How To 10X Your Productivity: 8 Simple Hacks From A Single Mum
Are you constantly overwhelmed by a never ending to do list?
Always doing but never seem do get anything done?
Ending everyday somehow feeling unaccomplished in spite of having spent the whole day “doing”?
There is so much you want to accomplish in life, yet you finish every day feeling frustrated at your lack of progress. It’s not that you’re not doing the work, it’s that the work isn’t moving you forward.
Deep down you know that nothing changes if nothing changes, yet you are barely staying afloat as it is.
I feel you, I was you, I know how frustrating it is my lovely friend!
But trust me when I say: IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!!!
When I had my daughter as a solo parent it was truly baptism of fire regarding my productivity.
Suddenly my workload had quadrupled, my time had seriously diminished and I had to keep both myself and a whole other human alive, fed and a socially acceptable level of clean.
By trial and error, during the first two years of her life, I discovered nine simple hacks that helped me to;
✦ Complete an MSc in Psychology
✦ Launch a successful business
✦ Care for and nurture an excellent little person (who knows all the words to Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds)
✦ Heal mentally after years of pain and…
✦ Spend the majority of my time hanging out with my awesome daughter.
1: Develop Rules For Making Faster Decisions
The average human makes 35,000 decisions per day. That’s one decision every two seconds.
Instead of wasting time on decisions, I instead choose to invest time into creating rules by asking myself as often as possible:
“What rule will save me from having to make this decision again”
For example:
“Should I work out or chill with the telly before bed?” → Rule: “I work out for 15 minutes after Maya goes to bed.”
“What should I have for dinner?” → Rule: “I eat what is on the meal plan”
“What shall I wear today?” → Rule: “I put out my clothes each night before bed”
“What shall I do with my free time?” → Rule: “When I have spare time I spend it on creative hobbies that nourish my soul”
2: Build Routines
Routines aren’t just for babies, you can create routines for everything. Food planning, laundry, personal grooming , self care, socialising, the list is endless.
The power of routines for productivity is two fold:
1: It helps you to establish a baseline from which to optimise. It’s really difficult to tweak and make better random chaos. But if you have a starting point for a routine or system you can tweak it to make it even more time effective.
2: Second it takes away the mental energy and stress of having to do these things on the fly. If you know that on Monday morning you create a food plan for the week and then go shopping, you don’t have to spend anytime at all in the week worrying about food.
Reduce that mental load!
3. Batch Everything!
Switching between tasks is brutal for productivity and can result in increased stress, decreased performance and huge losses of time to task switching (needing to ‘refocus’ your brain).
The solution? Batching
Batching, the art of chunking related tasks, is a well known productivity hack that can and should apply to life.
You wouldn’t wash each sock everytime it gets dirty right? That would be an insane waste of time,.
Instead you let it build up until you have enough laundry to justify the energy and time required to sort it.
That, my friend, is batching, and it’s genius.
For example, Thursday afternoons I protect 90 minutes of my time WITH MY LIFE. This is my life admin time. You know all those little annoying niggly things that come up in the week and distract you?
Things like: I really need to order more socks online, this bill needs paying, I need to call the bank.
I let them all pile up and deal with them all at once.
This protects my brain and time from task switching (a huge energy drain!) as well as removing the overwhelm of trying to remember all the tiny things I needed to get done today.
Granted there are emergencies that need our attention immediately, but truth be told these are rarities if we’re being honest. So I have one question to help me decide what to batch and what to action:
“Will anyone die or will I lose money if I wait until Thursday to sort this?”
If the answer is no, it goes on my admin list and I don’t look at it until Thursday.
4: Know What You Want in Life
Now this might seem like an odd addition for a productivity article but bear with me Brenda.
This comes back to the point above regarding protecting your mental energy from constant decision making.
Imagine getting into a car and setting off with no destination. You’d end up lost, overwhelmed and confused when it came to deciding which junction to take.
The same is equally true for life.
It’s overwhelming trying to make the right decision if we don’t know what we’re trying to achieve.
Spending time deciding what kind of life you want to live will give you the vision. This vision can then become the destination to guide every decision you make in life, because everytime you need to make one you simply ask:
Is this moving me closer to or further from my vision?
