Work
Productivity tips
The productivity tips with evidence behind them make a short list: decide when and where, plan from your past hours, do one thing at a time, take short breaks, stop on time, and check planned hours against done hours every week. The first has the most research behind it: one review combined 94 separate tests of it (Gollwitzer and Sheeran, 2006).
Last updated
Reviewed by Mohammed Raqeeb
The rule here
Why this list is short.
Tips to increase productivity usually arrive as a long list, twenty or thirty of them with nothing behind them except that they sound right. Wake up early. Do the hardest task first. Drink more water. Some of it may even be true, but a reader has no way to tell which parts, and no way to tell afterwards whether any of it worked.
The list below follows two rules instead. Each tip names the study it rests on, with the size of the effect and its limits, so you can see how much weight it can carry. And each tip comes with something to count in hours, so you can check it against your own weeks. A tip that cannot be counted is a mood, and moods do not survive a busy Wednesday.
That leaves 6 tips. They are not secrets. What is uncommon is using them one at a time and keeping score.
The tips
How to be more productive: six tips, each with its evidence.
Every tip below has the same three parts: what to do, what the research found, and what to count. Where a paper reports one, the tip also gives an effect size. An effect size is a single number for how big a difference was, measured the same way from study to study, so that results about very different things can be set side by side. As a rough guide, a half on that scale is usually read as a medium effect.
Tip one
Decide when and where, in advance.
A goal says what you want. An if-then plan says when and where you will act: “When I sit down at 9:00 AM, I open the report before the inbox.” Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006) combined the results of 94 independent tests of such plans. People who made one reached their goals more often, and the size of that effect was 0.65, above the half that is usually read as medium.
Count it
The hours the planned task got, on the days you planned it.
Tip two
Plan from your past hours, not from your hopes.
People guess too low when they estimate how long their own tasks will take, a pattern called the planning fallacy. In one study, students predicted that a personal project would take 5.0 days. It took 9.2, and only 42.5% finished when they said they would (Buehler and colleagues, 1994). The fix is to stop asking how long the task should take, and ask how long this kind of task took you the last time.
Count it
Done hours beside planned hours, task by task.
Tip three
Work on one thing at a time.
Going back and forth between tasks has a price in time. Across 4 experiments, people who alternated between tasks were slower than people who repeated one, and the cost grew as the rules of the tasks got more complex (Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans, 2001). The cost does not end when you switch, either. Other research found that an unfinished task holds on to part of your attention after you leave it (Leroy, 2009). The page on deep work goes further into both findings.
Count it
Your longest unbroken stretch on the main task each day.
Tip four
Take short breaks, mostly for how you feel.
The evidence here comes from a meta-analysis, a study that combines the results of earlier ones. It looked at breaks of up to 10 minutes across 22 study samples and 2,335 people (Albulescu and colleagues, 2022). People who took such breaks reported more energy (an effect of 0.36) and less fatigue (0.35). The lift in performance was smaller, 0.16, and not statistically reliable, which means chance could explain it, though longer breaks did more.
Count it
Breaks taken, and the hours of real work you did after lunch.
Tip five
Set an end to the day, and keep it.
Longer weeks stop paying. An economist went back to the records of British munition workers from the First World War, which list the hours worked each week beside the output. Output rose in step with hours up to about 49 a week and more slowly after (Pencavel, 2014). A week of 70 hours produced little more than one of 56. Factory work a century ago is not your job, and the point where extra hours stop paying may sit elsewhere for you. The page on preventing burnout has the full account.
Count it
Work hours in the week, and the days work ended by your time.
Tip six
Check your progress every week, in writing.
Looking at how far you have come changes how far you get. Harkin and colleagues (2016) combined 138 studies with 19,951 people, each comparing a group prompted to check its progress with a group that was not. The groups that checked reached their goals more often, an effect of 0.40 on the same scale as tip one. The effect was larger when progress was physically recorded, and when it was reported to someone.
