We’re all looking for ways to “level-up” with productivity hacks.
Anything to give us that edge on our competition, or above all else just reassure us we’re doing everything we can to position ourselves for high-performance throughout the day.
With an increasing amount of clickbait articles, ebooks and gurus claiming the next best productivity hack, we have compiled a list of tried and tested productivity hacks.
These are hacks we each use daily, and have stood the test of time against the fads that pop up on a regular basis.
Time to cut through the BS and get back to basics.
The following are 5 Affiliate World approved productivity hacks to improve your daily performance.
Hack #1: Kickstarter Cocktail
“Drink warm water with lemon first thing in the morning. It’s a good way to detox and alkalize your body,” Valentina Zelyaeva
What would a productivity hack cheat sheet be without a little cheeky biohack?!
One thing we all need to consider is when we wake up, what are we putting immediately into our bodies to start us off on the right foot?
Most of you might be thinking to yourself, coffee…and lots of it!
Well time to shake that up.
There’s a super easy mineral cocktail you can pound back before your coffees that will get your body and brain primed and ready for your day, and it goes a little like this…
- 1 LRG Glass of warm filtered H20 – you ideally want to remove the metals and chemicals from normal tap water
- ½ Lemon juice squeezed in – known to help alkalize, and help promote good digestion
- 1 tablespoon of Apple Cider Vinegar – full of healthy enzymes as well as a quick energy booster while your coffee brews
- 1 teaspoon of Himalayan Salt – when you wake up, your body is dehydrated. This is the quickest, healthiest way to make sure while hydrating you deliver high quality electrolytes and minerals throughout your body.
Starting your day off with this, before coffee or anything else is a fast, easy way to get your body and mind functioning right out the gate.
Hydration is key, and using that to help deliver good minerals throughout your body will make sure you aren’t fighting uphill right once you step out of bed.
Hack #2: Morning Meditation
“Meditation is not about stopping thoughts, but recognizing that we are more than our thoughts and our feelings,” Arianna Huffington.
It’s safe to say that meditation has broken through the “hippy” stigma and sunk its teeth into mainstream society.
Everyone from Silicon Valley CEO’s to journeyman carpenters are identifying it as a way to clear mind, reduce stress and improve focus and memory.
We live in a world where we are juggling dozens of tasks and thoughts, mentally and physically from the second we wake until we finally find rest at night.
Meditation allows for us to declutter our minds, increase creativity and provide clearer, enhanced planning capacity.
Hack #3: Make To-Do Lists
“Compile your to-do list for tomorrow no later than this evening,” Tim Ferriss.
If you don’t already have a rolling notebook or app that helps you keep on track, this is by far the easiest tool to implement to increase your total output in a day.
Todoist and Trello are great webapps for this, but at minimum crack open the moleskine and get to it.
Structure and group tasks, find useful ways to mark priorities and be sure you’re crossing things off as you go.
When you mark a task or project as complete, you’re rewarded each time with a delivery of dopamine – which is a much healthier way to collect it than posting on social media and waiting for likes to roll in.
Pro Tip: Preparing your to-do list the night before, like “King of Productivity” Tim Ferriss, helps you to remain focused on what needs to be achieved and minimizes distractions that inevitably crop up.
Hack #4: Front-loading Your Day
“Eat a Live Frog Every Morning, and Nothing Worse Will Happen to You the Rest of the Day,” Mark Twain.
Life doesn’t reward easy as it does difficult – the harder the squeeze, the sweeter the juice.
But we’re human, and that task you’ve been avoiding on the list you started from day #1, it’s gotta go.
We all know that feeling, the list keeps growing, but there’s that one task you keep putting off for either end of day, or tomorrow.
Time to flip that approach upside down and take your hardest tasks head on each day.
It will obviously shorten major task completion times, but it will increase productivity throughout the day, as other tasks seem much easier.
You’re also equipped better in the morning to take on bigger tasks than in the afternoon, based off of our biological clocks, also known as our circadian rhythm.
What this means is that we have more energy in the tank in the morning, and we need to get to it before we get hit with that midday slump.
Hack #5: Single Tasking
“Focus on being productive instead of busy,” Tim Ferriss.
We were brought up to strive for a blackbelt in multitasking.
Eventually growing to four screens at your workstation at home, showing off to friends your reporting screen, traffic manager, photoshop design studio and of course one screen always open to skype with a million group notifications blowing up your headphones.
Yes, it’s possible to do many things at once, but to do many things at a level of high performance simultaneously? Please.
When you shift to focusing solely on one task at a time, and blocking off any other distractions (yes, turn off notifications on all devices), having less tabs open (use OneTab) and simplify your workspace, you’ll notice an increase in productivity with completing tasks.
Plus a much higher quality of work.
📝 TL;DR Prepare tomorrow’s to-do list today, with your most important task listed first.
Wake up to a kickstarter cocktail, meditate then single-task your way to a super-productive day.
Have you got more productivity hacks to share? Comment below.