How To Plan Your Day For Maximum Productivity

In this post, I’d like to share with you my best ideas on how to plan your day for maximum productivity.

During the industrial revolution, the eight-hour workday was created to cut down on the number of hours that workers had to do hard manual labor on the factory floor.

This breakthrough was a more humane way of doing things 200 years ago, but it doesn’t have much to do with us now.

We’re expected to work eight-hour days like our ancestors did, in long, continuous blocks of time with few or no breaks.

Even during lunch, most people continue to work.

This old way of doing things doesn’t help us, it holds us back.

How to best plan out your day

The computer program was used in a recent study by the Draugiem Group to keep track of how employees did their jobs.

In particular, the app tracked how long people spent on different tasks and compared that to how productive they were.

In the process of figuring out how people spend their time, they made an interesting discovery:

How people planned their days was more important than how long their workdays were.

People who took short breaks religiously were much more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The best way to do it was to work for 52 minutes and then rest for 17 minutes.

People who stuck to this schedule did their work with a unique level of focus. For about an hour at a time, they gave their full attention to the task they had to do.

They don’t “quickly” check Facebook or let emails get in the way. When they were tired (again, after about an hour), they rested, which was a time when they had nothing to do with their jobs.

This gave them a chance to rest and get ready to work for another hour.

For More Tips On How To Plan a Productive Day, check out this article.

Your brain needs an hour of work and 15 minutes of rest.

People who have found this magic number have a huge advantage over their competitors because they are meeting a basic need of the human mind:

The brain works in bursts of high energy that last about an hour and then bursts of low energy (15 to 20 minutes).

These natural ups and downs mean that most of us have times when we are very focused, followed by times when we are tired and give in to distractions.

The best way to beat tiredness and annoying distractions is to plan your day on purpose.

Instead of working for an hour or more and then trying to fight through distractions and tiredness when your energy starts to drop, take this as a sign that it’s time to take a break.

When you know that a real break will help you get more done, it’s easier to take one.

We often let fatigue win because we keep working through it (long after we’ve lost motivation and focus) and our breaks aren’t really relaxing (checking your email and watching YouTube doesn’t give you the same boost as going for a walk).

Take charge of your day on the job.

You can be healthy even if you work eight hours a day if you break up your time in smart ways.

Once your natural energy and your work are in sync, things start to go a lot smoother. Here are four tips to help you find the right rhythm:

Split your day into hourly chunks

We usually plan what we need to do by the end of the day, week, or month, but we’re much more productive when we focus on what we can do right now.

Planning your day around hour-long intervals helps you get into a good rhythm and breaks up big tasks into smaller, easier-to-handle pieces.

If you want to be literal, you can plan your day around 52-minute intervals, but an hour works just as well.

Honor Your Time

The interval strategy only works because we use our highest levels of energy to concentrate very hard for a short amount of time. When you don’t respect your hours by texting, checking your email, or quickly looking at Facebook, you defeat the whole point of the method.

Take a Real Rest

In the Draugiem study, they found that workers who took breaks more often than every hour were more productive than those who didn’t take any breaks at all.

In the same way, people who took breaks to relax were better off than those who had trouble putting their work aside when they were “resting.”

To be more productive, you need to get away from your computer, your phone, and your list of things to do.

The best ways to recharge are to take a break from your work and do something like a walk, read, or talk with someone.

During a busy day, it may be tempting to think that answering emails or making phone calls are breaks. They aren’t, though, so don’t let yourself think that way.

Don’t take a break when your body tells you to.

If you wait until you’re tired before taking a break, you’ve already missed your most productive time.

If you stick to your schedule, you’ll work when you’re the most energized and rest when you wouldn’t get much done otherwise.

Don’t forget that it’s much better to take short breaks than to keep working when you’re tired or distracted.

When you divide your day into chunks of work and rest that match your natural energy levels, you feel good, your day goes by faster, and you get more done.