Popular Productivity Tips- What Worked For Me & What Didn’t

Just because it’s popular, doesn’t mean that it worked for me.

I recently read a blog that I decided to do my take on. It’s The Lifestyle Files’ blog post, Popular Productivity Techniques: What Worked For Me and What Didn’t. I thought it’d be interesting to review how some popular productivity tips worked for me.

I’ll be listing 10 popular productivity tips that I found (the ones that kept showing up repeatedly in every YouTube video and article I read about how to be more productive). You’ll learn about each of them if you’re not familiar with them. You’ll also read about how they worked for me (or didn’t work for me).

This blog post is for anyone who wants to improve their productivity. I encourage you to let me know if there are any productivity tips I missed on this list. I’m the only one that sees the comments so you can be as open as you’d like!

Let’s dive in.

1 – Wake Up Early

The Idea: If you couldn’t tell from the name in itself, you wake up early. It’s a popular productivity myth that waking up early makes you more productive.

How it Worked For Me: For me, it does work WHEN I have the energy and the right sleep for it. I’ve found that it’s practically ineffective for me to wake up early when I’m running on low hours of sleep. One major example was when I woke up at 3 am (I wrote a blog post on my experiment with this! Read it here.) I learned that if you don’t have enough sleep to function, waking up early is a pretty useless productivity rule. You’re better off sleeping a little later if it means you’ll have more energy during the day.

After all, one of my favorite quotes about this is: “It doesn’t matter what time you wake up, what matters more is how you spend your waking hours”.

2 – 2 Minute Rule

The Idea: Also a name in itself. The idea of the 2-minute rule is that if something takes less than 2 minutes to do, just do it. By doing so, you save time during the day. Various examples include:

• Putting things away immediately
• Washing dishes immediately
• Answering a message immediately
• Countless, and countless more!

How it Worked For Me: I love this! If I’m being honest, there was some time when I stopped using this rule. I started actively implementing this in my life again, and it saves me so much time. For example, every time I eat, I wash my dishes immediately. Later on in the day, I don’t have a lot of dishes to wash which I thank myself for. Putting things away immediately saves me time from cleaning at the end of the day.

And also, these are tasks that I tend to procrastinate on. In reality, these tasks take less than 2 minutes to do. It’s pretty crazy how I procrastinate a task for 2 hours+ even though it only takes less than 2 minutes to do.

3 – Batching

The Idea: This is where you do everything all at once. For example, you batch all your emails and/or messages at once. Or you do all your cleaning at once. The idea is that you don’t get distracted with these tasks during the day because you’ll have a specific time scheduled for those tasks.

How it Worked For Me: 100% helps me, although I know this doesn’t suit everyone. The reason why it helps me is that I constantly get distracted by my emails and messages throughout the day. When I set a time to schedule those batched tasks, it limits those distractions. Besides, I feel more focused when doing them.

4 – Eisenhower Matrix

The Idea: Here’s a photo diagram for you:

You organize your tasks through these matrixes.

How it Worked For Me: It didn’t. While it did help me become more aware of my priorities (it helped me see the things that I would do, that weren’t necessary), it doesn’t help me with anything else. Planning my schedule and time blocking would work better for me, and the Eisenhower Matrix doesn’t take time schedules into account. I do think it’s helpful for anyone to be aware of what their priorities are. But I think that if you want to manage your time effectively, there are more effective techniques out there.

5 – Most Important Tasks (MITs)

The Idea: It’s where you do your most important task first. Even your 3 most important tasks first. The idea of this is that getting the hardest and most important tasks out of the way, it motivates you to keep going with your other tasks.

How it Worked For Me: It sometimes works.

Most of the time, the first task I work on is not my hardest or most important task. Instead, it’s the tasks where I need the most creativity. For me, my most creative time of the day is in the morning, and that’s why I like doing my content creation first. While it’s not the hardest/most important task, I need the most creative energy when doing it.

I know that for some people, doing their hardest and most important task first helps them a lot…. And I understand why. I guess with me, I focus more on what time of the day I’m most creative and efficient and organize my tasks based on that.

6 – Time Blocking & Calendar Planning

The Idea: This is where you time block your day and schedule out all your tasks and priorities. It’s supposed to help you know how you are going to spend your time and make sure that you do the things you need to do.

How it Worked For Me: I love time blocking and calendar planning. It’s my favorite thing to do every week. Time blocking and calendar planning helps me so much because I feel organized with my time, and I know when I’m going to get things done. Knowing my calendar ahead of time helps me to make sure that I don’t overcommit myself to anything.

This is not to say that I have to stick with it 100%. The purpose of calendar planning and time blocking is to be aware of how much time I truly have. After that, I can be as flexible as I need to be. For example, I may choose to switch up the tasks and when I do them because of how it feels in the moment.

