Useful Hacks to Enhance Your Productivity

One of the main challenges that most employees face is being productive when working long hours. Employees regularly encounter burnout or brain fog while trying to stay productive, which not only affects the quality of their work but also their job satisfaction. As a result, understanding how to cope with such a situation is critical. Christine Liu, Innovation Editor at Harvard Business Review, provides a few essential productivity hacks in this YouTube video on the Harvard Business Review channel, which you can use to enhance your productivity. 

Christine’s first recommendation to enhance your productivity is to employ the Pomodoro technique. The strategy advises working for a set amount of time, say 25 minutes, without getting distracted, and then taking a brief rest. Christine, on the other hand, believes that the strategy is helpful primarily for major projects that must be completed quickly but inefficient for modest daily jobs. Second, she proposes using Caveday as another trick to enhance your productivity. Christine describes Caveday as a virtual conference call in which you are assigned a coach who will assist you in meeting your goals. Essentially, it creates positive peer pressure for you to complete tasks. She believes that using Caveday is beneficial since it allows you to meet new people. She suggests that you work with a coach to plan your time and says that the group vibe is motivating. Similarly, she proposes another system called Focusmate, in which you connect with a stranger on screen who keeps an eye on you until you complete your stated goal. Although Christine finds it beneficial for peer accountability, she notes that the program is unguided, and the social side may be a bit distracting because your attention is usually drawn to the stranger focused on you rather than your task. Finally, the video recommends establishing a list of what you want to do in a day in order to be productive. It is also critical that you get enough sleep before implementing any productivity hacks, as not getting enough sleep is one of the key reasons you may experience burnout.

A lack of productivity is fairly prevalent, especially if you constantly compare yours to someone else’s. However, if you want to enhance your productivity, the aforementioned methods will undoubtedly help.