Hackers Digest #59: Delete Facebook

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Hackers Digest, a feature that explores some of the more interesting ideas about productivity that were published over the past several days. We explore every nook and cranny of the Internet to find the six best hacks and productivity stories of the week so you don’t have to.

Here’s what we found this week:

1. Ten tips for staying productive when you’re on the road. 

Those who travel for work often know the routine. You hop in a car to wait for a flight only to hop in another car after you land. You’ve got to figure out the intricacies of the logistics of your trip—while simultaneously needing to stay on top of your work and remain in contact with your team. The more you travel, the more difficult it can be to continue being a productivity beast. Thanks to the efforts of one perpetually traveling writer, however, you may be able to get a better handle on your business travels by utilizing 10 hacks and apps the writer swears by. For example, you may never want to get a rental car again. Relying on Uber and services like it can save you a lot of time—and save your business a lot of money. To get the most out of your time on the road, you may also want to do your best to schedule business dinners with influencers and other folks in your network. The tips are over on Entrepreneur.

2. Stop working when you’re in a good place.

When you’re in the zone at work and you’re doing great things, you may be tempted to keep moving forward until you wrap up the project you’re working on right away. But instead of finishing a fun project before it’s quitting time, you may be better off stopping when you’re in a fun and exciting place so that you can pick up where you left off the next day. This way, you’ll be excited to get back to what you were doing when you head into the office the following morning. The enthusiasm you’re full of the next day will carry you throughout your entire shift. Repeat the process and watch your productivity trend in the right direction. Inc. has the scoop.

3. Productivity is no longer about getting things done. It’s about having breakthroughs.

There’s no shortage of information telling you what, specifically, you can do to become a more productive worker. Maybe you’re using the wrong apps. Maybe you’re not exercising enough. Maybe you don’t get enough sleep at night. Maybe you aren’t able to bring your pets into the office. The list goes on and on. But is the ticket to productivity really about how to accomplish more and more tasks? Or is it about figuring out how to produce meaningful breakthroughs? If you want to take your game to the next level, it may be time for you to figure out how you can change your approach to work so that it creates the highest possibility that you’ll gain insight that leads to breakthroughs—the kind Peter Thiel writes about in Zero to One. For more, head to the Observer.

4. Stop having meetings and limit disruptions from technology.

If you’ve ever worked at a place where you’ve been inundated with meetings, you know how miserable it can make you feel. You shuffle from conference room to conference room all the while thinking about how you’re ever going to get anything done. It should come as no surprise that one leading productivity guru recommends companies eliminate as many meetings as they possibly can. Instead, substitute them with brief one-on-one meetings and use a cloud-based collaboration or project management tool (like Knotable) to share information and track progress. Workers would also be wise to do everything they can to limit the number of disruptions they face over the course of the day. Next time you’re trying to make progress on a major project, shut off your email notifications and mute your Slack channels. To read the rest of the story, head over to Business News Daily.

5. Your company’s outdated processes are holding you back.

If you work for a startup, this might not apply to you. But if you’re employed by a company that’s been around forever, this will pique your interest. Many older companies are held back by processes and policies they enacted years ago but for whatever reason haven’t been reviewed since then. If an organization wants to become more productive and more effective, it is critical that processes are examined on a regular basis to see how they can be improved. To take your organization to the next level, implement a process review and regularly study the processes that are in place to see whether they would benefit from an update. You’ll also want to start using process mapping, which enables you to see very clearly what your processes look like. That way, you’ll be able to identify bottlenecks if they exist. For more on those tips and others, SitePoint has you covered.

6. Seven bad habits you need to break (including Facebook).

Much of productivity writing focuses on things you should start doing to become a more effective worker. Here’s a piece that explains seven habits most of us are guilty of that, if we were only able to break them, we could become productivity warriors. For starters, remove email from your smartphone. You really don’t need to check your inbox 10 times an hour, do you? While you’re at it, take your phone out of your bedroom. It’s a distraction that can hurt your sleep patterns—thereby damaging your productivity. And, as much as you might not want to hear it, you’ll be much better off deleting your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat accounts. Social media is an enormous time suck that doesn’t really do much to enhance your productivity. To read the rest of the tips, head over to Entrepreneur.