7 – Pomodoro Technique

The Idea: This is how it works:

• 25-minute work session + 5-minute break
• Every three 25-minute work sessions, 20-minute break.

How it Worked For Me: Have used this for the longest time and with everything. From content creation to studies, to work, and every long task I can think of. The reason why it works so well for me is:

• It breaks down long & dreadful tasks in shorter time blocks – especially with studies and work!
• I make sure that I take my breaks so I can keep regaining my focus – I tend to work 2 hours straight without taking a break which affects my productivity negatively.
• It’s easier to not procrastinate – it’s easy to procrastinate on a one-hour or 2-hour task because of how long it takes. By breaking it down into 25-minute sessions with breaks in between, it prevents procrastination.

8 – Theming Your Days 

The Idea: The name is in itself, but this is where you theme your days. For example, a content creator will theme their days like this:

• Monday – Brainstorm
• Tuesday – Creating Content
• Wednesday – Creating Content
• Thursday – Editing Content
• Friday – Admin

Theming your days is supposed to help you break down your week, and help you focus on one thing at a time.

How it Worked For Me: Sometimes it works depending on what type of work I do.

Theming my days work the best for me when it comes to cleaning. I theme my cleaning days like this:

• Monday – Laundry
• Tuesday – House Cleaning (vacuuming, mopping, etc)
• Wednesday – Bathroom
• Thursday – Kitchen
• Friday – Other

It also works for me with my blog:

• Monday – Blog Writing
• Tuesday – Blog Writing
• Wednesday – Business Work
• Thursday – Business Work
• Friday – Social Media Content Batching

However, with my studies and work, I can’t theme my days because I have to constantly work on something different every day. I can’t just theme the types of tasks because it won’t let me. For example, I can’t theme my study days into ‘Monday – Classes Prep’, ‘Tuesday – Assessments’, or Wednesday ‘Study & Review’, because my classes and assessments are all on different days, and I’m supposed to work on these tasks every single day.

Ultimately, it’s a good productivity technique, but it depends on what I use it for.

9 – Don’t Multitask

The Idea: If the name doesn’t give it away, it’s saying to not multitask anything. The most obvious reason is that by multitasking several tasks at once, you sacrifice the end quality for all of them.

How it Worked For Me: There’s a lot of truth to the downsides of multitasking. With tasks that require your full focus, multitasking is a bad idea. So, I agree with this productivity tip.

10 – Plan Next Day

The Idea: I don’t know if you noticed, but a lot of these productivity tips explain the tip in their title. In case you haven’t caught on, you plan the next day with this one.

How it Worked For Me: 1000000000000% works for me! I honestly dislike planning my day the morning of because it’s time that I could’ve used to just get started. And also I love the feeling of going to sleep knowing what’s ahead for the next day. I know the feeling of waking up feeling stressed because I don’t know how my day is going to turn out. Planning ahead of time relieves me of that feeling.

Take a SMALL STEP

I don’t recommend starting all these productivity tips at once, but here are small steps to get started:

1. Focus on what you get done in your waking hours, not what time you wake up – Forget waking up early. What matters more is what you get done while you’re awake. You can plan your schedule and the tasks you’ll complete there.
2. 2-minute rule – If a task is going to take you less than 2 minutes to do, just do it.
3. Batching – If you haven’t tried this yet, you can give it ago. You can schedule a time to batch when you answer emails or messages, or when you do your cleaning.
4. Eisenhower Matrix – While this isn’t the best technique for time management, it’s a really good technique for organizing your priorities! Think of your current priorities and try organizing them in the matrix.
5. Most Important Tasks – Have a go at doing your most important and hardest tasks first. You might find that it helps you be more productive.
6. Time Blocking & Calendar Planning – Plan your schedule for tomorrow or the week ahead.
7. Pomedero Technique – Require the Pomodoro technique discussion to see how it works and give it a go for yourself (if you haven’t already).
8. Theme Your Days – Choose one area of your life that you can theme the days with, and see how you go.
9. Don’t Multitask – If you tend to multitask things, challenge yourself to not multitask for the whole day.
10. Plan Next Day – Refer to Tip Number 6 (they’re the same thing).

To Wrap Up…

I hope you got some value from my sharing what productivity tips worked for me. At the end of the day, just because they’re the most popular productivity tips, it doesn’t mean that they will work for you. Everyone’s life circumstances are different!

If you want to improve your productivity, I have a resource that will help you. It’s my mini e-book Small Steps to Productivity which you can download for FREE in the Free Resources Library. You’ll also be able to access my free book Small Steps to Progression which you can download here.

In the meantime, have a go at any of these productivity tips if you haven’t tried them yet. Just remember that whether they are for someone depends on their life circumstances.

-Lauren 😊

P.S – I recommend you read these blog posts next:

• Easy Productivity Tips for All Areas of Your Life
• Busting Productivity Myths
• Five Things That Count As Being Productive

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