Count it
Planned hours against done hours, once a week, written down.
Read the limits as carefully as the findings. The planning studies measured whether people did what they intended, across many kinds of goals. The break studies found that people felt better, and could not show that they produced more. The study of long weeks comes from factory work. None of this proves a tip will work for you, and that is why the second half of this page is about checking a tip against your own hours.
If your day is planned in blocks already, or you want it to be, the page on time blocking shows how to give each task a time. The first two tips are what make such a plan hold.
The myth
The goals study that never happened.
Written goals come with a famous story. Researchers are said to have asked Yale’s graduating class of 1953 who had written down their goals, and found years later that the few who had were far ahead of everyone else. The story appears in books, talks and a great many lists of tips.
Yale looked for the study and could not find it. The university library’s own answer is that no goals study of that class took place. The class secretary and other classmates knew of none. The library traced the story to a magazine article from 1991, whose source, when asked, said he had heard the statistics over the years and had nothing to point to.
Writing things down is still worth doing, for a reason that has real studies behind it. A goal on paper does little alone. A plan that names the time and place does more, and so does a record of progress you look at every week. Those are tips one and six above, and both rest on the combined results of many experiments, not on one story about one class.
A worked example
Three rules, checked against one week.
The week below belongs to the example person on this page, who is made up: an office professional who had been working close to sixty hours a week. On , they wrote down three rules: work ends at 6:30 PM, no work email after 8:00 PM, and Sundays are off. That is tip one and tip five together: a plan with times in it, and an end to the day.
Each day’s hours were counted from how the person described the day in their own words. The last column shows when the day’s work ended, and whether the first rule held.
| Day | What happened | Work | Work ended |
|---|---|---|---|
| The rules are written down. No work at all. | The rules are written down. No work at all. | None | No workKept |
| Out at the time set, on the dot. | Out at the time set, on the dot. | 10h | Kept |
| Email on the laptop after dinner, shut at the second rule’s hour. | Email on the laptop after dinner, shut at the second rule’s hour. | 10h 30m | Missed |
| A manager asked for changes late in the day. | A manager asked for changes late in the day. | 10h 30m | Missed |
| Left on time. Cooked, read, slept. | Left on time. Cooked, read, slept. | 9h 30m | Kept |
| The deck finished, then drinks with the team. | The deck finished, then drinks with the team. | 9h | Kept |
| An hour of email in the morning, to see what Monday holds. | An hour of email in the morning, to see what Monday holds. | 1h | Kept |
| The week | The end time held on most days. | 50h 30m | Kept on 5 days |
The end time held on 5 of the seven days. The two misses are easy to read. On Tuesday the laptop came back out after dinner, and went away again at 8:00 PM as the second rule said. On Wednesday a manager asked for changes at 6:00 PM, and the day ran half an hour over.
The week came to 50h 30m of work, down from 58h 30m the week before. Nobody would call that a perfect week. What it has is a count, and the count shows which rule slipped, on which day, and by how much. That is enough to decide what to do about Wednesdays.
Try it
Check your week: planned against done.
Your own week goes in the check below, which opens with an example filled in. List what you planned to spend time on last week, the hours you meant to give each line, and the hours each one got. The result is the share of your plan that happened. Extra hours on one line do not make up for hours missing on another.
Last week, line by line
For each thing you planned, the hours you meant to give it and the hours it got.
- Planned10hDone5h 30m
- Planned5hDone8h 30m
- Planned8hDone9h
- Planned3hDone1h 30m
- Planned2hDone2h
Of the plan, kept
79%
22h of 28h planned hours happened. You did 26h 30m in all.
The mark is this page’s test: 80% of planned hours.
Under the mark this week. Plan fewer hours, or protect the line that fell short.
- Fell short most
- The project report
- 4h 30m under the plan
- Ran over most
- Email and messages
- 3h 30m past the plan
I kept 79% of my planned hours this week: 22h of 28h.
