Conquer Your Day: 7 Productivity Tips for Online Service Providers Many people have various degrees of productivity during certain times of their day. Our focus waxes and wanes even during the week depending on our energy levels, hormones, life stages and all that. We’re not robots, our energy levels will rise and dip. What is constant though? Our workload as online service providers. It’s rare to have a day with fewer tasks just because it’s a day when you’re having trouble getting focused. So how do we keep the work flowing even when we can’t pull from our energy reserves? Some good old discipline and routine help. Here are 7 things that you can do to help stay focused and productive, even when your focus reserves are at zero: 1. Write a To-do List I’ll always remember my dad telling me this (God rest his soul). Guess he knew his scatterbrained daughter better than she thought. He’d always tell me, “write a to-do list of your day before you get out of bed!” And I do. Semi-religiously. The days I make time to write a to-do list (even adding the seemingly mundane things), my day goes smoothly. The day I don’t… well… Moving on swiftly! Here’s a tip to take your productivity for the day to the next level: after you write the to-do list, order it by priorities and by similar work, if you have multiple clients. That’s called batching tasks, but we’ll talk about that more later on. That way, when you start, you know that task #1 is truly task #1 and you don’t have to go down the list looking for your most important task. That wastes time and defeats the whole purpose of making a to-do list in the first place. 2. The Pomodoro Technique I swear by this because breaking up my work day like that funny enough has helped me be even more productive. The usual technique is having 25 minutes of focused work, a 5 minute break for four cycles, then a 15-minute longer break afterwards. I love this desktop app. It’s simple and easy to use. It’s not hard and fast; make the times how you want them, but make sure it’s 4 short breaks then a longer break. I extend the longer breaks to coincide with my meals so I can relax, eat in peace and watch an episode of my favourite show (lately it’s Kaguya-Sama: Love is War), before getting back to work. Fully leaning into your breaks and not trying to get work done is a great way to boost productivity, believe it or not. We’ll get into that a bit later, too. 3. Batch Your Tasks This is important. One of our last posts spoke about how context switching affects your productivity. That’s when you switch from one task to another completely different task that requires you to re-focus and that amount of time spent trying to re-focus wastes a lot of time. Let me give you an example: Let’s say you have 3 clients: Client #1 needs you to schedule posts to their FB group and then to IG. Client number 2 needs you to engage in Instagram and edit & schedule their newsletter for the week Client number 3 needs you to create graphics for their Instagram & Pinterest, and schedule them to the respective platforms. What is the best way to batch these tasks so you’re not bouncing back and forth from one task to another? Here’s what I would do: I’d start with the graphic creation for Instagram & Pinterest and the newsletter (if there are any) and download them to their respective folders. Once I did that, I’d prep all the posts that need scheduling, and schedule them to the respective platforms. I’m assuming the clients have their own scheduler, so it’s a matter of logging in, dragging and dropping and finalising the posts and scheduling them. Now, since I’m in schedule mode, I can hop on over to Client #2’s scheduler & do the engagement from there instead of going to IG. Once I’m done, I can re-focus and finish off the newsletter. I have the graphics already so it’s a matter of adding them to the newsletter, making final edits and scheduling them. I’d love to know how you’d do it. Let’s hear it. 4. Take Proper Breaks Close that computer. Get off your desk. Put down that phone. Multitasking is not your friend and it causes you to be less productive than you thought. In fact, I was readig up on a study about how multitasking doesn’t help you and causes you to lose focus and make more mistakes. When you’re switching from one thing to another, do it intentionally so your brain can switch gears and focus on the task at hand. This includes taking a break. When you’re taking a break, be intentional about it. Let your brain say “Ah, it’s break time”, shift gears and get into rest mode. Once you’re done, your brain can shift gears back into work mode without being all over the place. 5. Have an Accountability Partner That could look like having coworking sessions with a network, having a business partner who keeps you accountable (like me!), or being in a Facebook group of like-minded individuals. Whatever that looks like to you, having people who help you stay productive is important for some people. If that’s something that you know helps you, then go for it! 6. Technology Helps! I need dings and dongs (and occasionally gongs) to keep my mind focused on work sometimes, and when those days come, I make use of all the technology that’s available to me to make sure I stay focused on all the tasks ahead. Google calendar houses all my serious and not-so-serious tasks. Gmail has notifications so I can keep up with updates in real-time. Zapier is so amazing! Adding tasks to my task manager of choice from emails through Zapier is
