7 Lifehacks to Boost Your Productivity

Who knew that sleeping, reading and even walking can be made more efficient with the help of these convenient lifehacks?

1. Walk Faster

If you want to get places quicker, you can get a little spring in your step by adjusting your arms. According to race-walking coaches, keeping your arms bent at a right angle (90 degrees) forces you to quicken your gait and move faster. Race walkers also thrust off their toes at the back of their step to get extra oomph in their gait.

2. Keep Your Naps Short

Power napping is an easy way for busy people to reclaim their midday energy. But you don’t want to overdo it. According to sleep scientists, a ten-minute nap is the optimal time to reenergize your brain and get it moving at a faster clip. More than that, and the grogginess affects your cognition. In fact, if you’re “napping” for more than half an hour, it can leave you more tired and with slower response speeds on tests than if you’d just forced yourself to stay awake!

3. Speed Up your Reading

Lots of people practice subvocalization: the habit of saying the words as you read. Occasionally, people move their lips while they read, but more often than not, they hear a voice saying the words as they read them. The problem is, if you’re reading at the same speed that your mind is saying them, it limits how quickly you can plow through a book. An easy way to break the habit is to chew gum while you read. By distracting your mouth as you absorb text, it forces your brain to take the talking out of the equation, helping you read at a faster clip!

4. Use a Calendar to Motivate Yourself

Lots of old-school comedians use this simple trick to ensure they write every day. They start by buying a big blank calendar and putting a large red X on every day they spend writing new jokes. When they feel tempted to skip a day, looking at the calendar can be tremendously motivational. Not wanting to break that chain of X’s is enough to get people to get to work, and it’s a trick that plenty of part-time novelists use as well.

5. Bake Your Eggs

If you love hard boiled eggs, but have a hard time watching a boiling pot while you’re multi-tasking, try baking your eggs instead. Put the eggs in a muffin tin, and then slide them into your oven at 325℉ for 30 minutes. Once they’re done, stop the eggs from overcooking by putting them in a bath of ice water for 10 minutes. Not only is it extremely simple, but you can cook more eggs all at once!

6. Warm Up Your Wounds

Instead of wasting your time slowly peeling off an adhesive bandage, you can both make the process faster and reduce the pain with this easy trick: just blast a hair dryer on high heat at the bandage for 20 seconds. The heat will loosen the adhesive, and the strip will peel off effortlessly.

7. Listen Quicker

Plenty of productive people listen to audio books while they exercise to get two things done at once. But if you want to supersize your efficiency, try this little hack: just set your playback speed to 1.5x the normal setting, to get through 50% more story in the same amount of time.

The best lifehacks are about making life simpler. That’s where Wells Fargo can help. With Wells Fargo Mobile® Banking, you can conveniently pay bills, send money, deposit checks, or just check your balance—almost anytime, anywhere. On your phone, online, or on the go, Wells Fargo makes it easy to get banking done. Learn more about these tools at getbankingdone.com. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. Member FDIC.