Conversations get so much further, so much faster when you close your mouth, open your
ears, deprioritize your own agenda, and truly understand someone else's."
That matters more as organizations get flatter, says Baird. "Today's consensus mode of doing
business, where everyone has veto power, makes the notion of stop talking a crucial
productivity tool if you want to design or ship anything at all."
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"Stop talking is a crucial productivity tool if you want to design or ship anything at all."
How? "Ask open-ended questions, but sparingly," she cautions. "Speak just enough to get the
ball rolling, then be quiet. Suffer silently through awkward pauses." Baird admits that "this may
feel a little weird, since most of us view productivity as doing, doing, doing." But its the most
efficient method shes found for "moving from thought to action," especially on teams.
8. Push The Important Stuff To The Top
"I'm a huge fan of the Boomerang plugin for Gmail," says The Muse cofounder and CEO
Kathryn Minshew. "I use it to schedule emails to disappear out of my inbox and boomerang
back in at a later date, like 7:15 a.m. Tuesday or 5 p.m. Friday'."
MailChimps VP of customer support Jon Smith does something similar by pushing less urgent
but important emails into a small handful of folders, leaving the most crucial ones marked
"unread," and archiving the rest.
This way Smiths top-priority messages stay front and center. "I try to have no more than 6070
emails in my inbox at any given time," he explains. "Thats the number I can comfortably
process in one sitting, and I try to get through all of my unread-marked emails by the end of
each day."
9. Set "Action Triggers"
Behavioral scientist David Hoffeld prefers "preloaded decisions that link a behavior with an
external reference," which researchers in his field have found can increase the likelihood of
completing a task. These "action triggers" are simple formulas, Hoffeld explains: "When X
happens, I do Y".
While working on his latest book, Hoffeld would decide earlier in the day to do some writing after
putting his kids to bed, and "then when that time came, I simply sat down and wrote for a few
hours," he says. "Preloading this decision and connecting it to an environmental stimulus
enabled me to avoid decision fatigue, and gave me a boost in productivity."
10. Write A "Stop-Doing" List
"Productivity is really about what you don't do," says Jocelyn K. Glei, author of Unsubscribe:
How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done. Glei proposes sitting
down and listing six to 10 things "that you commit to not do in 2017 because they are keeping
you from focusing on your best work." Think of them as your anti-resolutions, she suggests
"things like not sleeping with your smartphone in the bedroom, not opening your email first
thing when you arrive at work, or not checking social media before lunch."
Psychologist Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic backs her up. He says that "saying no to irrelevant
tasks, or outsourcing them" is the real secret to productivity. "Realize what you love and do well,
and focus on that."