These are the hours as you remember them. Your real hours come from your day. Nothing you enter leaves this page.
In the example week, 22h of the 28h planned hours happened, which is 79%. The total done, 26h 30m, sits close to the plan, but only because email and meetings ran over. The project report, the line that mattered, got about half of its time. A total can look fine while the plan underneath it fails.
Filling this in from memory gives you a rough picture. For a truer one, keep a short note each day of what you worked on and for how long. If you would rather do that on paper, the time log template is made for it.
The test
How you know it is working.
The test
Your done hours reach at least 80% of your planned hours, on the one thing you changed
for 3 weeks in a row.
A productivity tip is easy to take up and hard to judge, because few people count what their week looked like before it and after.
A good way to run this test counts your hours from what you already write or say about your day, and sets them beside the hours you planned. No timer, and no form to fill in on Friday. Most journaling apps stop at how the week felt. A week can feel productive and still give the main project half of its hours.
One app built for this is Think in Numbers, a smart journaling app with time tracking built in.
You write or say your day in your own words, as it happens or all at once. The app reads what you wrote and counts the hours that went to each part of it: work, your main project, breaks, your phone, and the time you never mentioned (shown as unaccounted). Then it shows those hours over days and weeks. You can set a weekly plan and targets for your hours, and see them beside the hours you really logged.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.
Run the test on one tip. Choose the hours it is meant to move, set a plan for them each week, and count what happened. The mark sits below a full score on purpose: a plan you always complete is a plan set too low. Three weeks is long enough to include one bad week, and a tip that only works in good weeks is not much of a tip.
Here is the day the example person wrote their rules down, followed by the four weeks around it.
“Asleep right at midnight and slept until 8, no alarm. Made three rules today: work ends at 6:30, no email after 8, and Sundays are off. Logged out of work email on my phone. Coffee and a long breakfast until 9:30. Walk in the park from 10 to 11:30. Lunch with a friend from 12:30 to 2. Read on the couch from 3 to 4:30. Cooked dinner from 6 to 7:30. Watched a movie from 8 to 10:15. Read in bed and asleep at 11:30.”
The hours it became
- Sleep8h 30m
- Food & Meals4h 30m
- Entertainment2h 15m
- Self-Growth2h
- Fitness1h 30m
- Using Phone5m
- Unaccounted5h 10m
18h 50m of 24 hours accounted for. Unaccounted is the time the words never mentioned.
An example person's day, read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Four weeks of one person’s work hours, and their walks and runs
Work a week
58h 30m45h 15m
13h 15m less in week four than in week one
Walks and runs a week
0m3h 45m
3h 45m more in week four than in week one
Week one
58h 30mWork
0mWalks and runs
No rules yet. Work on every day of the week.
Week two
50h 30mWork
3hWalks and runs
Three rules. The end time holds on most days.
Week three
53h 30mWork
1h 30mWalks and runs
A proposal due Wednesday. The rules break twice, then return.
Week four
45h 15mWork
3h 45mWalks and runs
Every workday ends on time. Sunday is fully off.
An example person's four weeks, each day read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
Week three is the useful one. A proposal was due on Wednesday, the end-of-day rule broke on two nights in a row, and the week climbed back up to 53h 30m. Then the rules came back. Week four came to 45h 15m, with every workday ending by 6:30 PM and no work at all on the weekend.
The hours that came off work went somewhere. In week one the person logged no walk or run at all. In week four they logged 3h 45m, some of it on weekday evenings, which used to end at the laptop. On the last Friday they also planned the week ahead before leaving work.
“Up at 6:15. Train at 7:30. Work from 8:30 to 5:30, planned next week before I left. Lunch from 12:30 to 1. Train home. Dinner with friends from 7 to 9:30. Watched a show from 10 to 11. Asleep at 11:30.”
