Phone in a safebox if possible

In the previous article I talked about the differences between working hard and working in a smart way, where in the first case you just worked "hard" by just doing anything that means work to you and not leaving much quality time to the parts of the job that are really going to make you advance further in your projects. You will end up distracted and stuck in the same position for a longer time. However, in the second situation, you'll find yourself more focused from the get go, by eliminating all distractions and performing the task in the correct way while you direct all your attention to one simple endeavour for a determine period of time, where even If you dedicate less time of the day to It, you'll find yourself making a more significant progress. In this article I'll talk about a series of tips you can use to arrange your environment and schedule so as to reduce all the distractions and their sources in order to make your day look more like the second option. Let's begin with the first one:

1.- Make phisically harder to get access to distractions than to work material.

One of the main reasons we always end up spending more time than what we say we would in our phones is not because of some kind of magic, It's all because of the simplicity with which you can access to any social media app and have a lot of posts about what you like in your feed, all with the touch of a simple button or two, while getting to work is more difficult, as we have to grab our laptop, turn It on, sit ourselves, grab a couple folders and open PDFs along with microsoft office Word, Excel or Powerpoint and write tiresome paragraphs. Well, one of the pathways to an increase in productivity is to make It much harder to access to the sources of these distractions (At least during the time you're at your job) and to make more accessible to sit down and work. There are many ways to do this, one of these being restraining yourself from the use of your phone while you're at work, either by turning It down, putting It at other place in the room and turning off System notifications or just downloading a particular app to restrict the access to social media for a determined period of time in the day, all while you make sure that all your material is in order for the day the night before, making It just a matter of sitting down and typing in your keyboard to begin. In this way, you'll be much more productive with the limited amount of time you dedicate to putting in the work.

2.- Realize reviews and planning for your weeks:

Taking inspiration from journaling, you can self assess the quality of what you do regarding your progress, as there's no better person to figure out If you are feeling like you're wasting your time than yourself. In this way, you will just dedicate a particular hour of maybe just one day of the week to write about the past 7 days, what you think you did good or bard, what the results were, why you think It happened and what you can do to make better. Alongside with this, you can also plan for the next days, as you will set activities in order to your priorities and getting more proficient at what you think were your difficults according to your diagnostic.

3.- Use your early hours

As I've pointed heavily in the last article, the way you spend your first hours awake will mostly impact the way you'll feel the rest of the day, as It will provide you with renewed energy (Proven that you've slept accordingly) to focus on what you demand It to in an easier manner, so why not work right at those hours instead of using your limited capacity for attention in not so relevant tasks and leaving you with no room for quality input? By making your duties from the beginning of your workday you'll be required to spend less time in a particular point of It as you will digest and interpret the information more easily, also leaving you with more room for rest and other meaningful activities.

I hope that with the information in this post you can get and implement some valuable strategies for making your day more productive as you work, getting rid of distractions, pointless efforts and poor performances. In this way you'll be much more focused in what you do and you'll produce much more with less. Thank you for your support and I wish you the best of luck!