by Bea Maiz

In many ways, increasing your productivity isn’t about finding more minutes to cram into an already overloaded day. In fact, it isn’t about doing more at all — it’s about working smarter, not harder. It’s about finding ways to streamline the way you already live your life, regardless of whether you’re talking about your business life or your personal one. And it’s all in an effort to not just improve the quantity of what you’re able to do, but the quality at the exact same time.

“Increased Productivity” or “How to Do More With Less”

This list of the top 23 productivity hacks of the year are designed to help you do exactly that. They’re about using the way you like to live your life to your advantage, allowing you to stay on track and happy and be as productive as you need to be all year long.
As you read through this list of productivity hacks, think about what these tips have in common. When we recommend turning off the alerts on your smartphone, we mean more than just “don’t spend too much time every day pay attention to every new push notification as it pops up.” Think about the hack beneath the hack — in this case, the underlying advice is “don’t get distracted” (or at least try not to.) Keep your eye on the prize, focus on the task at hand and enjoy the massive boost to your own productivity that you’ll enjoy the second you tell your phone to “sit down, shut up and if I need something, I’ll tell you.”

Likewise, when we recommend that you ignore the news, we don’t mean that you have to stop paying attention to current events. That’s an unrealistic goal, particularly in the fast-paced political world that we’re living in. What we really mean is learn how to identify the pre-packaged, pretty-yet-hollow nonsense that passes for news these days and focus on what really matters. Remember that the actual definition of news is “information that you need to live your daily life.” If something that actually meets that definition happens to occur, rest assured — you’re going to find out about it (probably first from that ultimate time sucker — social media.) If another Z-List celebrity just made a faux pas when giving an interview to an international journalist, guess what — you can go ahead and ignore that one. Focus on what YOU need to live YOUR life (and to do your job) and push out all the rest.

Productivity is Malleable: Use This to Your Advantage

In the end, perhaps the most important thing to understand about productivity is that this is not a journey that is going to end anytime soon.

In many ways, that is exactly what these 23 Productivity Hacks of the Year is all about. This infographic was made by Visme and is the result of collaboration with Larry Kim, an internet marketer and it includes easy to understand and valuable tips on Productivity.

And remember, the minute you think you’ve done enough — that you’ve finally gotten to the point where you think you’re using every second of every day as well as you possibly can — is the minute you’ve lost a game you never truly understood in the first place.

That gives way to the most important productivity hack of them all: Always push yourself. Don’t just find your limit, walk right up to it and say “Well, I’m here. I guess that’s it, then.” Find your limit, back up ten feet to get a head start and then leap right over it, then say, “Fantastic. What’s next?”

With that in mind, do you have any productivity hacks to add to this list? Tell us in the comments below!