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The kind of productivity method you need depends largely on the kind of person you are. Some methods are adaptable, open to interpretation, and fluid, which is nice if you just need a little guidance. Others, though, are detailed and rule-driven, which is great if you need to be told exactly what to do and when to do it. Agile Results, a system devised by J. D. Meier, is in the second category; it's stricter than others, but for some of us, that's what's needed to get things done. With Agile Results, you schedule and plan around all your goals, from the short- to long-term, so everything gets taken care of—even the biggest big-picture tasks. Here’s how it works. What is …

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Studying alone and in a quiet space is the way to go most of the time—but there are instances when studying with someone else is unavoidable, like when you're assigned a group project. I'm a group project hater myself, but I admit it can be nice to split up the work on a more overwhelming workload. In fact, there are times studying together can be even more beneficial than studying alone, provided you do it right. For instance, dividing work among the members of a group can help you tackle a huge amount o…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. The method of loci (or the loci technique) is a mnemonic memorization trick with a number of uses, from helping people with mild cognitive impairment learn and remember information, to getting someone ready to give a speech. But you can use it in almost any context, for anything you need to remember. Obviously, you're here because it's helpful when you're taking a test, but the ways you can apply it in that scenario are a little unique and you'll need to get the hang of something that seems silly at firs…

So many productivity methods ask you to prioritize your daily tasks by considering how much time or effort they'll require, then tackling the resource-heavy ones first. For some people, that's a solid strategy, since you can definitely get some motivation from getting your toughest, most demanding responsibilities out of the way. There's even a weird name for doing that: "Eating the frog." But you can also find motivation in working toward a bigger goal, so what if you prioritized your tasks based on importance and impact, no matter how big or small they are? That's what the Most Important Task (MIT) method involves: rather than thinking of specific tasks and how long th…

After writing about productivity and organization for the past few years, I understand better than most that the vast majority of the advice you'll get about working more efficiently asks you to carefully schedule your day, plan out the exact type and number of tasks you're going to do, and be diligent to the point of near-militancy—literally. I also know better than anyone else what works for me, personally—and it usually looks like nothing so meticulous. Assiduous preplanning and scheduling can be beneficial for a lot of people, but there is no universally effective productivity technique. If the intricate routes aren't working for you or you simply find yourself overw…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. I'm going to say something that sounds contradictory at first, though I swear it does make sense eventually: You should always study in silence, but a little noise can be helpful for remembering things. Specifically, your noise can be helpful—that is, when you’re speaking out loud. If you practice the “production effect,” it can help you remember what you’re studying. Here’s how to use it the next time you’re trying to remember something challenging. What is the production effect?The production effect ref…

Productivity is an essential skill for getting things done in your life and career, but it’s also important because it can gives you a sense of accomplishment and it enhances your sense of wellbeing. When you don’t get all your tasks done, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and disappointed in yourself, which doesn’t help you push through to finish those tasks, let alone feel like you’re thriving. You should be happy. You need to be productive. Reaching a state of zen can help you accomplish both—or so goes the theory behind the “Zen to Done” method, which aims to help you get more good and feel good about it. Unlike some other productivity approaches, this one has less to do …

Managing your inbox is a never-ending task, which is why we should seek to simplify it as much as possible. When emails pile up, you start overthinking what you need to do—I know I do, anyway. But if you pare down your options to the most basic and straightforward ones, it'll help ease your decision paralysis and keep you on top of things. That's what the "four Ds," or the 4D method, does. It’s easy to remember and easy to implement, which makes it helpful for anyone who has a pile of emails to contend with every day. Here’s how to follow it. What is the 4D method of inbox management?This method of managing your overflowing inbox has been around quite a while and rests on…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Studying can be as easy as sitting down and reading a chapter, but it shouldn't be. I do hate to break that to you, though I'm actually doing you a favor. Just absorbing huge blocks of content isn't necessarily helpful for remembering any of it. Before you do the work of studying, you have to get organized by sorting the content you need to absorb. Even organizing it, especially using the "chunking" method, will help you start to grasp and retain the materials, so by the time you're going through them, yo…

You already know that scheduling your tasks—whether you’re time blocking, task batching, or theming entire days—is a major priority when it comes to being productive and getting stuff done. But when you have a bunch of tasks and don’t even know where to start with scheduling them, you need an efficient method to decide what to get on right away, what to delegate, and what to forget about. Essentially, not only do you need to know what you need to do, but you need to rank those tasks based on how crucial they are, how much time they'll take, and what you'll need to get them done. What is the Eisenhower Matrix?This assessment and productivity tool is named for former presid…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Study methods are usually all about what you can do in your own time to maximize what you learn and that's generally most important, but bringing someone else in to your process can be helpful if done correctly, too. That’s what Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, thought—at least in theory. According to many possibly apocryphal sources, the Nobel Prize-winner once said, “If you cannot explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it. The best way to learn is to teach.” It’s entirely poss…

Planning is a key part of staying productive, but it has to be done right. To succeed, you need to understand why previous attempts at planning didn’t pan out. Conducting a personal after-action review is one way to assess your work and determine how to be more efficient, but to truly understand what went wrong and prepare for the future, you need to dig deep. Try the “Five Whys” technique to get to the bottom of things. What is the “Five Whys” technique?You should know, first of all, that this is yet another productivity protocol that springs from Japan’s famed factory system, like the 5S and 3M techniques. With this one, once you identify a problem, you’re going to ask…

When you're wading through all the emails, Slack messages, and other notifications you get on an average day, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. When that happens, you can might yourself getting distracted and missing important messages—at least, that's what happens to me, unless I have some kind of plan in place. There are a few different approaches you can consider to prevent this, but the "OHIO" technique is the one to try if you need extra help being decisive—though it's important to note that while it can ease your decision paralysis, it does have a few limitations worth considering. What is the OHIO method of time management?OHIO is an acronym for “Only Handle It Once” …

