It doesn’t matter what you do for a living in or where you work – everyone is looking for productivity tips to get more done. Everyone is looking for ways to get their jobs done faster, easier, with fewer headaches. But, what if I told you that true productivity doesn’t just come down to making a task list and checking things off when you finish. It takes more than that. True productivity lies not only in how you manage your time – but in how you manage your mind.

So follow these five uncommon tips to become an all-around more productive person.

1. Clean up your messes

First, clean up your messes. When you live in a state of mental and physical clutter, it’s likely that you won’t be very productive. Incomplete projects, unfinished business, and piles of cluttered messes can weigh you down and take away from the energy you have to move forward toward your goals. When you don’t complete tasks, you can’t be fully prepared to move into the present, let alone into your new future.

What this means is that in order to be productive, you must complete any unfinished business or tasks that have been holding you back.

2. Focus!

Next, focus! The most successful people create entire days dedicated to focusing. A Focus Day is a day in which you spend at least 80% of your time operating in your core genius, or primary area of expertise—interacting with people or processes that give you the highest payoffs for the time you invest. To be successful, you must schedule more Focus Days and hold yourself accountable for producing the results. The more you focus on your highest payoff activities, the more productive you’ll be.

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3. Just say no

Learn how to say no. If you are going to increase your results and your income, as well as increase the amount of free time in your life, you are going to have to eliminate those activities, requests, and other time-stealers that don’t have a high payoff.

You will have to structure your work so that you are focusing your time, effort, energies, and resources only on projects, opportunities, and people that give you a huge reward for your efforts. You are going to have to create strong boundaries about what you will and won’t do.

4. Practice the Rule of 5

Next, practice the Rule of 5. The Rule of 5 simply means that every day, you must do five specific things to move your most important goal toward completion. By committing to take meaningful daily actions to achieve your goals, you will accomplish more than you thought possible in a surprisingly short amount of time.

5. Meditate

Meditation is very important when it comes to productivity. In general, through meditation, you can do many things better. When your mind is clear, you make better decisions, you’ll be able to focus on your most pressing issues, you’re more creative, you have much greater awareness of the world around you, and you ultimately get more done.

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