How to become more productive: Tips from the creator of Asana service

Excellent service Quora continues to delight us with great answers to pressing questions. This time we want to tell you that told Justin Rosenstein, an excellent programmer and Internet entrepreneur, put his power to create such well-known projects such as Gmail, Facebook and Asana, in response to the invitation to share their secrets productivity.

During his career as a programmer and project manager Justin on his own experience I recognize the great importance of proper organization, and put a lot of effort to study this matter. As a result, he realized that the effectiveness of any activity depends on many parameters and requires optimization from three areas: streamlining your environment, your mind and the actual process work.

environment Optimization

Avoid any distractions

We begin immediately with the main thing: multitasking hurting your productivity!

Yes, your feelings can deceive you, and you can feel at simultaneous work on multiple tasks just the genius of productivity. But in fact it is not, and numerous scientific studies prove this. Multiple constant switching between tasks really slow down!

So the first and most important - is the focus.

• Turn on your mobile phone mode "Do Not Disturb".
• Close all browser windows or tabs that are not associated with the current task.
• If you need to send an email, you do not go then to view the unread mail.
• Disconnect the new mail notification on your computer.
• Exit all chats.

Look for a state of flux

If you are constantly distracted and your entire day consists of a hodgepodge of meetings, phone calls and conversations with colleagues, it is very difficult to find the particular condition, which is called the flow. It is in this state is achieved the best performance and come to address even the most complex tasks.

• Highlight special time for meetings and conferences. Let all your colleagues know that you better look only at this time.
• If possible, offer management of your company to dedicate one day a week when there will be no meeting.
• Keep track of your performance at different times of the day. Try to distribute the tasks in accordance with the observations made.

Get to know tools

If your primary job is connected to the computer, each time you reach a hand to the mouse, you lose a few seconds and get out of the flow state. Learn and apply the most appropriate combination of hot keys that will not only save you time but also allow less distracted.

• Keyboard shortcuts are present not only in any program, but in most Web applications. Many of them are identical, so that, having learned one key combination, you can use it all the time.
• use the program SizeUp to quickly organize windows on the desktop.

optimization of mind

All you need to know about the right motivation and involvement, you will find in the books of an American journalist and writer Tony Schwartz. Among them you will find out what really should be controlled not by time or tasks, and their energy.

Take regular breaks

Common sense tells us that the more time we spend at work, the more we will do. But this is not true. People are not robots, we need time to recover and rest. Studies show that a short break every 90 minutes can significantly increase your overall productivity.

meditate

Here about the benefits of meditation, everything is already written.

You take care of your body

• Drink water. At the beginning of each day, I put five high glasses of water on his desk. I drink them all before the end of the day. Their appearance does not allow me to forget about the need to drink more.
• Eat right. Abundant dinner with an excess of carbohydrates can be a real disaster for your performance.
• Exercise. Cardio, at least twice a week will give you an extra energy boost.
• In short, make sure you use your free time not to harm themselves, but rather to restore and increase the supply of its energy.

Find the causes of procrastination and eliminate them

we prokrastiniruem usually not due to the fact that pathologically lazy, no. Usually the reason is that the task facing us caused us any hidden (or obvious) discomfort. This can be avoided in the following ways:

• Try to honestly admit to yourself what is the reason for your delay and shelving. Write down on paper what exactly you do not like your job or the task at hand.
• Break the task into several light steps and follow them one by one.
• If you are unable to bring himself to do any business at the moment, then move to another, an easier and pleasant, but not immediately run off aimlessly flipping Facebook tape. In this case, your job is to somehow move and not stand still.

process optimization

Make a clear plan of work. Clearly distribute it in all its tasks by importance and urgency. It is accurate prioritization of cases is the key to productivity.

• Do not start to work until all the subsequent steps will not be crystal clear and understandable for you.
• Start with the main. Decide what your goal is. Why do you want to achieve it? What steps are needed to achieve it? Who is responsible for each step? In what order should be carried out of action?

Assemble a team. Some people prefer to work alone, but great things not to do so.

• Find a teammate with whom you will be the easiest to work. Sometimes there are problems over which a few days you can fight alone, but they will be completed in a few hours with the help of a partner. "Pair programming" is a common reception in software development, but it can also be applied to the rest.
• If you still prefer to work by yourself, then spend sometimes a short meeting with yourself. Can be directly in a text editor or magazine to ask yourself questions about what you're working on now, the difficulties encountered, what problems you have to solve. Formulation and record the answers to these and other questions of great help to look at the process as if from outside.
• Assign deadlines and publicly voiced. If you are confident told before all, that finished the job by Friday, you will have to dig in its heels to avoid being branded as verbiage.
• Track the progress of each task. Of course, as a service creator AsanaI recommend for the organization of individual and team work was his.
• Leave time at the end of each day to sum up. Try to honestly assess for themselves your current achievements and failures. Draw conclusions from the mistakes.

The above tips and tricks alone mean very little to do in a moment you are the most productive person in the world. But all together they are built into a powerful system that will help you to work much more effective.