Small, non-daily practices that will help you smash your big productivity goals this year

Now is around that time of year when your resolutions begin to fall flat. Maybe yours already has. And this is OK.

It takes more than patience, willpower, and raw energy to achieve your wildest dreams without burning out. And productivity is one hell of a drug!

Read also: 4 habits of emotionally intelligent people (must read)

Here’s how to supercharge your productivity with these 3 minimalist habits that’ll help guarantee more balance and flow in your work:

1 — Only upgrade your gear once you’ve completely exhausted it

Marie Kondo explores the concept of “noise” in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up as the amount of information that space can hold.

She details this through the practice of removing unnecessary labels and pieces of readable information that lounge about our spaces.

These labels feed our brains with useless information. Noise that clutters the mind.

My theory takes this concept a step further.

There is no need to buy replacement things unless your old things have been completely exhausted. Of no further use.
The only time I invest in new things is when purchasing a piece of equipment I don’t have any equivalent to. This way, I only ever buy one of something, like an electric guitar or a suitcase. When a new need arises, I’ll buy something to fit that need.
With these two tenets in mind, you can save space in your home. Decreasing the physical clutter helps lower your stress about any associations you have with that item.

If you bought too many clocks, you’d be more worried about how you spend your time.

If you bought too many books, you’d eventually have bookshelves full of stories you already know. Or full of a daunting amount of unread stories.

Minimalism is about being mindful of the items you choose to surround yourself with.

Make sure you surround yourself with purely useful items that will help you focus on the things you enjoy, while not distracting you from other priorities.

2 — Perform regular digital decluttering and organization sessions

My phone’s storage has been full for a while. It’s old, chipped, and very quickly losing its functionality. I barely use it.

My PC, however, has a few terabytes of storage left. Plenty of room. It’s relatively shiny, relatively new, and is maintained through a series of low-effort habits I’ve built. I use it for most hours on most days.

It’s vitally important that we clean our physical and digital spaces.

I used to believe that cleaning should only be done after a space has reached a critical mass.

Full storage. Dishes to be washed. Eek!

A terrible threshold that causes more stress than necessary.

A simple practice of digital decluttering fixes everything.

Every few weeks, you should delete unnecessary files from your download folder.
Then do the same on Google Drive, focusing on higher ticket (denser files) files first.
At the end of each day, close all your tabs. So satisfying. I’ve found it makes for a refreshing experience the following morning when I return to my PC.
Building a habit of deleting unnecessary files preserves the longevity of your machines, while also giving you the peace of mind that they’ll continue to perform for you the following day.

Bonus tip: toward the end of the day, I turn off my second monitor. This not only signals to my brain that it’s time to wind down, but it also appeals to Kondo’s sense of letting used items rest after they’ve done their job for the day.

Read also: 5 simple ways to improve your morning routine (highly recommended)

3 — Prioritize time, not tasks

In the world of artistic creation, it’s best practice to allow yourself double the time you’d think it would take to finish something.

I’ve found this to be true in every project I’ve ever worked on.

When you schedule things for your day, you most likely do it by task.

Meetings, personal work, a weekend dinner with old friends. The whole nine.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t account for the life factor.

What can normally be an hour-long meeting might take two after working out connectivity issues with your co-workers.

A flow state might pull you into your work from day to night, regardless of your intention to do so.

By instead chunking time to perform a variety of tasks, you allow room for every one of life’s inevitable hitches, snags, and snafus it can throw at you.

Realistically, you might set aside an afternoon to catch up with an old friend and find time to work on the video game you’re developing.

Having a chunk of time helps take the pressure off needing to perform a task by a specific time.

And I realize that this chunking is not an option in every working condition. Bosses and deadlines.

But in the aspects of our lives that we have more control over, like our relationships and our hobbies, chunking time provides us with the leeway to play within that space. And freely wander between our tasks.

Keeping our own pace gives us room to practice, make errors, and learn from them while decreasing the stress that even self-prescribed deadlines can create.

And when productivity becomes a playground, we become truly limitless.

Contributed by Justin Boyette

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