Many students reach out to me about how they struggle to get things done and struggle to maintain consistency with Qur'ān memorisation. For this reason, I thought it would be beneficial to put together a list of productivity systems and productivity tips that can help you.
I have shared other advice previously, so do check them out too.
10 Top Productivity Systems
We all know that time is our most valuable resource, and that's why having a solid productivity system in place is key to our success. Productivity systems are a set of tools, techniques, and practices that help us manage our time and get more done in less time.
From the Pomodoro Technique to the Eisenhower Matrix, there's a productivity system out there for everyone, regardless of their work style or personal preferences. They can help you with your tasks, staying focused, and ultimately achieve your goals faster.
I suggest you take a browse through and if you find something that seems suitable for you, dive further into that system.
1. Getting Things Done (GTD)
Getting Things Done (GTD) is a popular task management system created by productivity consultant David Allen. The methodology is based on the idea that the more information bouncing around inside one's head, the harder it is to decide what needs attention.
The key principles of the GTD method are:
- Capturing: Write down all tasks, ideas, and thoughts as soon as they come to mind in a central location, such as a notebook or task management app, to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
- Clarifying: Evaluate each item on your list to determine what action is required and what the next step is.
- Organising: Sort tasks into categories based on context, such as "errands to run" or "calls to make." You can also use tools like the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks based on their level of urgency and importance.
- Reflecting: Regularly review your lists to ensure you are staying on top of your tasks and making progress towards your goals.
- Engaging: Take action on your tasks, working through your lists and checking items off as you complete them.
- Improving: Continuously refine and adjust your system to make it more efficient and effective over time.
The major downside is that GTD is complex. It has more of a learning curve than most other productivity systems, and its rigidity won't appeal to those who like more flexible frameworks. GTD could be adapted to help memorise the Qur'ān effectively by breaking down the process into smaller, manageable tasks.
2. The Pomodoro Technique
Some like to call this The Five Minute Rule or Time Blocking but the Pomodoro Technique is a time management method developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The core concept of the Pomodoro Technique is to work for a focused, uninterrupted 25-minute interval, known as a "pomodoro," and then take a short break. This process is repeated several times, with longer breaks taken after every four "pomodoros."
It uses a timer to break work into intervals, typically 25 minutes of focused work followed by five-minute breaks. After four consecutive work intervals, longer breaks are taken, usually 15 to 30 minutes. The goal of the technique is to reduce the effect of internal and external interruptions on focus and flow.The Pomodoro Technique has been found to be effective for productivity as it helps people resist self-interruptions and re-train their brains to focus. It also encourages consistency rather than perfection, allowing for fresh starts with each session and motivating users to build on their successes by setting goals such as adding an extra pomodoro each day or finishing a big task in a set number of pomodoros.
3. The Ivy Lee Method
The Ivy Lee Method is a simple and effective productivity strategy developed by business consultant Ivy Lee in 1918. It involves creating a list of up to six important tasks for the day, ranking them from most to least important, and then completing each task in that order. This method encourages focus on one task at a time and discourages multitasking. Additionally, it helps prioritise tasks so that the most important ones are completed first.
4. The 2 Minute Rule
The two-minute rule is a strategy designed to help people stop procrastinating and stick to good habits. It states that if an action can be completed in two minutes or less, it should be done immediately. This strategy was popularised by author and productivity consultant David Allen, who has his own version of the two-minute rule which states "If it takes less than two minutes, then do it now".
The two-minute rule can be applied to nearly any habit, such as meditating for one minute, reading one page or putting one item of clothing away. It is effective because once you start doing the right thing, it becomes much easier to continue. However, it is important to note that the two-minute rule should only be used during processing time and should only be related to the task at hand. Additionally, if the two-minute rule feels forced, try doing it for two minutes and then stopping.
If a task can be done in less than 2 minutes, don’t write it down or put it into a system
or discuss it or think about it… just do it. Of course if you have a more important,
more urgent job at that same moment, that one will win. But in general we often
procrastinate or feel overwhelmed when sometimes it’s better to just get on with
some small tasks, build momentum, clear the clutter and gain a degree of control. This
works very well for full inboxes, and tends to be more effective when it’s not mixed
with longer tasks. Devote 30 minutes to getting 2-minute jobs done and you will have
completed 15 (at least!)
