Cheryl Zhao

We all need time off, so a vacation or even a long weekend are golden. Since we’re not robots, just working all day and having no fun or time off will eventually ruin our productivity. But, how ca we get back to a productive workflow, after few days of plain relaxation? Here are some proven productivity tips to get back in the saddle and make a difference: Set your schedule the day before. It’s not fun to think about work the night before, but waking up in the morning, not knowing what to do and having no clue about how to best manage your work will clearly work against you. This is why a bit of planning for the day after won’t hurt. Before you go to sleep, think about the tasks that are URGENT and IMPORTANT (we’ve already learned about Eisenhower’s Decision Matrix), so you’ll choose exactly what matters most and will have the biggest influence on your career/business. In the morning, as you’ll drink your coffee or whatever you do to start your day, you’ll know exactly what task to tackle first. Instead of wasting time and just finding it difficult to concentrate, you’ll go through your tasks list like a rocket. Keep your smartphone away from you As you concentrate on your tasks, having your phone near you will clearly distract you from work. You don’t need to follow that Facebook notification now or respond to that retweet. In most cases phone calls are not really emergencies, so they can wait for at least 25 minutes (if you choose to the Pomodoro technique for instance) until you finish one work ‘chunk’. Use the Pomodoro Technique to break long tasks When I have to create a website for a client, it’s a pretty big task. I have to prepare […]

For many years we were raised to think that hard work alone is the way to make it. I’ve boasted several times about how I have 16 hour work days to make my small web design business work. Then I understood that just working hard is not the answer. I needed to start working smart, accomplish more in an hour, do the tasks that matter the most, hence become more productive. As you can guess I tried all kinds of techniques, some have worked great (The Eisenhower Decision Matrix or the Pomodoro Technique), but others prevented me from actually becoming productive. Here are three productivity ideas that didn’t work for me Over-scheduling I’m the queen of planning. I love to list my tasks, come up with new ones, plan for the future etc. This way I used to come up with tens of tasks to be handled, with daily task lists longer than this article. Do you think this helped me? Well, not really. I’d be able to finish few tasks and that nothing. Tens of due tasks, my ever-growing list growing even more. Stress and that ugly feeling of  not being to accomplish my goals. Now I keep my daily tasks list simple – not more than 3 items. I can do them most of the time and, if a task is too big, I can resume tomorrow and not get tens of new due tasks in the meantime. Install yet another productivity tool I’ve always been computer savvy and loved new software that would make my life easier. Now there are also many web-based applications that are supposed to help with time management, task scheduling, team and project management. As you can guess I tried many of them and ended up having way too many installed. I’d have an Asana […]