What You Can Do Today to Revitalize Your Productivity

Like many people, I’ve had my share of “I’m on fire” productivity days and a handful of “I can’t focus and I hope I don’t get fired” days. But after more than a year of pandemic isolation, those unproductive days had really started to pile up. I was in a rut.

So I did what I usually do when I run into a tough situation: I asked my Wirecutter co-workers what helped them get back on track. As usual, their advice was excellent, and I hope it’ll help you as much as it helped me. Whether you’ve been feeling less productive for a while or are just going through the common “afternoon slump,” try using these prompts to give yourself a boost. For a full refresh, I highly recommend devoting an entire day to working through these steps, revamping your workspace and your work system.

Tweak your mindset

Step back and look at the big picture

Because “so much of the mental block of the pandemic was an inability to see the future,” Wirecutter senior editor Harry Sawyers says he spent time reflecting on what worked and what didn’t during pandemic work life—and made adjustments based on those findings. For this exercise, do the following:

• Project what you want your productivity to look like. Visualize what a great day of work would be and what kind of worker you want to be. For me, that’s checking off all the tasks that I set for myself each day, moving projects forward, and definitely not thinking about work when I’m done for the day. I also envision myself being a dependable co-worker who’s always growing.
• Make a list of what works and what doesn’t work about your setup. Worked: setting up a separate workspace for other family members. Didn’t work: juggling my work, my schoolwork, and my daughter’s homeschooling amidst pandemic-induced angst.
• Search for the root causes of issues you’ve been having. Harry says that when making his lists, he’d pause to recognize that a lot of his problems resulted from “short-term fixes that became long-term habits, and that they can change.” Another friend of mine realized that the unproductive feeling he was experiencing at work wasn’t because he wasn’t getting enough done but because he was isolated from his co-workers and friends—a huge part of his work and home life. Personally, I discovered that a creative-writing class I was taking that focused on mass murders (I didn’t know that detail before enrolling) was partly the cause of my nightmares and poor sleep.
• Brainstorm any improvements you can make. Maybe it’s a small change, such as actually eating lunch away from your desk, buying noise-cancelling headphones, or muting Slack when you’re done with work. Or maybe it’s a bigger change that you work on over time, such as training your family members not to interrupt you during meetings or creating better eating, sleeping, and exercise habits. The latter is important because how well you work is tied to how good you feel.

Do just one small thing

You might have heard the advice “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed [every morning],” shared by retired US Navy Admiral William McRaven. He’s describing the emotional domino effect that comes from completing one little task. Doing so gives you a small sense of pride, which pushes you into the next task and then the next, keeping you moving forward the rest of the day. It’s a good habit to start, if you haven’t already: The Sleep Foundation found that people who made their bed were more likely to sleep better at night.

But it doesn’t have to be making your bed, and it doesn’t even need to be a daily habit. Whenever you feel like you’re slumping, sometimes just one little change can pull you out and give you the pick-me-up you need to keep going. Try deleting items from your to-do list that have been there for ages—the ones you know in your heart you’ll never get to. Raise or lower your chair or your monitor for better ergonomics at your desk. Map out your vacation days on your calendar for the rest of the year. Make your computer (Windows or Mac) announce the time at the top of every hour to remind you to take breaks—sometimes when you’re not feeling productive, it’s because you’ve been working too hard.

Refresh your workspace

Clean your desk

Wirecutter editorial assistant Erin Moore recently rearranged all the furniture in her office, saying it gave her brain “good novelty dopamine.” She also repositioned her desk so that it faces a window for good Zoom lighting. This sort of redesign might take up a weekend rather than a day, but a new perspective from your desk could be just what you need.

You can start small, too. Something as simple as getting rid of a stack of papers—filing, shredding, or recycling them—can eliminate extra mental weight. Alternatively, you can work on taming the cords and other knickknacks cluttering your desk. Or how about moving things currently occupying your desk that don’t belong there to a different home? (For example, I recently put away a first-aid kit that had been sitting on my desk for almost a year. Don’t ask me why it was there.)

