After going through my daily Facebook ritual, I got a great idea from fellow strength coach Charles Staley.  It may not necessarily apply directly to your workouts, but it absolutely could.

Quite simply, what are some of the best productivity tips you’ve come across?  What helps you get more done in any given day?

I’ll even start.

One of the best tips I’ve ever gotten was to batch your work.  Batching is taking similar tasks and compiling them, performing them all at once rather than one at a time.

For instance, Friday afternoons are typically slow at IFAST, so I write as many programs as possible for the upcoming week that afternoon.  In a two or three hour setting, I can easily knock out 3, 4 or even 5 programs in an hour (assuming they’re simple updates versus new programs).

If I wrote one program, then trained a client, then wrote another program, etc., I would be painfully slow and inefficient.  More importantly, your mind does really well when it gets dialed in and focused on one thing.  Not only are you more focused, but you’re more effective as well.

Think about it in relation to a workout:  You wouldn’t come in and warm-up, squat, then work on your taxes for an hour.  After that, you’d do your chins, then run errands for an hour before you do some glute-hams.

Obviously there’s physiological reasons for not doing this, but it doesn’t make sense from a common sense perspective.

When it comes to diet and nutrition, try making all your food for the week on Sunday afternoon versus daily throughout the week.  By knocking it all out at once you save time and energy in the process.

So I’m interested – what do you guys do to become more productive?  Leave your thoughts in the “Comments” section below!

Stay strong

MR