5. Zen to Done System (ZTD)
The Zen to Done System (or ZTD) is a habit optimisation system developed by Leo Babauta. It's based on the GTD method, but designed to appeal to those who want a comprehensive system that's holistic and personalised, not rigid and rules-based like GTD.
ZTD asks users to collect all their tasks and ideas, similar to GTD, but to do so in a portable tool, like a small notebook. Then, there are habits that users are encouraged to adopt:
- Making decisions on tasks quickly, rather than putting them off.
- Choosing 1-3 major goals for each week and day, and accomplishing those first to ensure they get done.
- Focusing on one task at a time without distractions.
It's important to note that ZTD isn't a task management system so much as it's a framework designed to promote personal growth and changing habits. If you want to stay productive by building good habits and growing holistically, ZTD might be the system for you.
6. Don't Break The Chain
The method encourages you to focus on completing your daily habit and adding one more day to your streak. It is particularly helpful for those who struggle with forming habits. The technique involves four steps:
- setting a goal to adopt a good habit
- making sure the goal is specific and realistic
- tracking progress with an X each day
- and not breaking the chain of X's
This method works because it makes you focus on the process rather than results, helping you form long-lasting habits. You are supposed to set a goal of keeping the streak for 66 days to make sure the new habit has become part of your lifestyle. If you break the chain, you should get back on track by focusing on why you wanted to form the habit in the first place.
There are multiple tools available online that can help you implement this method such as Chain Calendar and Don't Break The Chain which require signup to track habits online.
7. Most Important Task (MIT)
A Most Important Task (MIT) is a single task with an assigned due date that will take no more than one day to complete. It is a critical task that will create the most important results you're looking to achieve. You ask yourself a question: “What are the most 2-3 important things that I need to do today? What are the things that—if I got them done—would make today a success?”.
The best way to ensure that your MITs get done first is to tackle them early in the morning. This way, you can have the rest of the day by yourself doing whatever you want to. It is important not to treat everything on your task list equally and focus on getting your MITs done as soon as possible.
This productivity system is ideal for maintaining a sharp focus on what's most critical and making steady progress with your most vital work. Nevertheless, it entails a continuous need to prioritise as new tasks are continually added to your to-do list. For individuals who find prioritisation more challenging than focus, this system may not prove as effective.
8. The Eisenhower Decision Matrix
The Eisenhower Matrix, also known as the Eisenhower Decision Matrix, is a prioritisation tool that helps you determine which tasks you should focus on based on their urgency and importance. The matrix is divided into four quadrants:
- Urgent and Important: Tasks in this quadrant are considered both urgent and important and should be dealt with immediately.
- Important but Not Urgent: Tasks in this quadrant are important but not urgent, and should be scheduled and worked on proactively.
- Urgent but Not Important: Tasks in this quadrant are urgent but not important, and can often be delegated or postponed.
- Neither Urgent nor Important: Tasks in this quadrant are neither urgent nor important and can often be eliminated.
9. Calendar blocking, time blocking or batching
Calendar blocking is a time management system beloved by productivity experts for its structure and accountability. It involves creating blocks of time within your calendar and assigning tasks to them. Eventually, your entire day should be scheduled, with dedicated time planned out for every task on your to-do list, as well as meetings, breaks, and personal responsibilities. It can be combined with other techniques such as task batching and day theming.
Calendar blocking is a great way to make sure you dedicate time to every task you need to get done each day. It's likely to work well for people who have trouble staying focused on their to-dos and stay busy all day, without ever feeling truly productive.
But a potential downside to calendar blocking is that its rigidity doesn't allow for spontaneity. If you're likely to have urgent, but unexpected, tasks come up throughout the day, calendar blocking may hinder you more than it helps.
10. Bullet Journaling Method
The Bullet Journal Method is a system of personal organisation developed by designer Ryder Carroll. It is an analog system that combines a calendar, task manager, and notebook into one organised system for planning, taking notes, and getting work done. The method requires only a pen or pencil and a notebook (though many users are more elaborate).
The Bullet Journal Method was created to provide a framework for users to plan out their lives and increase productivity. It is flexible and allows users to customise the system to fit their needs. The method has become popular among students as it can help them succeed in all levels of school.
