Top 10 Life Hacks: productivity shortcuts that boil down to an identifiable success factor

Biz School Best Practice: Key Takeaways, PART 5
By George ILIEV, #RepurposeEducation

Life hacks are shortcuts that increase productivity and efficiency: the cornerstone of business as well as business education. They are recipes for success when success can be boiled down to a single, sometimes counter-intuitive and often overlooked factor. (See PART 4 on the challenges of benchmarking when success is usually based on multiple factors). Below is my Top-10 list of life hacks for business school professionals and students:
  1. Make up your bed first thing in the morning to start on a productive note, advises US Admiral William McRaven.
  2. Pick some more low-hanging fruit (easy tasks) to give you impetus and to reward yourself.
  3. Watch a Youtube video if you need to learn how to do something that you haven't done before. (In the social media era this is similar to the simplistic advice of self-help guru Tony Robbins: "follow a recipe to achieve best baking results.")
  4. Once you start working, use the Pomodoro Technique: work in 25-minute chunks on a task.
  5. Aim to get into Flow or "the Zone" mode during work, i.e. no interruptions. Be conscious of the cost of interruption: on average it takes 23 minutes to recover from a distraction and return to work. One way to reduce interruption is to turn off news and instant messaging notifications on your phone. Another is to lump similar tasks together, e.g. schedule your conference calls back-to-back to leave big chunks of uninterrupted time during the day.
  6. Deal with non-crucial emails and simple tasks the moment you embark on them. Don't open a non-sensitive email and leave answering it for later.
  7. Practice "brain dump" at the end of the day: write down unfinished tasks. This is not only a task management tool but also relieves mental pressure as it allows you to unload these tasks from your mind, so they don't take up residual memory.
  8. Watch out for bias: pick your favourite among this list of 188 cognitive biases.
  9. Use numbering on lists and Page Numbers on presentation slides. Bullet points are OK for lists but numbers are even better.
  10. Invite guests to your house every 3 months so that you have an incentive to tidy up - recommends Japanese continuous improvement methodology Kaizen.
Ice climbing
(image source: Wikipedia)

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