What’s the best productivity tip you ignored for years?

For the longest time, I thought productivity was all about working harder and putting in more hours.

Then I started paying attention to advice I used to dismiss—things like taking breaks, setting boundaries, and focusing on one task at a time. Surprisingly, those simple changes made a bigger difference than any productivity app or system I tried.

It made me wonder how many useful tips we overlook because they sound too obvious.

What's one piece of advice you ignored for a long time but eventually realized actually works?

Time-blocking with a “hard stop”

The one I ignored for years was treating the diary like a contract — not a rough plan. It sounded a bit corporate and unrealistic when you’re running a small business and clients, staff, and suppliers can derail the day. But once it’s used properly, it’s one of the few tactics that actually protects profit-making time.

What changed things was setting a fixed end time (a genuine hard stop) and then working backwards. When the day has a defined finish, tasks get sized properly, meetings stop ballooning, and “quick calls” stop eating the afternoon. It also forces decisions: if it won’t fit, it gets delegated, deferred, or dropped.

A practical way to make it stick:

• Block 60–90 minutes for the one task that moves cashflow (sales follow-ups, quoting, invoicing, chasing debt).
• Batch admin into one slot (emails, banking, HMRC bits) rather than drip-feeding it all day.
• Add buffer blocks for the inevitable fires, so the plan survives real life.
• End-of-day 10 minutes to set tomorrow’s top 3, so you start clean.

It’s “obvious” advice, but most people don’t do it consistently. Once the diary becomes non-negotiable, productivity stops being about effort and starts being about control.

For me, it was regularly reviewing the tools I was already using before adding another one.

It’s surprisingly easy to build up a stack of software where two or three tools overlap, some barely get used, and the monthly charges just become background noise.

A simple quarterly review helps: what are we actually using, what’s duplicated, what’s coming up for renewal, and what can go?

It’s actually one of the reasons we use LemSubs, to keep recurring software costs and renewals visible in one place.

Sometimes the best productivity tool is getting rid of three others.

For me, it was “don’t try to do everything at once.” I used to think multitasking would help me get more done, but it usually left me distracted and took longer to finish things. Once I started focusing on one important task at a time and taking short breaks, I noticed I was getting more done with much less stress.