In brief

• When learning how to be productive you should identify your motivations and then define what productivity means to you.
• Prioritizing tasks will help you achieve better work productivity, as well as time efficiency.
• Increase your productivity by getting to the root of procrastination and taking steps to make your assignments more manageable.

You might think that you need to get everything on your to-do list done to be able to call yourself productive, but experts say increasing productivity often involves learning to check off the right things rather than every single item. Laura Mae Martin, executive productivity advisor at Alphabet Inc.’s Google, trains staff to be more productive. When she speaks to groups, she asks them to close their eyes and think of a day when they were very productive. She then asks the group to raise their hands if the day they pictured involved watching Netflix all day. Hands don’t typically shoot into the air. A lot of times, she says, people associate being productive with checking many things off their to-do lists. “But I think the point of productivity is really being thoughtful about what you want to do, and if that is spending time with family, if that is having a day where you’re just watching Netflix, and then you do it, well, then to me that is a productive day,” she says. We spoke with experts on productivity about how to be more efficient in a way that makes sense for you.