How to be more productive?

This question always makes me remember a Hadith saying “Allah loves that anything you do, you do it with excellence.”

Being a Muslim, making myself a productive human being is an obligation for me. My parents inculcated few tips to improve my productivity which I am sharing with you today.

Start your day with Fajar

My father says, “The nations, who wakes up the sun, make progress by leaps and bounds and the nations, who are waken up by the sun, get destroyed.”

Make Fajar prayer a necessary part of your morning routine and if you are not a Muslim, meditate for at least half an hour.

Waking up early and the morning meditation will increase your productivity level by 200%. It reduces your stress level by providing you a lot of time to perform all your morning rituals and saving you from unnecessary rush.

Plan your time effectively

Planning is something really important if you want to increase your productivity. It will save a lot of time for you.

Schedule everything and try to stick to all of your plans. Do remember, the plan you make should be practicable and flexibility is the key requirement to make it practicable.

Remove later from your dictionary

A task that is necessary to be done, do it ASAP. There should be no LATER. If you are to do it tomorrow, do it today. If you are To do it today, do it now.

Postponing things will bear no fruit. In fact, it will keep on making it more and more difficult for you.

Eat less but healthy

My mother taught me never to eat to my fill.

Eating to your fill makes you sluggish and lethargic. Always eat 2/3 of your hunger.

But you must eat healthy food. As the famous proverb says, “Sound body has a sound mind.”

Meat, lentils, vegetables, fruits and cereals all are necessary for your body. Just have a balanced amount of them all.

Keep yourself fit. Physical activities are essential for everyone. Our daily plans must have minimum thirty minutes of any kind of physical activity.

Be proactive

My teacher used to say, “Hope for the best. But prepare for the worst.”

For being productive proactivity is the key. We should hope for the best but we must prepare ourselves for all the possible situations.

Seek knowledge

One must have a never ending thirst of knowledge. You should never stop learning no matter what.

Remember the saying? “Seek knowledge from your cradle to grave.”

Be greedy for knowledge. Grab a piece of it wherever you find it.

Read a lot. Reading will make you more and more productive everyday.

Be resourceful. We are living in an era of Science and Technology. Seeking knowledge is no more difficult for us. Everything is just one click away. All we have to do is always stay hungry for more and more information and knowledge.

Be self-reflective

My father used to ask whatever we did in a day before sleeping. And everytime he used to ask it, he would later say, “Today I am doing it for you. Tomorrow you will do it all by yourself. Remember you need to quit the things telling about which makes you feel ashamed.”

Self-reflection or self-assessment adds a lot in our productivity. Everytime I do it, I get to know, where I went wrong; where I was right; which things need to be prioritized and which I should quit.

Give your best

No matter what you are doing, always try to give your best. Give everything you are doing full of your concentration.

Remember quality over quantity. Doing one thing perfectly is thousand times better than doing a lot of mediocre jobs.

That's all from my side. May Allah help us in acting upon all these golden rules.