The Ultimate Guide to Productivity
15 Hacks for Maximum Effectiveness
One of my favorite Stanford GSB lecturers, Ed Batista, passionately stated: time is not our most precious resource, but rather, our attention is. He suggested “Apple’s red app notifications are meant to look like little drops of blood to steal your attention” and that nearly every large tech company pays smart people millions of dollars to addict you to their product. So he encouraged us to put structures in our lives to minimize distraction and maximize focus.
After graduating from Stanford, I joined a 30-person startup, Kasa, where there was no shortage of things to do. Everything seemed urgent; I was short on both time and attention. I had always been a bit of a productivity guru, but startup life pushed me to learn every efficiency hack. I’ve shared my favorites below.
1. Keyboard shortcuts
If you focus on one section, it’s this one. It’s so important, I wrote an entire post about it here.
Why is it so important? Imagine you watch someone take the mouse, right-click to select “copy,” and then right-click to select “paste.” Does it frustrate you as much as it does me? You know how much easier it is to use control + c to copy and control + v to paste. Now, imagine knowing 60+ more shortcuts that save hours each week.
Once you learn a handful of other shortcuts, you’ll increase your efficiency tremendously. Do not underestimate the power of keyboard shortcuts!
2. Practice getting faster at typing
Perhaps just as important as learning keyboard shortcuts: getting faster at typing is a skill that will benefit you for the rest of your life! I was fortunate enough to learn how to type at an early age and currently type between 85-100 WPM (the average is 35-45).
I used this tool to test my typing speed, and there are dozens of typing software to help you improve!
3. Turn off notifications
Did you know that, on average, it takes 23 minutes to get back to work after getting distracted? And, as I noted above, companies do an amazing job at trying to distract you! On the iPhone, there are alerts via the lock screen, notifications, and banners; further, they use sounds and badges in addition to vibration to get your attention.
My suggestion: turn off essentially all of your notifications! This includes Slack, Email, apps, large group texts or WhatsApp groups, social media, etc. You can customize these for more specificity within the apps/products themself, i.e. on Slack you can just turn on notifications that tag you, specifically.
Personally, the only notifications I get are for texts, phone calls, WhatsApp messages, and a handful of others: Uber/Lyft (so I know when my ride is coming), airlines (for check-in), Calm (to remind me to meditate), and reminders.
4. Calendly
Please, please, please start using Calendly (or one of their competitors, like Cal.com or Sprintful). This allows you to stop listing the days/times you’re free and instead send a simple, one-click link. Magic!
5. Learn to better manage your email
When I joined Kasa, its founder suggested I enroll in the 21-day ReviveYourInbox.com program. While I thought I knew everything about email management, this course proved invaluable. I’ve since suggested it to every person I’ve managed and dozens of my friends & co-workers. Whether you have 0, 100, or 1,000+ emails in your inbox right now, you have something to learn from this program!
6. Superhuman
And after finishing the ReviveYourInbox training, let me suggest an amazing email client: Superhuman. Its tagline, “Blazingly fast email for teams and individuals,” couldn’t be more spot on, and it helps save me hours every week. If you can afford Superhuman — or can expense it to your company —, I’d highly recommend it!
7. Templatize emails
Are you sending a lot of the same messages via email again & again? Are you searching your old emails for a similar message and then copying/pasting them? If so, you can create email templates. You can learn how to do this in the ReviveYourInbox training, or there’s a great article here.
8. Don’t use Email as a to-do list…
Another lesson from ReviveYourInbox that’s worth calling out: Do not use your email as your to-do list. There’s an absurd amount of literature on the internet that validates this. Key reasons?
It’s difficult to prioritize
There are limited task management features
There’s a lack of coordination
It’s not collaborative
New emails can divert your attention
9. …and instead find a task manager
There’s no shortage of task management products on the market. In addition to Trello, Todoist, Asana, Microsoft To-Do, Monday.com, and ClickUp, there feels like there are dozens more popping up every year.
Early days at Kasa, I kept a pen-and-paper to-do list that was organized like this:
At the end of each day, if I didn’t finish something, I’d cross it off and re-prioritize it in the coming days (then, later in the week, I’d flip the sheet over and start prioritizing the next week).
Over time, I migrated to Notion, then ClickUp, to manage tasks. It ends up looking similar. Personally, I like ClickUp best because it allows me to create tasks far off into the future without having to open up my calendar to create a reminder on a specific day!
And I use different tags (such as 💚) to highlight personal tasks, such as meditating, exercising, and writing down 10 things I’m grateful for (more on that here).
10. Shortcuts on iPhone
This is one of my more recent learnings, and it’s been a huge time-saver! On Apple devices, you can create shortcuts for words/phrases. Many people use it for things like typing “omw” and it outputting “on my way.” I also use the following shortcuts:
“zz" — work email
“zzz” — personal email
“248" — phone number (248 is my area code)
“xx" — my LinkedIn
“xxx” — my Calendly
“ccc" — Co-Founder’s LinkedIn
To do this on an iPhone, Go to Settings > General > Keyboard, then tap Text Replacement.
On a Mac, Go to Settings > Keyboard > then tap Text Replacement.
11. Run efficient and effective meetings
A pet peeve of mine is when meetings go over their allotted time. Why? Because there was likely a considerable amount of wasted time in the meeting due to the lack of an agenda, unclear meeting objectives, too many people, and/or unclear action items. Thus, I find that the meetings that go over are also the ones that are the least effective. Again, there is a considerable amount of information on the internet about effective meetings, but my favorites come from this HBR article:
Defining the objective of the meeting (some examples: decision-making, problem-solving, brainstorming, status update, planning, team building, etc.)
Create an agenda and share it before the meeting (and again at the beginning of the meeting)
Invite the right people (four to seven is generally ideal, above ten is likely too many)
Take notes (this can be done by the organizer, or delegated to someone else in the meeting)
End with clear action items, owners, and timelines
12. Avoid Multitasking and Context Switching
This one is easy: simply stop trying to multitask. It’s not possible, and it’s not effective. In fact, only 2.5% of people can actually multitask (and science confirms it).
Further, chaotic schedules reduce our productive time by 40%.
Therefore, try to bunch tasks and meetings by topic. At Kasa, we encouraged having 1:1s with direct reports on Monday afternoons and Tuesday mornings so that everyone within the company was on the same schedule. We also had suggestions for when to have team meetings, external meetings, interviews, and “deep work” time.
13. Download the Magnet App
If you’re a Mac user, download Magnet to organize the apps on your screen quickly (though, go back to #1 and make sure you’ve mastered some shortcuts first!). This might be the best $10 I’ve ever spent.
14. Install Grammarly
Grammarly is a great product to ensure that you’re writing without typos! There’s a free version available that does the job and you can pay a bit more for premium features. Highly recommend!
15. Focus on your well-being
Last — and certainly not least — is a reminder to focus on your personal well-being in order to stay engaged and productive. This list includes:
Eating a balanced diet
Sleeping 8 hours each night
Exercising daily
Meditating or practicing spirituality
For me, I view these activities as a core part of the workday and never feel bad stepping away from my computer to meditate for 10 minutes or cook a healthy meal.
Have any productivity hacks that I didn’t share above? Please share them in the comments below!