It's a typical Monday morning.
You got into work a few minutes early to get ahead of everything you need to get done.
You've just poured your second cup of coffee and you check your work email to make sure you didn't miss anything.
Then your boss comes in and hands you ANOTHER assignment he expects you to do ASAP.
You add it to your growing to-do list that you never seem to "get ahead" of.
That's when the dreaded thought hits you.
"Man. I wish I could clone myself so I can do twice the work at once and catch up on this long list of things I gotta do."
Well, unfortunately, human cloning is not yet possible.
But there are some simple productivity hacks you can use today to turn yourself into a productivity powerhouse that gets things done without burning out.
Why Burnout Happens
If you're like me, you wish you could squeeze just a little bit MORE out of yourself each workday.
You think "If I could just work a little bit harder, I could get everything I need to get done."
Well, one mind-blowing fact about the human body is that it has all the tools its needs to work for hours on end.
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would run for miles chasing down prey for food.
And once they caught that prey, they would often carry it for miles back to their dwellings.
When they finished all that, they would cook and clean the food AND use the skins to make new clothes.
These long and exhausting tasks were a typical day's work for a hunter-gatherer.
So WHY do we get burned out?
It has more to do with how we're working and not how long we're working.
Why You Feel Like Crap After A 9-hour day
The reason you feel burnout at work is because you're not working the way your brain and body are designed to work.
In addition to expending valuable brain power and energy on your work, you're also expending additional energy on maintaining an inefficient workflow.
That second aspect is what is killing your productivity.
Fortunately, it's fixable.
Productivity Hack #1 - "The Elephant Method"
Part of the reason you crave that 30-minute lunch break to recharge is because you aren't setting the right goals.
Instead, you're likely making big, lofty "dreams" of what you'd like to get done.
While dreams are great, they don't help you actually accomplish your work.
Instead of dreaming "finish this project by today," map out a list of steps toward completing that dream.
Then tie those steps to a reasonable amount of time to complete them.
I call this "The Elephant Method," after the famous idiom:
You eat an elephant one bite at a time.
Why "The Elephant Method" Works
The Elephant Method better utilizes the spatial reasoning portion of the brain.
It reminds you that your task IS getting completed.
But it also unlocks the brain's reward system.
When you complete a task, your brain feels rewarded by having one less task to worry about.
What this does is it releases brain chemicals that will make you want to repeat what you just did.
So by breaking complex tasks into small ones, you're utilizing powerful brain chemistry to propel you to work harder.
Productivity Hack #2 - "The Task Slayer"
When you multitask, you're increasing the number of opened, uncompleted projects sitting in the spatial reasoning portion of your brain at once.
Your brain spends precious energy worrying about getting each of those projects done.
If you continue starting new projects without finishing old ones, it'll require more and more of your brain's resources to keep track of them all.
But if you have implemented "The Elephant Method" and mapped out how all your tasks are going to be completed, then sticking to just one task at a time would throw gasoline on the productivity fire.
Your brain will be as streamlined as possible to finish the current task, because all the freed-up "worry" resources can now be fully honed onto the task at hand.
That's why I call it "The Task Slayer."
You're slaying the amount of tasks that your brain is wasting resources on remembering.
Wbu???
Using these productivity hacks will instantly increase your productivity and help you get more done in a day.
But are there any productivity hacks you have found work for you?
Drop them into the comments section to help other overworked coffee-guzzlers work faster and smarter!
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