How to Be More Productive: Ultimate Guide to Personal Productivity and Efficiency in 2025!

Are you tired of feeling like there aren’t enough hours in the day? You’re not alone! In fact, a recent study by the American Psychological Association found that 65% of adults feel overwhelmed by their daily responsibilities.

But here’s the good news: mastering personal productivity can transform your life and give you more time and space to truly live how you want to.

In this guide, we’ll dive into the secrets of highly productive people and show you how to skyrocket your efficiency. Get ready to take control of your time and achieve more than you ever thought possible! Here’s how to be more productive.

1. Understanding outside influences.

You can find countless tips to be more productive, but those tips don’t exist in a vacuum.

Let’s look at the real enemy here that none of us can truly control–external stressors.

According to the American Psychological Association, 27% of Americans report that most days are so stressful they can’t function normally. Most reported experiencing physical symptoms of stress, like headaches, fatigue, anxiety, depression, and changes in sleep patterns.

Most adults attributed their stress to inflation, violence and crime, and the general political and racial climate of the US. Over three quarters of adults said the future of our nation is a significant stressor.

Issues like reproductive rights, personal freedoms, and children’s health have driven many Americans to relocate or consider relocating. 59% of the LGBTQ+ population said they considered moving to an entirely different country to protect themselves and their rights.

A more optimistic perspective.

While the concerns of the individuals polled above are valid things to feel, our everyday struggles can make it harder to see the bigger picture.

By almost every metric, the world is improving.

The reason you probably don’t think that’s true is because fear sells. People engage more with negativity. With media companies directly profiting from fear mongering, we get a darker view of the world than is necessarily accurate. This can make it harder to see how far we’ve come as a species.

Pandemics, dehumanizing violence in the Gaza strip, human trafficking, citizen’s rights being stripped on all sides, and much more make things feel unbearably bleak.

But…

In the US, life expectancy is rising.

Violent crimes have declined nearly 50% since 1991 (FBI).

The fossil fuel demand is dropping, and internal combustion vehicle sales already peaked years ago (bbhub).

Efforts to address the climate crisis are gaining traction.

Medicine is constantly progressing–including the first gene-editing treatment for a disease, sickle cell anemia.

Here are helpful things to remember when combatting that pervasive feeling of dread and hopelessness:

Zooming out on our timeline–even by ten years–proves that things are getting better.
Fear-mongering is incredibly profitable for media companies.
Fostering virality online often requires invoking rage or terror. Marketers know this.
We can do a lot to control our personal perspective, leading to health changes on a molecular level.

Note: Controlling our perspectives and attitudes involves only ourselves. We can’t control the perspectives or experiences of others. There’s no way to truly understand the struggle of a person or group that we have never been–i.e., don’t tell a depressed person they just need to do yoga, and don’t discount the experiences of marginalized groups, yeah?

Okay, with the uncontrollable outside influences acknowledged, let’s dig into what we can actually change to become more productive.

2. Understanding personal productivity.

Personal productivity will look different for everyone, and that’s important to remember. Not only do we have different abilities and skills, but we have different goals!

Personal productivity could include:

keeping strong relationships
staying physically active
practicing meditation and mindfulness
financial success
working toward career goals
meal prepping consistently
keeping a clean house
providing enough enrichment for your cat

Focusing on important tasks can significantly boost overall productivity by ensuring that your efforts are directed towards high-impact activities.

So the content of your productive actions will vary, but in general, personal productivity is how you manage your responsibilities and goals to work toward what matters most to you.

Correcting misconceptions about productivity.

Hustle culture is not sustainable, nor is it helpful rhetoric.

Working harder than you’re paid to only benefits your employer.

Your employer does not care about you.

Productivity is not tied to morality.

Personal productivity is NOT about:

keeping up appearances
comparing yourself to others
beating yourself up when you haven’t hit goals
working as much as humanly possible
minimizing rest
not pursuing activities for enjoyment
neglecting self-care

Productivity is what we perceive it to be–it’s a healthy amount of effort and accomplishment that makes us feel fulfilled and purposeful.

3. Assessing your own productivity levels.

To know what to change, we have to know what we’re working with. That means learning how to measure our productivity and success so we can accurately gauge if changes we make have the desired effect.

How productive are you currently?

Here are ten key self-evaluation techniques for assessing and improving personal productivity.