The Bullet Journal Method has been described as a mindfulness practice disguised as a productivity system, and Carroll's book on the subject, The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future, provides an essential guide to using the method. To get started with a bullet journal, all you need is a dot grid notebook and no-bleed pen. You can use your bullet journal as a calendar, to-do list, goal-tracker, diary or any combination of these things. As many uses as there are for the bullet journal, there are 10 times as many ways to customise it to fit your needs.
Top 100 Most Useful Productivity Tips
There's a resource that I found that puts together 100 productivity tips together that cover 100 frequently cited tips. These cover things from admin, distractions, email, environment, goals, meetings, time management and wellbeing.
I mention them here for you too.
Time-boxing will improve your life
At the core it’s simple: assign a fixed period of time to a task, schedule it and stick to it. It works because it touches on so many aspects of behaviour: single-tasking and focus to achieve more and feel less stressed, prioritising work to observe deadlines, frequent feelings of accomplishment, and being transparent so people can see what you’re doing and help. The tricky bit is chunking the tasks and estimating how long they’ll take, but this skill improves rapidly with practice. Key to this is time-boxing into a shared calendar and taking commutes, meetings, and other commitments into account.
Prioritise
The modern worker has a thousand things to do at any one time. These should be ruthlessly and methodically prioritised. Otherwise you’ll consistently add less value at work. Find ways to avoid being distracted by tasks that jump to the front of the queue like email and alerts (see below). You also need a system for prioritising tasks – a simple one will do, and will always be better than none. So list out the tasks you have and, whether it’s a score out of 10 or colour coding, do it and stick to it.
Say NO!
Stop trying to please everyone! It’s much easier said than done, we know, but by overloading yourself with work, not only do you risk being unable to complete tasks and meet deadlines – the quality of ALL of your work is affected. Sometimes it’s best to politely decline so that you can focus on the most important work. If you do it right, colleagues will understand and respect you for it.
Move
Moving does a lot for you. It gets the blood flowing round your body, can break you out of that daydream and helps stir creative thoughts. It’s good for you and the perfect tonic to our desk-bound lives. Try a wearable that alerts you when you’ve been inactive for too long. Or take a walk for that call, or even that meeting.
Control your devices
Don’t let them control you. We check our phones between 150-221 times a day, depending on which study you’re reading. Even having your phone in sight, without touching it, has been shown to reduce performance in tests, according to a study at the University of Southern Maine. Clear your desk of distracting devices and see how much more you get done, with fewer distractions.
Take short breaks
Building regular, short breaks into working time increases focus and productivity,
studies have shown. One popular way to implement this is the Pomodoro Technique,
named for the tomato-shaped timer used by the method’s creator, Francesco Cirillo.
You use the timer to break work up into short periods, usually 25 minutes, with regular
micro-breaks of around 5 minutes. Play around to find what timings suit you best.
To-Do Lists
To-do lists are fundamental. They aren’t a complete solution to time management
(time-boxing takes the idea further) but they are essential. Think of a typical day:
we’re rushing around from meeting to email to work conversation to conference call,
picking up countless tasks along the way. We need to log these tasks somewhere and
then ensure that we action them when we finally get a moment of calm. For a lot of
people, the next steps are to prioritise them and then schedule them. But it starts with
to-do lists.
Eat Well
Loading up on sweets and crisps won’t sustain you over hours of hard work, and will almost certainly result in a crash. This is particularly harmful to productivity as your brain burns more glucose when trying to exert self-control. Eating foods that slowly release energy over time is better for your health and productivity. Think unprocessed, whole foods and a lunch with a balance of protein, veg, fat and carbs.
Control Social Media
Taking a sneak peek at what your friends are up to on Facebook during the working
day is common. But social media can be a toxic distraction. One click of a photo can
quickly escalate to 20 and unthinkingly uploading content can get you into trouble.
Take control, don’t let social media control you. Schedule “social media time” into your
calendar for 5 minutes twice a day. By setting aside time to check social media, you can
limit its impact on your day.
Choose when to check email
Every time we get a ping indicating a new email, comment, or notification of any
sort, our brains get a dopamine hit. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter responsible
for feelings of reward and pleasure, and it can get addictive. This is why it’s so easy
to succumb to constantly checking your emails, as each new message, however
mundane, releases dopamine, at the cost of productivity. Combat this by scheduling
set times to check emails, and allocate other times to producing your best work.
