Cheryl Zhao

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 […]