1. Time tracking

Log how you spend your time each day to identify patterns and areas for improvement.

You can also track activities, e.g., yes/no factors like did I eat well, did I wake up feeling rested, did I partake in substance use, etc.

With this data, you can strategize how to handle business and your personal schedule in a more productive way.

2. Goal setting and review

Set clear, measurable goals and regularly evaluate your progress towards them.

For the bigger picture, consider setting yearly themes to guide your movement.

3. Task completion rate

Track the percentage of planned activities you actually complete each day/week.

4. Productivity journaling

Reflect on your productivity, challenges, and successes in a daily or weekly journal.

5. Energy level monitoring

Note your energy levels throughout the day to optimize your schedule. You might try this energy audit for a better idea of what activities drain you and which energize you.

6. Distraction logging

Keep track of what interrupts your focus to minimize future distractions and effectively complete tasks.

7. Personal KPIs

Develop key performance indicators relevant to your work or personal goals.

For example, my KPIs as a writer might include:

Words written
Pieces completed
Page reads per day

Every industry and individual will have unique KPIs, so think about which factors most accurately represent your performance.

8. Skill assessment

Regularly evaluate your skills and competencies to identify areas for growth.

9. 360-degree feedback

Ask colleagues, friends, or family for honest feedback on your productivity and habits. Outsiders can often have helpful insights that have never even occurred to you.

10. Productivity score

Create a personalized scoring system based on factors important to your work and lifestyle.

Identify time-wasters.

Time-wasters are tasks or distractions that keep you from hitting personal goals. These are activities that do not align with your intentions for your work session, day, or life. Addressing time-consuming tasks early in the workday can significantly improve focus and efficiency.

We all know the classic time-wasters. Social media, reading articles about nothing, being distracted by your coworkers or office environment, bopping around to the easiest and most useless things on our task list.

Try to make a list of your frequent distractions and time-wasters. Then look at these two ideas that, when applied effectively, can make you the most efficient person in the office.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto Principle (or the 80/20 rule) suggests that 80% of our output is generated with 20% of our effort. That means we spend most of our time on activities with low impact.

Learn to harness the 80/20 rule to maximize your productivity.

Parkinson’s Law

Parkinson’s Law is the idea that a task will expand to fill the time allotted to its completion.

If we have a week to finish something, we’ll be finishing it EOD on Friday. Without even realizing or doing it intentionally, we take too much time to finish each task, we dawdle on social media, we chat with colleagues for a little too long, we might get distracted with another project. Maybe we’re writing a new resume. Maybe we’re beating our best time on the NYT sudoku (🙋‍♀️).

Once you know about Parkinson’s Law, you can’t unsee it. So let’s learn how to avoid Parkinson’s Law.

Recognize your peak productivity hours.

Aligning challenging tasks with your peak productivity hours can lead to more efficient and higher-quality work. Understanding your natural rhythms allows you to time complex tasks to when you are most alert and motivated.

Set realistic personal and professional goals.

As far as productivity tips go, this is might be a bit basic, but it’s important enough to warrant saying: Set goals for yourself.

Personal goals focus on things like relationships, your health, your mindset, your home.

Professional goals are related to your profession. Duh. This can be milestones you set for yourself, things that are expected of you, raises, promotions, all these things.

Be sure you take the time to set those goals for yourself, strategize how you’ll get there, and implement a real plan to accomplish them.

Goal tracking.

The most productive people will tell you that goal tracking is as important as goal setting. Often, we create a productive goal, and maybe even formulate the plan to get there, then fully forget about it until the next time we sit down to set a goal.

For most of us, this happens around the start of a new quarter or year.

To stay focused, establish a method for tracking your goals. My favorite one is the weekly check-in, where you simply review your listed goals once a week and evaluate how you’re moving toward them.

4. Essential time management techniques.

Here are our top techniques to master time management.

The Pomodoro Technique: Work smarter, not harder

One classic productive mistake we make is rapidly switching between tasks. But, staying too long on one task can also be detrimental.

If it’s hard for you to find the balance, try the Pomodoro Technique. Simply put, this technique means performing 25 minutes of work with 2-5 minute breaks in between work sprints. After four rounds of this, take a longer break (15-30 minutes), then start again.

Personally, I find the best timing of work and rest for my style is one hour of work, then half an hour of break where I perform a non-screen activity, like chores around the house, preparing a meal, walking my dog, lifting weights, or reading.

