Productivity hacks, or how to work from home when the world went crazy
About the situation – the Happiness approach
You are probably tired of everyone saying about the pandemic, working from home and blah blah, we know, we are tired as well! However, in our team, we are trying the positivity approach and looking at everything from the happiness perspective.
Recently, Denis suggested we all read a book: The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor, it is a great book and we advise all of you to check it out. And I know, you all very busy so here is a gist of it in a TedTalk by the author:
So what is the point here? To notice your advantages and happy moments, instead of focusing on negativity. The world is going crazy right now, but we want to keep our sanity and in this article, we will share our productivity tips and how we manage to work from home during these uneasy times; (we are cheating a bit, we’ve been working from home before it became mainstream).
About the remote work
First of all, let’s see what the remote job is. A lot of companies had to move their employees to work remotely recently, but there are a lot of companies with the remote-first culture, as well as freelancers working for different clients on their own time.
Working remotely giving you enough freedom to plan your day, follow your routine, and be flexible. But on the other hand, it can totally make you a procrastination master.
In order to be more productive and not burn out at the same time, I gathered some productivity hacks and tips.
Some hacks
- Plan your month, week and day
Sounds quite simple, but planning is the key to productivity. When you have clear goals for the month, week and day – it is easy to prioritize your tasks and see what needs to be done.
Planning for the month should be rather general because some things might go differently, however it is always good to have the direction, even if it might shift a bit.
For the week planning should be more precise, with more details and actual outcomes that you want to achieve.
For daily planning, I really suggest you focus on 1-2 most important things.
- Eat that frog
There is a famous phrase by Mark Twain: “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And if it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.”
Why eating the frog and why in the morning? Well, it is related to all hard and complicated tasks that you postpone till the very deadline and then struggle to finish them. If you do this biggest and hardest (most of the time it is not true though) task in the morning, then all the rest will be as easy as watching YouTube.
- Work in bulks
For that you can use different methods and apps, like tomato-timer or forest app, these apps allow you to set up the time for deep focus, from 20 minutes to 50, or as you prefer, and also not forget to make the small breaks in between work bulks. In the dee- focus time try to focus on one task, not distract yourself with different noises, notifications or your housemate (wife, boyfriend or a cat). Make as much as possible from your 30 minutes of deep work and then rest for several minutes.
- Don’t forget to exercise
As much as we talk here on planning, focus, and concentration, you should not forget about your physical health as well – try to get up every hour to stretch your legs, walk around your room, office, yard, etc, or even do a couple of situps, you will see, your blood circulation will be significantly better this way and it will be easier to concentrate.
These are so common techniques and tips our team is using on a daily basis, a lot of authors and coaches wrote books on these topics! We just want to remind you that these techniques are actually working and helping us to achieve our goals.
But let’s go to some fun stuff, and see what Denis thinks about productivity and which personal hacks he is using to achieve his goals.
Denis hacks
Denis Panjuta, tutorials.eu main instructor with over 150000 students on Udemy shares his personal tips on how to be successful and productive:
- Visualize my goals
- Meditate to make sure I’m not getting too stressed and still focus on the important things
- Always finish at 5:30 so that I’m at home for dinner with the family. This forces me to get shit done
Visualization is a great hack that can be used for your planning, whether you plan a new business, workload or personal things, just imagine you achieving what you want and imagine how you feel about it. Do you like the feeling? Then move and work!
Meditation helps you to concentrate on the most important things, learn to notice your own thoughts, and understand what it is you really want. There are tons of YouTube videos on how to start meditating, we definitely suggest you check those out.
Summary
You’ve heard about all these hacks millions of times already, but the most important thing that we didn’t mention – you need to implement them. Just reading about tomato-timer and ‘eat that frog’ method will not make you the king of productivity, but actually implementing it – will. So go ahead and use it!
For more specific productivity hacks, go check out or C#& Visual Studio Productivity Masterclass, where you will learn different shortcuts and shortcakes to help you code faster, will learn how to make the shortcodes yourself and how to use extensions.
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