5 Tips to Live Your Life Efficiently

People constantly think about improving their quality of life. If they spend their days doing useless things, such as watching the Kardashians or Big Brother reality game show, sooner or later they start feeling guilty about the way they waste their days. The overall quality of your life can be improved in different ways, but there is one thing all positive changes have in common: efficiency.

It’s time to start taking actions towards boosting the efficiency of your living. The following 5 tips will help you do that.

1. Have a plan!

There’s nothing more crucial than having a plan for the upcoming day, week and month. A plan is an important measure of your efficiency. Start each day by scheduling a neat plan based on your priorities. A plan gives you the needed motivation and pressure to actually do your work.

A plan even works better when you tend to divide tasks into smaller subtasks. After you identify your main tasks, you need to divide them into discrete subtasks so that you can provide usable step-level information. It also helps you to keep away to procrastination monkey.

Tip: Apply the rule of nine, a subtask should not consist of more than 9 subtasks. Keep elements short and clear. If you find tasks that take more than nine steps to do, determine whether the task can be divided again.

2. Evaluate yourself

Be self-conscious about your actions and achievements. It’s important to take some time and reflect on your day.

What went well? What went wrong? How can I improve myself?

A useful strategy is writing down each ‘wasted’ moment, for example, you’ve been looking at Facebook for 5 minutes. You would be surprised how fast these 5-minute distractions add up to a much larger chunk of wasted time than you expect.

Source: gratisography.com

Tip: Look for patterns. Did a task take longer on a certain day? Did you find that you’re more productive in the morning?

3. Outsource you daily activities

There are several services that help you outsource some of your daily errands, but one of them will let you outsource everything you want and on-demand from taking out your garbage to run to a store for you, so you free up time to focus on better things you like to do.

Gratzio offers a decentralized app that allows you to order or perform favors for people around you in exchange for cryptocurrency. In short, it is like an Uber for favors. There’s always some work you don’t like or your not experienced enough for. Using the Gratzio app, you can use “favors” from people who are more experienced than you or do like the work. The idea is to make everyone’s life more enjoyable and efficient. Read the interview with the COO of Gratzio here.

Example favors

a. You live at least a 20-minute drive from a certain store. You can drive yourself, however, you just need one item. You can put up an ‘Ask’ favor from someone who’s passing by the store and add a detailed description of the product you need. This way, you save time and money, whereas the person who fulfills the task earns some money and doesn’t lose much time as he’s already driving in the right direction. This is a beautiful example of a ‘favor’ where both parties benefit from.

b. I’ve just bought a load of furniture and overestimate the size of my vehicle, can someone come and help with half the load?

c. I’ve left my washing in the launderette, can you pick it up and drop it home when ready.

4. Keep your mind sharp

Source: gratisography.com

Learn something new every day, read a book or study a second language, just continually work out your brain. You’ll be more productive and perceptive. Earlier, I wrote an article on the 5-hour rule and why you should spend time learning. You can find it here.

Why should we spend time on learning?

The answer is simple: Learning is the single best investment of our time that we can make. Or as Benjamin Franklin said, “An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”

It is key to not get stuck in what you do; invest some free time weekly to learn about new things. It’s a good idea to explore different niches and pick some which have your interest.

5. And your body fit

The same is true of your body. Spending 30 minutes, three times a week can do wonders for your energy levels. An active person will be a more productive person. You’ll sleep better and your time awake will be more focused and productive.

Sources

• Full Gratzio interview
• Pick the brain
• Robinsharma — How to become productive
• Task-Oriented Writing for Techies
• Lifehack

5 Tips to Live Your Life Efficiently was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.