You Can Become Highly Productive by Taking These Steps

My biggest weakness was low productivity. So I used to look for the ways and motivation to improve myself and achieve high productivity.

But it was all in vain. Why?

Because reading about productivity tips yields no results until you work through the root causes and take actions.

When I chose writing as a career, I was hardly able to write a 500 words article a day. Not only because I was new and had no words and ideas on what to write, but also because of the distractions and habits of multi-tasking and procrastination.

Then one day I came across an answer on Quora where many writers claimed that they were able to write 3000 to 5000 words a day. That too with an excellent quality in an easy-to-read and interesting style.

It hard-struck my mind.

There were many questions in my mind like;

    Why can’t I write 3000 words a day?
    How can I write 3000 words that people like to read?
    What is stopping me to reach this level?

Do you also have such questions and are trying to overcome low productivity? Millions of people are facing the same problem and looking for concrete ways to overcome it.

So what did I do to overcome it?

Here are the ways.

Monitor your activities for a month

There are many apps and online tools available which you can install on your mobile phone and computer. Read about 10 Powerful Tools for Productivity Boost.

For example RescueTime. It’s a time management software and will help you monitor your activities. It provides you with a report of how productive you were during the past week. So you can know your productive and unproductive hours.

By the end of the month, you should be very clear on which activities are useful and which are wasting your time. So now it’s time to take action.

Take a bold action and remove unproductive activities

Once you are clear about what is wasting your time, you have to remove it from your daily routine. They can be useless subscriptions, games, chatting apps, unnecessary reading, social media, YouTube videos etc.

Be clear about your goal and desired results. It can be your personal project, your job-related tasks, your business or profession. Write down the activities that will help you achieve your goal and desired results. Any other activity can be considered unproductive.

If you can’t remove all those time-wasting activities at once, set half an hour of the day for them and don’t look at them except that time. Get rid of useless notifications and emails by uninstalling useless apps and disconnecting your mobile internet when you are working.

Read more about what is stopping you from being productive in this article.

Being busy does not mean you are productive

After having a report on your productivity for the past month, you would be having a list of unproductive activities. But it doesn’t mean that you will be highly productive by removing them.

By removing them, you will be busy doing what you should be doing. But still, it may be difficult to achieve the top level productivity. There are some mental and physical hurdles that can keep you from being highly productive.

They are;

Too much Perfectionism

Imagine you are writing an article. You are new, but want your article to be the one written by a seasoned writer. So you keep writing and rewriting to make it polished and perfect, but never publish it.

Task done with fair quality is better than never done. But a lot of people fail in getting things done because they want to do them perfectly.

Though perfectionism brings excellent results in some areas like art and craft, it’s not advisable in business and other fields. This is because it may become the main reason for low productivity, high cost and financial loses.

So being busy all the time for a task may, in fact, lower your productivity if you run after the perfection instead of timely completion.

Get rid of this habit and you will see the boost in your productivity.

Not knowing the correct procedure of doing a task

Being trained for doing a job is important to perform well and getting things done on-time with required quality.

So if you are not knowing the correct way or procedure of doing a task, you will not get much benefit by removing the time wasting activities and being busy doing your tasks.

So start learning new skills and techniques for doing your job in a better and quicker way. You will see an increase your productivity.

Physically exhausted

It is said that a healthy body is the home of a healthy mind. One of the many reasons for low productivity for many people is the lack of physical energy. You can’t focus on your task when you are having an illness or feeling tired all the time.

So, in order to be highly productive, you have to be fit and healthy and have a lot of mental and physical energy. Wake up early in the morning, at least at 6:00 AM. Do exercise or Yoga and meditation daily, and you will see its effect on your productivity in a few days.

Read more tips on a healthy lifestyle.


To summarise, you can say that without taking definite actions, you can’t be highly productive. No motivational reading, video or speech can bring a change in you unless you take action. Take help of technology, be determined, remove distractions, and focus on your tasks. Only then you can become highly productive.

Best wishes for your future!