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When you think about it, the 5 hour rule is nothing complicated to remember and practice:
The Five Hour Rule is based on spending just one (1) hour a day experimenting, learning, or generating creative ideas every weekday. It’s one of the best investments you’ll ever make toward your personal growth.
It’s tough competing in today’s online and completely remote business world. Almost all of us feel like we have to work 24/7 – otherwise we are simply not being productive. A completely irrational thought invades our heads and causes anxiety: If I take a break now even for a tiny bit, I am missing all the huge opportunities and income to my competition.
You will hear a lot of people complaining that it’s often impossible to find time to grow and learn. But, is it?
The successful people are those who have managed to find the balance between the work life and the private life – without sacrificing neither of them.
If you’ve been struggling to be productive throughout your life, you’ve probably picked up some bad habits that are limiting your ability to produce.
It may seem practically impossible to achieve the levels of productivity that you desire because of the bad habits you’re having a difficult time breaking.
With that said, we’ll take a look at some of the most common bad productivity habits today. Because identifying them is the first step in figuring out where you can improve.
Once you’ve learned more about your weak points, you’ll be able to reverse the curse and begin developing positive habits that will help you improve your productivity levels tremendously.
Bad Productivity Habit #1: Failure to Keep Track of Your Productivity throughout the Day
First and foremost, it’s going to be nearly impossible to determine when you are at your most productive if you aren’t tracking everything you do throughout the day.
As an example, if you’re working on a particular project and you need to track the hours for billing purposes, you’ll be able to use an online time clock like Clockspot to keep track of everything.
Not only will this tracker help you with billing, but it will also help you determine when you’re being your most productive and when you’re being your least productive during a project.
By examining this information, you’ll be able to discover what you were doing during your least productive hours. And then you can use this info to avoid making the same mistakes the next time you have to work on a similar project.
Bad Productivity Habit #2: You Are Easily Distracted
For many of us, we have a tendency to waste hours of our time during the day on social media websites, video sharing sites, our favorite crowdfunding site, or our favorite blogs and news sites to name a few examples.
If you absolutely know that you are going to go down the rabbit hole of distraction when looking at these websites, then it’s imperative that you avoid these sites like the plague when important work needs to be done.
Some people like to use apps to block certain websites that they frequent the most during their least productive times.
If you suffer from this problem, you may want to look into software that will prevent you from visiting your favorite websites at times that are least convenient for you.
To help you get started, a few highly rated options include Freedom, Rescue Time, WriteRoom or Dark Room, and Anti-Social.
Bad Productivity Habit #3: Reading Email & Text Messages at Inappropriate Times
At this point, it’s nearly impossible to get away from our smart devices.
We have dozens or even hundreds of calls and text messages coming at us every day, and it’s a minefield that people are having a difficult time navigating.
You have to get tough on email and text messages. And most important of all, you have to get tough on yourself and learn to act in a disciplined manner.
It’s important to learn this discipline not only to increase your productivity, but also to be prepared for some unexpected situations, where you will be left with no choice. Let’s say, your iPhone needs to be repaired. You cannot start panicking, and going on impulse shopping for a new one if it can be repaired. To avoid that stress completely, learn to control your cell phone usage.
So, if you have something important that you have to get done during the day, do your best to shut down your phone and email. And if you cannot shut them down completely, avoid answering calls and text messages unless it’s from somebody that has something really important to say.
Conclusion
It’s really easy not to be productive. As you have learned, we have developed some really bad productivity habits. Use this guide to break the cycle today and watch your productivity numbers soar.
Here’s another article on how to be more productive using automation tools.
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