Work hard, work smart. Want to be more productive? You can maximize productivity, according to science; if you stop doing these things. 


What is working well that I need to continue doing? 
When I got opportunities to work with leading organizations and a successful career at my early age. I thought working hard will bring me success, make me more productive. As I grew older, I didn't feel the same way. I realized that hard work is not always the way to success. Sometimes, working less can give better results.

Think of the owner of a small business that works non-stop. However, working hard will not help you compete with your millions of competitors. Time is a limited comfort. An entrepreneur can operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (the most amount of time someone can work). Your competitor can always spend more money, build a bigger team and spend much more time on the same project. 
So why do new companies get things that others could not? Facebook bought Instagram, a company with 13 employees, for billions of dollars. 
Snapchat, a young company of 30 employees, is rejecting technology big deals like Facebook and Google. Part of his success was luck - the rest was a matter of effectiveness.

The key to success is not in working hard, but in working with intelligence.

There is a big difference between being busy and being productive. Being busy does not mean that you are productive. Being productive has microscopic to do with time management and much to do with managing your energy. It is the business of life. We need to learn to spend less energy to get more benefits. I am very fortunate to work with an incredible team here at Filemobile. Everyone challenges me and helps me set my priorities to be more productive. I learned to reduce my workday from 80 hours to 40 and to get a lot more work done in the process. In other words, less is more.

These are the 7 things I stopped doing to be more productive.

If you want to become more productive, you must eliminate your bad habits first, then try these below mention methods. 

1. Stop overtime and increase your productivity.

Have you ever wondered where the 4 o'clock weekly comes from? In 1926, Henry Ford, American industrialist and founder of the car brand company Ford Motor Company conducted experiments with impressive results: When you reduce your daily work hours from 10 to 8 and reduce your weekly schedule by 6 to 5 days, Your productivity increases.

The more you work, the less efficient and productive you will be both short and long term. "Working overtime has consequences for building projects," says a report from The Business Roundtable in 1980.

"While a 60 hour or more weekly work schedule is longer than two months, the cumulative effect of reduced productivity will result in a delay in the completion date that could have been successfully achieved with the same staff on a schedule Weekly of 4o hours ".

In an article for AlterNet, publisher Sara Robinson cited an investigation led by the US military that revealed that "losing one hour of sleep per night for one week causes a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 10 milligrams". You may be kicked out of work because you are drunk, but it is perfectly acceptable to come without sleep all night.

"Regardless of how good you are to get along the day after that night without hardly having slept, it is very unlikely that you will feel especially excited and happy. Your more negative outlook than usual will result from a low mood, which is an obvious consequence of being tired. More important than encouragement, this attitude is usually accompanied by a less willingness to think and act in a dynamic way, to control impulses, to feel positive with oneself, to empathize with others, and to use emotional intelligence generally."

It is important not to overwork and sleep well to maintain a high level of productivity. The next time you ask yourself why you are not working productively, the reason can be as simple as being one of that 70 % of people who do not get enough sleep.
Also read: 10 Powerful Benefits Of Spending Time Alone

Did you know?

• Leonardo da Vinci slept a lot of naps during the day and slept less at night.
• The French Emperor, Napoleon, was not deprived of his naps. He consented every day.
• Although Thomas Edison was a bit embarrassed by his habit of sleeping during the day, he practiced his ritual every day.
• Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, used to increase her energy by sleeping before her speeches.
• Gene Autry, "the Singing Cowboy," always slept in his dressing room between each performance.
• President John F. Kennedy had lunch every day in his bed and then slept, every day !.
• The oil-and-philanthropist John D. Rockefeller slept every afternoon in his office.
• Winston Churchill's naps were not negotiable. I thought they helped him do double every day.
• President Lyndon B. Johnson slept every afternoon at 3:30 to divide his days into "two shifts."
• Although criticized for this, President Ronald Reagan also slept during the day.

Personally, since I started sleeping 8 hours instead of 7, I noticed a change: it was more productive and did much more work than when I worked 16 hours a day. Who knew sleeping was such a valuable tool for salesmen?

2. Do not say "yes" very often

According to the Pareto principle, 20% of the effort produces 80% of the results; However, 20% of the results consumed 80% of the energy. Instead of working hard, we should focus on those efforts that produce 80% of the results and give up the rest. We will have more time to concentrate on important tasks. We have to stop saying "yes" to the tasks that bring us low or no results.

"The difference between successful people and very successful people is that the latter say" no "to almost everything» - Warren Buffet.

This raises a question: what should we say "yes" and "no"? If you can not know if something is going to be worth your time, you can consider doing a discarded test. Take a look at everything you do and optimize if possible.

Many of us say yes more than we should because it is so much easier than saying no. Nobody wants to be the bad boy.