The hours it became
Work
8h 30m
- Work8h 30m
- Sleep6h 45m
- Family & Friends2h 30m
- Travel & Commute2h
- Personal Care1h 15m
- Entertainment1h
- Food & Meals30m
- Unaccounted1h 30m
22h 30m of 24 hours accounted for. Unaccounted is the time the words never mentioned.
An example person's day, read and counted by the app. A made-up person, not a real user. Real output from the part of Think in Numbers that reads your words and adds up the hours (version v21), last run on with the app’s starter categories. Stored as written, not edited.
That Friday plan is one line in a full day, and it took a few minutes. The person in this example never read a list of tips. They made one plan with times in it, missed it a few times, and kept counting.
Sources
Where the numbers come from.
Every figure on this page links to one of these sources. Each was read for this page or for an earlier one, in full or in its abstract.
- Gollwitzer, P. M. and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69 to 119.
- Buehler, R., Griffin, D. and Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366 to 381.
- Rubinstein, J. S., Meyer, D. E. and Evans, J. E. (2001). Executive control of cognitive processes in task switching. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 27(4), 763 to 797.
- Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168 to 181.
- Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A. and Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460.
- Pencavel, J. (2014). The Productivity of Working Hours. IZA Discussion Paper No. 8129, Institute of Labor Economics.
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y. and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198 to 229.
- Yale University Library, Ask Yale Library (read ). Where can I find information on Yale’s 1953 goal study?
Six tips is plenty. Pick one, write down what you plan to give it this week, and look at the number on Friday.
Keep reading.
- LearnAnswers about sleep, habits, study, people and work, in hours.
- Deep workDemanding work without distraction, and how to count it.
- Time blockingPlan the day in blocks, then check the blocks against what happened.
- How to stop procrastinatingMake the task smaller, then count planned hours against done.
- Where did my week go? calculatorEnter a typical day and see your week accounted and unaccounted.
- Time journalingThe method: write or say your day in your own words, then see it as hours.
Questions
Questions people ask.
How can I be more productive at work?
Change one thing and count it. Decide when and where the important task will happen, plan its hours from how long such work took you before, and work on it alone in one block. At the end of the week, set the hours you planned beside the hours you did. That number tells you more than any list of habits.
Which productivity tip has the most evidence behind it?
On this page, deciding in advance when and where you will act. Gollwitzer and Sheeran combined the results of 94 independent tests of such if-then plans and found a clear lift in how often people reached their goals. Checking progress in writing comes next: Harkin and colleagues combined 138 studies of it.
Do breaks make you more productive?
They make you feel better, and the effect on output is less certain. A meta-analysis, a study that combines the results of earlier ones, covered 22 study samples and found that breaks of up to 10 minutes left people with more energy and less fatigue. The lift in performance was small and not statistically reliable overall, which means chance could explain it, though longer breaks helped more.
Is multitasking bad for productivity?
Switching between tasks costs time. Across 4 experiments, Rubinstein, Meyer and Evans found that people lost time each time they alternated between tasks, and lost more when the tasks had complex rules. Other research found that an unfinished task keeps part of your attention after you leave it.
Does writing down your goals make you more successful?
The famous study behind that claim never took place. Yale’s library looked for the goals study of the class of 1953 and found that none had occurred. What research does support is narrower: specific plans for when and where, and progress that is checked and recorded.
How do I know if a productivity tip is working?
Give it a number before you start. Choose the hours it should move, such as hours on your main project, and write down what you plan each week and what you did. If done hours reach 80% of planned hours for three weeks, keep the tip. If not, drop it and try another.
How many productivity tips should I try at once?
One. If you change six things in a week and the week goes better, you cannot tell which change did it, and you will not keep all six. Pick the tip that fits your largest problem, run it for three weeks, and count.
Try it on my day.
Write today down in your own words, and see where the hours went.
For iPhone and Android. Try it on your own day before you pay.