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The definitive strategy for being productive doesn't exist, you have to try, make mistakes, change, try again, to find what works best for you. Here are some approaches practiced by executives that can help you for the year ahead.

1 - Plan your day the day before

By making a list of actions to take the day before, you'll start the day feeling less like you're pressed for time. Waking up with an action plan already ready is like starting the day as if you had already started your working time

2 - Make a list of unique goals

Some managers throw away long to-do lists and replace them with a single daily goal, which allows you to have limited time.

It forces you from too many things to do, pick just one per day, and ultimately achieve your most important goal.

3 - Walk for ideas

Stress comes over you often, and if you do nothing your health will suffer. Walking is proven to relieve tension, clear up thoughts, and help you find inspiration. If you feel your intellectual capacity waning, go for a walk and give free rein to a walking brainstorming, many executives find inspiration there to solve a problem, find the solution to a dispute or choose the right path to move forward.

For Jean Jacques Rousseau, walking "sets the mind in motion", Nietzsche believes that "only the thoughts that one has while walking are worth anything".

Walking promotes concentration. Aristotle already taught while walking, hence the name "peripatetician" for his School of Philosophers.

4 - Know when to stop

We often think that stopping work on a project is a failure. Yet stopping your action, if you are unable to add value, can save you. By becoming selective, you will be working on topics that really matter. And make a list of those you shouldn't be doing in 2021 because they're time consuming or unproductive. Some call them their counter resolutions.

Switching from one project to another depending on your mood often lightens your action and allows you to do a lot more in a normal day.

5 - Do what you Love During Procrastination

To be truly productive, you need to stop procrastinating. Yet you regularly go through moments of procrastination. The trick with some executives is to do what you love during these times of uncertainty.

So you make the best use of your time and keep your periods of great determination for what requires effort and pugnacity.

6 - Shut up and Listen

You waste a lot of time talking, arguing, chatting. A conversation is so much faster when you shut up and open your ears. In these days of consensus building, stopping talking is seen by some as a productivity tool. This behavior can be interpreted as a form of silence or a kind of inability to relate to others. Yet silence is golden, first of all it prevents you from pouring your emotions into others, it punctuates an exchange, sometimes amplifies it, and allows the other to exchange and understand.

Use this communication tool that removes confusion and overlap of words, and instill a deeper rhythm of conversation in a relationship that would otherwise remain shallow.

Productivity is not always about doing, and doing again is being silent in order to move better from thought to action.

7 - Prioritize your inbox

You are drowned in incessant flow of emails. Some executives systematically practice their dispatching to files created by categories and schedule their processing. This removes less urgent emails from the inbox and highlights those that need to be addressed. As the priorities remain in the foreground, you can deal with them more comfortably.

All you have to do is give yourself time at the end of the day to decide what to do with all the archived messages.

8 - Make a "Don'ts" list

Productivity also depends on what you don't do. Some practice the anti-to-do list which lists the actions, behaviors, habits or things that you agree not to do, those that prevent you from concentrating on your core business.

Thinking about these anti-resolutions means committing to saying "no" to irrelevant, time-consuming, unprofitable tasks, often the simplest secret to your productivity.