Organise your workspace
And keep it organised. Spending several minutes excavating the detritus on your desk as you frantically try to find a document is not a good use of your time. Keeping an orderly work space will make you more efficient and calm and exude an aura of control. A self-imposed clean desk policy is a good place to start.
Start Earlier
Not easy, but simple and effective. High performers are often also early risers. Whether it’s to fit in a morning workout or an extra hour of distraction-free work, getting up early means you literally get a head start in the day on almost everyone else.
Breathe
With increasing workloads, varied work, colleagues in multiple timezones and devices
pinging all around us, it’s no wonder we’re a more stressed workforce than any before.
We need simple ways to decompress. Breathing is the simplest. If you feel your mind
buzzing with too many things and it’s spinning out of control… focus on your breath
and try to slow your breathing down a little. Just 90 seconds can be enough to get
you out of the cycle of automatic negative responses and the resulting physiological
reactions. Better still, find 10-15 minutes a day to meditate. Amongst many other
things, meditation helps us to gain better control of our mental meanderings and leads
to happier, more useful and more productive thoughts. Try the Headspace app.
Turn off alerts or notifications
Alerts alert. That means they get your attention. That means they take your attention
from whatever it was you were doing. That’s fine if the alert really is important and
urgent. But for most of us, most of the time, it’s not. The thing we were doing is more
important. So mute alerts, pause them, go into airplane mode. This is about reclaiming
control of where your attention goes, and applies to email, Whatsapp, Slack, Skype,
internal messaging services – everything. Going full-screen (F11 on a PC or ^ + ⌘ + F on
a Mac) is a fast, effective way of muting alerts. Another way is to change your status to
‘Do not disturb’ on your various communications platforms.
Shorter meetings
The Babylonians created the concept we now call an “hour”, though they probably
didn’t have 21st century business meetings in mind at the time. An hour is a nice,
round number but that’s about all it has going for it as a universal time allocation
for gatherings. Parkinson’s Law says “work expands to fill the time available for its
completion” so if we set aside an hour for every meeting, the meeting will take that
time, though we won’t necessarily get more done than if we had allocated it less time.
So the advice is to either vary meeting length depending on the agenda (and of course
sometimes 60 minutes will be right!) or to universally apply a shorter time, e.g. 30 or 45
minutes. This forces everyone to get the most out of the time you have.
Site blockers
Why expend precious energy on exercising self-control, when you can simply remove
all temptation? There are numerous programs available to block access to your most
distracting websites for set periods of time, for all operating systems and browsers.
Install and activate these when working to free yourself of the burden of choice.
Use productivity tools
Tech might be responsible for the majority of our distractions, but it can also be
harnessed for greater productivity. There are a whole host of apps, tools and programs
out there that can make your life easier and more efficient, whether it be syncing your
social media posts or reducing the blue light from your screen at night to improve sleep
quality. Invest some time in getting the hang of a carefully-selected few, and enjoy a
productivity boost.
Plan ahead
Sounds like a no-brainer. We all know that proper planning helps us make better use of
our time. So plan ahead. At the beginning of each week, work out the non-negotiables
(meetings, deadlines, etc.) then schedule the remaining tasks around them. By creating
a scheduled agenda of your activities (try an app like Spark Notebook) you will be more
likely to follow through with each task and less likely to procrastinate.
Single tasking
Do one thing at a time. Do NOT multitask. This is very difficult. Even if you minimise
distractions from devices, tech etc, there are still your dear colleagues who may
approach you. And even if you can isolate yourself from them, there are still the
swirling thoughts in your mind! You’re writing a report, but your brain keeps reminding
you of that task your boss gave you before lunch and that just triggered a series of
thoughts about your last review…aaaggghhh!!! It happens to all of us, so don’t beat
yourself up too much when you get distracted. Just always be clear about what single
task you are supposed to be doing (e.g. have it written somewhere) so you can get back
to it as quickly as possible post-distraction.
That's the first 20. You can read the rest in this wonderful PDF.
May Allāh grant us productive use of our time.
2 - Like and share!
