How To Be Efficient Without Being Obsessed With Productivity

Last year, I signed up for a book reading challenge and I ended up reading many self-help books. Inspired by them, I started researching to make that knowledge actionable. When I was researching about productivity hacks, I came across this quote by Andrew Grove:

“Stressing output is the key to improving to productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”

This made me realize how there is a general misconception that being productive means getting a lot done in the stipulated time period. I too was a victim of this notion. I would try getting a lot of things done within a ridiculously short time frame. I would make impossible to-do lists because I equated quantity rather than quality with success.

I tried to finish the tasks any which way because they were on my to-do list to give myself this false sense of achievement. In the process of multitasking to boost productivity I ended up doing sub-standard work. The only outcome of which was that I ended up failing miserably at every task. Even though I gave enough attention to every task I could not succeed at any. The bigger the list, more the panic.

The clear problem is, rather than concentrating on one thing at any given moment, we set multiple goals, and think we can multitask and achieve them.

Failing to achieve my goals time and again, I decided to change the way I hustled.

I tried a lot of different approaches, there were few that were satisfactory but did not give desired output. Finally, I found the one that worked the best. The approach of task elimination rather than selection.

How does the elimination strategy work?

1. Make a to do list

2. Eliminate tasks of low priority

3. You should be left with top 3 tasks

Instead of choosing what tasks to finish, I started eliminating the tasks which were congesting my list and hindering my efficiency.

Eliminating the low priority tasks helps in filtering out the tasks that clog up your list. A limited number of tasks will keep you focused. Since you have eliminated those tasks it means you were never going to do them anyway, and even if you did it would be to tick it off your list.

Less number of tasks is actually more work done when you can finish each one successfully. Doing less number of things but getting more work done is better than doing more but achieving less output.

The best hack is, don’t overschedule.