Improving Productivity at Work, with Paul Minors

Our productivity blog series features interviews with leaders in the industry, highlighting relevant tips and tricks for those looking to optimize their time. 

Paul Minors is a productivity blogger and virtual consultant. He initially grew his business on the side and now consults full-time with companies all around the world helping them implement productivity-optimizing tools, such as Asana, Pipedrive and Zapier. Paul has an audience of over 35,000 email subscribers who love hearing his tips about how to be more productive in business and life. 

We recently sat down with Paul to discuss his philosophy on productivity in the workplace and to gain some useful insights for lockrMail users. Check out his advice and some core tenets below:

Develop discipline and focus on implementing the tools you have.

I think people too often get caught up trying all sorts of different tools to try and improve their productivity, when what they really need to do is use the tools they have in the right way. It’s the principles and HOW you use the tool that matters. 

For me, productivity first requires great discipline. By cultivating the right habits and routines and sticking to them, you can be a lot more effective at how you do your work. A lot of productivity issues like procrastination and poor time management are diminished when you cultivate discipline.

Wake up early, take breaks to clear your head and reset, and stay active.

I usually wake up about 5:30am, shower, eat breakfast and leave the house to get to my co-working space.. A few mornings a week I’ll meditate using the Headspace app before work.

I start my day by clearing my inbox before getting into deeper work and client tasks. I almost always go for a 30-min walk at lunch which is a nice way of breaking up the day and refreshing my brain before the afternoon.

A few evenings a week, my wife and I go to CrossFit classes. We LOVE staying active.

Block time on your calendar for critical tasks. 

If you want to get something done, block out time for it on your calendar. Doing this helps you to make a commitment to yourself to do the work. It also forces you to think about when you’re going to do the work and how long to allocate to the task. This is the best way I know of to plan your time!

Try out these tools in the office to manage your process workflows. 

My go-to tools for managing my work are Asana and Pipedrive. I also use Zapier to automate mundane tasks and processes and am recently loving Keyboard Maestro for automating little jobs on my Mac.

A healthy work-life balance is essential when achieving goals.

While productivity at work is critical to success, so is a healthy work-life balance. In my free time, I enjoy CrossFit, golf, walking, gaming with friends (Call of Duty!) and hanging out with my family.

If you are interested in following Paul for more productivity tips, you can check out his website at https://paulminors.com or follow him on Twitter @paulminors.