For as useful as emails are, they sure have a way of hampering productivity. Not only do endless emails bog you down and keep you stuck in a loop of endless replies, but the stress of even having to wade through both the important messages and the junk is enough to make you avoid your inbox altogether. There's a reason "answer emails" is always the example I use for a tedious-but-important task when I'm explaining more complicated, detailed productivity techniques. But there are smaller techniques you can apply directly to email management, too. To stay on top of your work, school, and personal correspondence, you need a productivity plan, but it doesn't have to be intens…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Do you want to learn the material you’re studying—like, really learn it? I'm not talking about learning enough to pass a test, but rather, learning enough that you know it for life. Then what you need to do is overlearn it. One learning theory suggests that if you overlearn, you’ll attain automaticity, or the ability to do something without having to think about it, and ultimately retain more knowledge. Here’s what overlearning is and how to do it. What is overlearning?You know something is serious when t…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. The way you study something will likely vary depending on how familiar you are with the subject matter. If you’re fairly acquainted with the core concepts, you can force active recall by using flashcards to review, or enhance your grasp of a topic by teaching it to someone else, for instance. But what about when you’re first encountering a new piece of information and you have no real context for it? A lot of reading techniques ask you to come up with questions or hypotheses before you even start reading…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. Memory is incredibly complex, which is probably why it’s been studied and researched so much—and why researchers who make big discoveries about how it functions get phenomena named after them. A great example of this: the Von Restorff effect, which refers to our brains’ acuity for remembering distinctive pieces of information over more uniform ones, a fact discovered by a German psychiatrist named Hedwig von Restorff. It’s an interesting fact of biology, but it can also be very useful to know when you’re …

Inbox management, like so much else, is a necessary evil in our day-to-day lives. As such, it’s best handled with the use of a strict system, but those can be tricky to implement and stick to. Also like so much else, finding the right system is time-intensive and adds a new layer of stress onto an already annoying task. Here’s a system that’s simple, doesn’t take a lot of time to start using, and can actually help you get through your unreads without overwhelming you. It’s called “yesterbox.” What is the yesterbox inbox management system?This technique—and its funny name—both come from late Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, who described yesterbox as a way of “relieving email guilt.…

Whether you actually go back and look at photos, watch videos, or review files from years past, you may someday be disappointed if those memories disappear forever, either because you didn't back them up or your one backup was destroyed along the way. I know I have done a poor job of keeping track of media as I have upgraded computers and phones over the years, and I've lost my fair share of photos, videos, and documents along the way, whether on misplaced or damaged external drives or from simply forgetting to back up at all. Here's how to ensure your data is available for years to come. You need multiple backups of your dataOne approach to backing up your data is the…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. You hear people talk about working in a “flow state,” but what does that even mean? before you start thinking of it as one of those corporate jargon phrases that gets tossed around so much it loses any meaning it ever had, it's worth knowing that it's a "real" thing, backed up by a whole lot of psychological research. In essence, being in a flow state enables you to work more efficiently and effectively at whatever you're focused on. What is flow theory?Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi came up with this theory in 1970, suggesting a flow state is similar to when someone is floating along, being carried by water: Their b…

It’s likely you’ve heard of the Pareto principle (maybe even while reading my tips on how to be more productive at work or study more effectively). But do you really know what the Pareto principle is? To be honest, I only just started to get a grip on it fairly recently, because it's a lot easier to read about than put into practice. Also known as the 80/20 rule or the law of the vital few, it can be little confusing at first, but understanding and implementing it can truly transformative, helping you to better manage your time and get more done with less effort. Who doesn't want that? What is the Pareto principle?Basically, the Pareto principle states that 80% of your …

To manage your inbox, you need dedication. You need a plan. You need acronyms. One such acronym is RAFT, which will literally keep you afloat in the sea of emails you receive every day. You can combine it with others, like LIFO and 4D to maximize its benefits, but first you need to know what to do with it on its own. What is RAFT email management?RAFT stands for the following: Read Act File Trash. Easy! With this management system, you take the time to read an email first, then act on it however you need to—if you need to, that is—before either filing it away somewhere or deleting it. That’s basically all there is to it, but it works because it requires you to focus on e…

We may earn a commission from links on this page. Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. The whole point of studying is to retain information you’ll need later in life, even if it’s just for an impending test on a subject you may never think about again in the future. That’s not easy when you’re taking in a bunch of unfamiliar phrases and concepts—which is why you need a quality method to structure your study sessions. Try the SQ3R technique next time you’re studying, and see the difference it can make. What is the SQ3R study method?I touched …

Over the past few months, I felt overwhelmed by all the changes going on in my life—and the things I need to do because of and for them. I've been providing administrative help to my partner as he opens a new business, managing professional expansions of my own, studying for a certification exam, overseeing renovations to my apartment, and restructuring my finances while still keeping up with my regular jobs and responsibilities. For a while, I was waking up tired before the day even started despite the fact that most of these boil down to never-ending, tedious, but little tasks like "send that email," "return that phone call," "confirm that account number," and "pick a p…

Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding Lifehacker as a preferred source for tech news. One of the worst parts of reading anything is when you realize you zoned out, but your eyes kept moving over the words—now, you have to go back and reread everything. It happens to the best of us, but it's especially frustrating when you're trying to study—and that's why simply rereading material and notes won't cut it when you have a test coming up. Instead, tap into the power of active recall. This technique is all about actively retrieving content from your memory instead of just reviewing it passivel…