To develop your visions start to ask yourself things like:
Where do I want to be in 10 years?
What about six months?
What would I most regret not experiencing at the end of my life?
If I couldn’t fail, what would I do?What will you most regret not doing at the end of your life?
If you had 24 hours left, how would you spend it?
What does your perfect day look like? In detail please!
5: Look After Your Brain Like It’s The Most Important Thing You Own (Which It Is!)
We’re all friends here so lets be honest, we each have a set of triggers stemming from less than wonderful childhood experiences.
You’ll probably know these as: Something totally normal and painless happens and you freak the fudge out, decide everyone is going to leave you and spend two days crying convinced you’re going to die alone.
The problem with these triggers is that they are responses we adopted in childhood that we haven’t upgraded since then.
Meaning, while you might be a seemingly grown up 33 year old with an degree, a full time job and a home you manage to keep relatively clean, when you get triggered you respond exactly like the 7 year old who just got told she was ‘in the way’ for the hundredth time.
To put it bluntly: you simply cannot get stuff done in the day if you’re constantly being triggered, and as a result engaging in things like avoidance behaviours, self-sabotage, procrastination and crippling doubt.
Actively manage your mental health Karen!
How to do this is different for everyone but it could look like:
- Inner child work
- Therapy
- Getting enough sleep
- Daily exercise
- Meditation
- Creative practice
Taking a step back and doing the work is never a waste of time, in fact ensuring a mentally healthy brain is VITAL in order to being able to move forward in life.
6: Make Space
If you are constantly in ‘doing’ mode you get lost and end up with zero perspective.
This makes you forget whats important and, as a result, make poor decisions costing you time.
When Maya was first born I was so triggered by the stigma of being a single mum I became obsessed with the idea that I couldn’t ask for help or people would see me as being weak.
I spent 24 hours a day doing everything myself and caring for this tiny human. After 14 months of this I nearly collapsed with exhaustion and stress.
My dad stepped in and took Maya for 4 hours while I attended a painting class.
I came back with a totally refreshed mind and saw that actually, we didn’t need an elaborate bedtime ritual each day, I didn’t have to never let Maya watch TV or cook a full meal from scratch every time.
The problem is I was in constant ‘doing’ mode which meant I never stepped back and looked to see if the ‘doing’ was effective.
Turns out: It wasn’t.
We get so lost in the doing that we forget to step back and see if we’re doing the right thing.
Space isn’t just a ‘self care’ buzzword, it’s vital in order to come back with the perspective that lets us see what actually needs doing.
This is key to moving forward with increased efficiency.
7: Make a Damn Plan Stan
Failing to plan is planning to fail right?
If you don’t have a plan, how do you know you’re on the right track?
And if you’re not on the right track how will you get to where you want to be?
When I first started my business I got so lost wasting my days sporadically posting on Instagram, watching a webinar and DM-ing a few people but not really getting anywhere.
It wasn’t until I got serious about what I wanted to accomplish with my business that I could reverse engineer my goals into a plan.
So start with the end in mind:
What are the big life goals you want to achieve?
Then figure out what you need to get done in the next three months to get there.
Then (and this is the real trick) brainstorm, gun to your head, how you would get the done in a WEEK if you had to.
Choose the mininimum possible steps and this becomes your plan.
Planning is vital countering the aforementioned tendency to get lost in the wrong things.
It allows us to Zoom out and see the bigger picture, make informed decisions about the next right step, then zoom back in and focus on cracking on with that step.
8: Only do the Things You Absolutely Must
When I had Maya I had to accept that life wouldn’t and couldn’t carry on as normal. No more long runs and yoga sessions, no more set daily routines, no more spending hours getting lost in projects and reading.
Instead I had very reduced times as to when I could get to work and as such, how much I could do.
Interestingly these constraints brought new focus that enabled me to move forward far quicker than before.
What I found was that, in accepting that I was limited in my capacity, I had to make better choices as to how to spend the time I had. This meant cutting the fluff.
This was where I developed: The Rule of Three.
Simply put, each morning ask yourself, if I could only do three things today, what would move me forward fastest to my goals.
This rule helped me drop all the busy work and focus only on the needle movers.
I hope this helps
