5 Lazy Ways To Be Really Productive

By The Financial Diet Thursday, November 30, 2017

This post is brought to you by Trello.

Let’s face it — there are plenty of stereotypes surrounding what it means to be a “productive” person. They are tried-and-true morning people with super Type-A, booked-to-the-minute schedules. They manage to have a fully color-coded planner that you’ve somehow never seen them write in. They have enough energy to keep going, going, going, without ever burning out.

But what if we told you that being a productive person isn’t about looking busier than everybody else? The above qualities certainly aren’t bad ones, but being productive isn’t just about seeing how much you can do — it’s about setting yourself up to succeed on a daily basis, so that you can accomplish more in less time.

As you probably know from reading TFD on an even minimal basis, we believe productivity is extremely important. But we also recognize that learning how to manage your time and be productive is tricky, especially if you weren’t naturally born a “productive” person as the rest of the world sees it. When you don’t have a high level of self-discipline to start with, how do you even being to learn productivity?

To that end, we’ve covered every kind of productivity hack, from the ever-popular Pomodoro Method to how to fake being a morning person when you need to. What we’ve learned is that there’s truly no one fix-all trick that’s going to work for everyone. Even among our own team, we have completely different methods for staying productive — some of us get as much out of the way as we can in the morning, while others are true night owls when it comes to work (and showering). It’s also super important to remember that learning to be productive isn’t just about your work life (though if you can learn to take more on, that’s great!). It’s what allows you to make time for everything that matters, not just work.

And in order to do so, you need to get the right productivity tools that are going to work for you, and help you structure your life intentionally. That’s why we made this week’s video in partnership with Trello, which we’ve been using (quite successfully!) as a company for over two years. A huge part of being a productive, healthy person is knowing how to break your time up into digestible, bite-size pieces, rather than working your way through the week with no breaks in sight. Trello is a super intuitive app that allows you to break up large goals into a smaller, more manageable plan to accomplish those goals. By adding a little more structure to your work, you give yourself more freedom to complete all the things you need to do without worrying which ones to do first — which is especially helpful if you’re not an inherently organized person.

And that’s not the only way to help you get more done in less time. This week’s video covers the five simplest ways to set yourself up to succeed and get more out of your day-to-day, especially when you don’t want to be putting in tons of extra effort.