Time blocking: Structuring your day for success

Time blocking is another great way to spend less time working while getting more done by incorporating structure.

To use time blocking, simply schedule specific blocks of time for different tasks or activities throughout your day.

The Eisenhower Matrix: Prioritizing tasks effectively

Another tool for time control is the Eisenhower matrix. This method helps you to prioritize and balance work, new projects, admin chores, and other demands on your time and energy. Here’s how it works:

5. Creating a productivity-boosting environment.

We can do the internal work, but without an external environment that allows you to implement these new productivity skills, they may still fall flat. So let’s address our workspace.

Organize your physical work space.

Creating a clean and focused work environment is essential to focus on and accomplish tasks.

So whether you work from home, a co-working space, or an office–how retro of you–take some time to optimize the space for increased focus and fewer distractions.

Digital decluttering and organization.

Don’t forget to take your digital world into account. We work in there, so that space is important to our productivity, too. Possibly even more important!

Try this digital decluttering technique and establish a regular maintenance routine to keep your files, apps, and correspondence organized and easy to use.

Minimizing distractions.

Distractions are a knife to the gut of productivity. If you work in an office, you’ve got coworkers and managers and Brenda’s birthday cake to distract you.

At home, you’ve got pets, kids, ding-dong-ditchers.

And no matter where you go, there are constant notifications. Alerts, blinking screens, buzzing, rings, bings, ka-chings.

Now, achieving complete silence isn’t really possible. But muting text notifications is.

Along with optimizing your work environment ahead of time, it’s important to plan ahead. A productive day can be derailed by unexpected interruptions, so it’s crucial to create contingency plans to handle regular disruptions effectively.

Ergonomics.

The ergonomics of your work space refers to optimizing for your physical body. Make sure your desk allows you to sit comfortably and supported, don’t forget to get regular movement throughout the day, and avoid eye, neck, and joint strain wherever possible.

Here’s a guide on improving your office ergonomics.

Focus techniques.

There are also focus techniques we can employ to boost our productivity in our cozy ergonomic workspace.

1. Flow state

A flow state is the mental state where you completely focus in on a single task or activity without thoughts of outside elements, performance, or even yourself. This is where REAL productivity can happen.

For my meditation fans, think of this as being “headless”.

To access a flow, we must eliminate distractions, set aside unrelated thoughts, and optimize the environment to allow us to lock in.

Some tasks are more suited for falling into a flow state than others, like tasks you’d use for deep work.

2. Deep work

Deep work refers to “real work”–those activities that make the biggest impact and require full concentration. It’s not the admin tasks, the busy work, the low-hanging fruit we reach for when we don’t want to work too hard or focus too intensely.

Deep work typically requires full focus, innovation, and creativity. Scheduling time for deep work is essential to make meaningful progress toward our goals.

Learn more about deep work and how to apply it to your work life.

3. Stop multitasking

Take one task at a time. Multitasking, in almost every case, will damage rather than increase productivity.

Here’s a breakdown of what types of multitasking will increase productivity and what types will tank it.

6. How to be more productive with technology.

Technology can help us with time management, tracking important tasks, building new productivity habits, managing our to do list, handling admin tasks to give you more time for actual work, and overall saving time while increasing productivity.

So here’s how to capitalize on technology to be more productive.

Top productivity apps and tools for 2025.

Some of my favorite productivity apps and tools include:

Habitica–a gameified to do list
Notion–a customizable hub to manage literally anything
Toggl–our favorite time tracker
Todoist–our favorite non-gameified to do list
Cold Turkey Writer–turns your computer into a typewriter so you don’t break concentration until the (writing) task is complete
AI chats–use something like chatGPT or claude for…anything in the world? create documents, draft example work, plan projects, build a business plan, create a social media schedule, or help you design your ideal work week to accomplish your goals

Automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks.

Any tasks you can automate, do.

Often, we underestimate how much time we spend doing little things that are necessary for day-to-day operations, but are not actually important for US to do manually.

Take some time to consider what tasks can be taken off your plate with current technology. I recommend this post from Value Coders on their top automation tools for streamlining workflows.

7. Habits and routines of productive people.

Maintaining health.

Productive people often have a set of healthy habits that they follow daily. These habits can include regular exercise, a balanced diet, and adequate sleep. By maintaining these habits, they ensure that they have the energy and focus needed to tackle their tasks efficiently.