In a 2012 study in the Journal of Consumer, Research researchers divided 120 students into 2 groups. One group was taught to say 'I can not,' and the other to say 'no.' The results were impressive:

Students who said to themselves, "I can not eat X," chose to eat a chocolate bar 61% of the time. However, students who said "not as X" chose to eat chocolates only 36% of the time. This simple change in terminology significantly improved the odds that each person would make a healthier food choice.

Next time you want to avoid saying yes, say no.

Another great trick to avoid activities that do not give much value to your life is the rule of 20 seconds: date 20 seconds more for activities you should not be doing.

Decrease energy activation for the habits you want to adopt and increase it for those you want to avoid. The more we can reduce or eliminate the activation of energy for what we want to do, the more we can improve our ability to start a positive change.

Also read: 12 Ways to Improve Your Time Management Skills 

3. Stop doing everything you do and let people help you

At one point in my career, I was taking care of a large community, and I felt I could not do everything. I was trying to do everything myself. I was exhausted, but the city eventually took over and controlled itself. Surprisingly, the members managed to do a better job than I did. I learned the power of the community and why brands need content generated by users.

Consumers know what they want and how they want it better than any seller. Did you know that, according to Octoly, the videos generated by users are 10 times more YouTube than videos created by the brands themselves? When it comes to searching for information about a brand, about half of Americans (51%) rely more on content generated by users than on brand website content (16%) or the media impact of The brand (14%). It is important for marketers to open up and seek help in the brand community.

Being a great content marketer does not mean creating the best content, if not being able to build a great community that can create great content for you.

It is important that we realize that we can seek help when we need it. We can not do it all alone. It's better for you to let someone who can do a better job, take some of your chores. It will give you more time to focus on the most important tasks. Instead of wasting time trying to figure out something, let the experts help you.

Many times, even when your friends can not help you, having them next to you can help you be more productive.

Just having friends around can propel you to being more productive. "There is a concept in the treatment of ADHD called" double, "says Dr. David Nowel, a clinical neuropsychologist in Worcester, Mass. "People who are distracted easily do much more when they are accompanied, even when that person is not preparing or helping them." If you are on a task that is tedious or confusing, like cleaning your wardrobe or putting together all the tax receipts, ask a friend to help you and be your double.
Also read: 8 Mistakes Even Professional Content Writers Make

4. Stop being a perfectionist

"We find that perfectionism stumbles teachers on their way to productivity research. The more perfectionist the teacher is, the less productive he is, "says Dr. Simon Sherry, a professor of psychology at Dalhousie University, who conducted a study on perfectionism and productivity, to University Affairs magazine. Dr. Sherry found a close relationship between increased perfectionism and diminished productivity.

Here are some of the problems associated with being a perfectionist:

• They spend more time than necessary on an activity.
• They postpone and wait for the ideal moment. In business, if it's a perfect time, you're already late.
• They lose the big by focusing on small things.
• Sellers always wait for the perfect moment. Meanwhile, they always run away.

The perfect time is NOW.

5. Stop doing repetitive tasks and start automating them

According to a research study conducted by Tethys Solutions, a team of 5 people who spent 3%, 20%, 25%, 30% and 70% of their time. On repetitive tasks reduced that time to 3%, 10 %, 15%, 15% and 10% after two months improving their productivity.

A week ago I spent 15 minutes writing a basic Python program. The idea was to generate information content, which I borrowed from the Twitter API using a Ruby bot, and use Hootsuite to process them into packages. What took me a whole day, now it takes less than 5 minutes. Today, when I see that I am doing the same thing over and over again (more than 5 times), I wonder if there is a program that can do it for me.

You do not need to be a programmer to automate your repetitive tasks. It's great to have the skills or resources, but it's not a requirement. If you can not build it, buy it.

People often forget that time is money. They usually do things manually because it is easy and hardly requires you to investigate. Of course, it is possible to moderate 30 images in Instagram for your user-generated campaign, but if you had to handle 30,000 photos and videos from 5 different platforms, you would need good asset management software. In Filemobile, we help people solve that problem, and by doing so, we even create more user-generated content. It's like controlling rich media content; You can easily buy software to solve all problems on the Internet.

If you still can not find a solution, you can hire an expert to help you. Keep in mind that you have to spend money to make money and that time is the comfort that most value has.

6. Stop asking yourself and start backing up your decisions with data

If you can optimize websites for search engines, you can optimize your life to grow and reach your full potential.

Many research studies can provide answers in different areas. For example, did you know that most people are more easily distracted from noon to 4 in the afternoon? This random statistic comes from a recent study conducted by Robert Matchock, an associate professor of psychology at Pennsylvania State University. Even if you can not find the data you need, it will not take you long to do a test to decide.

For example, last week we did a couple of tests to discover the best way to optimize images for preview in the Twitter stream.

Keep asking yourself how you are going to measure and optimize everything you do.

P.S. Thanks for reading. If you think this article is worth it, I would appreciate it if you click on the Recommend button.