The best way to deep-clean your desk, though, is to remove everything and carefully consider each item you put back on it. Wipe the desk down with a damp cloth and clean your laptop, as well as your keyboard and mouse plus any other accessories you commonly use (such as a desk mat or your headphones or earbuds). Once everything is just as you like it, take a break—you deserve it.

Get yourself some nature

When you’ve been inside all day, even taking just a quick walk down the road or sitting for a few minutes in sunlight can be reinvigorating. If the weather is nice, move your home office outside—a shady spot, a chair, and a folding table or lap desk may be all you need to work in a more refreshing setting.

If you can’t work outside, or if the outdoor space you have available isn’t very green, consider buying a plant for your desk. Studies show that having a plant in your workspace is one of the small home-office upgrades that can boost productivity, and we have many plant recommendations you can choose from, along with tips on how to keep them alive.

Improve your workflow

Tame your email inbox

If you’d like to have a tidier inbox without spending a ton of time on it every day, here are a few things you can do now:

• Unsubscribe from all the promotional email you no longer want. You can go through your emails individually and click the unsubscribe button—or you can do it the easy way and use Unroll.me. The app, once connected to Gmail or whatever other email provider you use, gives you a list of the email subscriptions that are in your inbox and makes it easy to unsubscribe from some or all of them with just a few clicks.
• Filter new incoming emails automatically. Filters can move emails out of your main inbox into folders so you know that anything that’s left in the main inbox is what needs your attention. MakeUseOf offers instructions on how to set up email filters in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook, and Wirecutter senior editor Mark Smirniotis shared with me a few tips for setting up filters:
  • Use asterisks at the beginning of a folder name to make it stand out at the top of an alphabetical list. For example, “***Company announcements” will keep that folder readily visible.
  • Filter newsletters and promotional emails by using “unsubscribe” as the keyword.
  • Filter automated reports based on a subject line and/or sender. For example, you can filter for weekly performance reports that always have “weekly performance report” in the subject line.
  • If you get regular email that doesn’t need action or response, filter it. That includes newsletters, Google Docs notifications, and notifications from other apps that are purely informative.
• Declare email bankruptcy. The steps above will help you organize your email going forward, but what about all the emails that are currently cluttering your inbox? You can always take the “desperate times call for desperate measures” approach and archive them all into a folder, or delete them and never think about them again. (This is the email equivalent of the “throw away all toys that are on the floor” approach that my parents used when I was a kid—one that successfully kept my siblings and me from leaving our toys lying around.)

Create automated workflows or try a text expander

Just as you can automate email labeling, you can automate the apps you use on a regular basis. By connecting your apps, you can reduce tedious copying and pasting and frequent switching between windows.

For example, with Zapier, you can have new tasks you’ve entered into your to-do list app automatically added to Google Calendar. You can also automatically save email attachments to Dropbox or Google Drive, send new blog posts as soon as they’re published to Twitter or Facebook, and more. Similar services such as IFTTT can automate smart-home gear and mobile devices to perform complicated tasks like tracking your work hours in Google Calendar based on your phone’s location or turning on a light whenever your calendar says you’re in a meeting.

Typing the same words over and over again can be inefficient and tiring, as well. If your work requires you to type a lot, try a text expander. These apps (or the built-in settings on Mac or iOS) turn a short code or abbreviation you type into full text. For example, you might type “;addr” to have the app enter your name and address in any text box or document, or “;din” for “What do you want for dinner?” Tip: Use a special character for the short code you use to make sure the text expander recognizes it.

Audit your notifications

One final stop-being-annoyed-and-distracted-by-technology tip: Look at the notifications you’ve received recently on your phone and on your desktop. Do you want to keep getting them? If not, adjust your notification settings to stem the flow. Your future self will thank you.