Morning routines.

Not everyone can be a bright and chipper morning person. If you rock the 5am club morning routine, that’s awesome.

If you’re more like me and prefer to maximize your sleeping hours, hiya! We can also have a morning routine that boosts our productivity and overall satisfaction with life (I’m serious).

Build YOUR most effective morning routine and watch your life change.

Habit stacking.

One of the most effective ways productive people instill new habits is to use habit stacking.

“Habit stacking is effective because it reduces the cognitive load of trying to remember and implement new behaviors.”

Read all about the strategy of habit stacking and how to use it to implement new routines.

Mindfulness.

Most people will roll their eyes when I stress the importance of mindfulness. And many of those same people spend the majority of their day distracted and unproductive.

When you’re first becoming aware (lol) of mindfulness practices, they might seem silly, intimidating, or even like a waste of time.

Well, they’re not!

Practicing mindfulness helps us to set aside distractions, mind our own business, get more work done, and be more present to actually enjoy the moment we’re in.

So spend less time stuffing every waking moment with stimulation and noise. Take smaller chunks of time to focus on the physical sensations of being alive. Plug in with the current moment. Focus on what’s in front of you.

Try something like this ten-minute body scan meditation as an easy first step to mastering mindfulness.

Take a break!

(Run away with us for the summer, let’s go upstate.)

Productive people understand the importance of frequent and adequate rest. The positive impact of allowing your mind and body to truly recover is immeasurable. But, here are some people measuring it regardless.

If I can instill in you only one idea on how to be more productive, it is to understand the productive relevance of rest.

EOD routines.

An end of day routine is the bread slapped on top of your productivity sandwich. It wraps up your work and helps you to transition into your evening activities.

A stark start and end to the work day is one strong strategy for improving work-life balance.

Learn to create your ideal end of day routine.

8. Overcoming productivity challenges.

One key area to focus on when improving productivity is learning to anticipate and overcome challenges. Let’s go over some of the common issues we encounter.

Dealing with procrastination.

Procrastination plagues most of us. Dealing with it can increase productivity tenfold. My biggest tip for procrastination is to employ the two-minute rule.

Managing stress and avoiding burnout

Another of the main productivity challenges is learning to balance work with rest to manage stress and avoid burnout.

First off, be sure you’re handling the basics. Get enough sleep. Eat well. Fit movement into your day.

Don’t forget the importance of breaks.

Listen to your body and know when it’s time to wrap something up for the day.

Remember that if you work unusually hard one day or pull an all-nighter, that will lead to decreased productivity the following day. Sometimes it’s necessary for us to put the pedal to the metal and crank out a draft or hit a deadline, but be sure to allow space for extra rest the next day/week. Your body and mind seek equilibrium, and working past your limits is not sustainable or something you should practice regularly.

How to stay motivated for long-term projects.

Keeping up steam longer term for bigger projects can be tricky. Here are some actionable steps to take.

1. Chunk it up. Break it into smaller, achievable milestones. Track your progress visually and celebrate each completed milestone to stay motivated.

2. Connect with your deeper purpose. Hopefully, you’ve got a personal stake in completing this project. It makes it easier if you can regularly remind yourself why the project matters and how it aligns with your goals.

3. Build a sustainable routine. Everything is about consistency. So make the routine of working on your project as accessible for yourself as you can. Set specific times for work and stick to them, even if the progress feels slow.

4. Hold yourself accountable. Use deadlines, check-ins with others, or public commitments to add a little pressure. Only use these methods if you know they work for you! For some people, these can backfire and intimidate you away from making progress.

5. Manage scope. It can be easy to add new features, requirements, and goals to a project. This can easily lead to overwhelm and burnout. If you keep moving the goal posts, how will you hit the goal? Be careful about adding extra to your plate when you’ve already set your parameters.

6. Take breaks! If I hear you’re skipping breaks and pushing yourself too hard, I’m gonna lose it. Take strategic breaks to prevent burnout and overwhelm. Step away briefly when you get stuck and return with a fresh perspective. Sometimes all it takes to crack a hard nut is a quick walk around the block.

7. Document your progress. There’s nothing like a before and after picture. Document your progress where you can, even small wins. Review them regularly to maintain momentum if you feel your motivation dipping.