Master Your Productivity With the Rule of Three

"How can highly successful people get so much done during their day?"

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot. It’s become almost a daily habit to read, watch, or listen to those people, to find out what their secret is.

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a book called Getting Results — The Agile Way, written by J. D. Meier, where he presents a strategy called The Rule of Three, which can be used in many different ways to improve your productivity, time-management, and work-life balance.

I’ve now been using this strategy for a few days, and it has helped me achieve more than with most other productivity-increasing techniques. That’s why I’m going to share with you the way I integrated this concept into my daily life to boost my productive output.

The Concept

When it comes to productivity, a common misunderstanding is that it’s about how much work you can perform during the day, but that’s not quite true.

It’s not about how much you work, but how much of the right tasks you perform.

If you read a lot about this topic, you’ll already know this, but I’m mentioning it again because the rule of three makes good use of this principle.

Instead of writing a complete TODO-list, with all the things you want to get done during the day, you only identify three main goals. No matter what, those are the three things you want to get done.

Now, why does this help you raise your productivity?

1 - You can only choose three main goals for the day: This helps you to keep track of the most important things to get done. Now, instead of wasting your time with the less profitable things, you can focus your energy on the tasks that will bring you forward the most for this day.

2 - Start with the hardest tasks: Since you know what your main goals are, you can directly start working on one of them. So instead of checking your E-Mails in the morning, when your energy levels are the highest, you can directly begin with one of the more important tasks, and get things done much quicker.

3 - It’s simple: There’s not much you have to remember. At the start of the day, or even the day before, you only have to put three things on your list. With that, you have a clear idea of where you want to go with this day.

4 - It’s scalable: The concept can not only be applied to your daily goals, but also weekly, monthly, or even yearly. Let’s say your daily goal is to take notes for the first chapter of your book, then the weekly goal could be to finish the first chapter, and finishing the whole book could be something that you want to achieve over a longer period of time.

How to Use It

Okay, we now know that The Rule of Three is an easy-to-use strategy to keep track of your most important goals. But how can we apply this concept in the fastest, and easiest way possible?

Of course, you could just write three goals on a post-it and place it somewhere on your desk, or write down three bullet points on your notepad app. These are simple approaches, and if you like the simplicity, go for it!

But if you want a more structured way of doing it, to keep a better overview and track your accomplishments over time, I’d recommend creating a table that looks something like this:

For the purpose of demonstration, I’ve only included three days in the list. Of course, you would normally put the whole week (or at least five days) on it. After that is done, you can start with filling in your tasks:

As you probably have noticed, the weekly goals on the right side are always visible. This makes it easier to visualize your overall goals over the next few days.

Also, I’d recommend choosing the weekly goals first, and after that determining the tasks of every day, since you’ll then be able to make better decisions on what actions to take to fulfill your weekly goals.

Simplicity Is Key

That’s basically it.

There isn’t much more to know about this concept, which is exactly why it’s so effective. Now the only thing that is left to do is to apply it to your daily life.

Hopefully, it will help you as much as it helped me! Try it out for at least a week and feel free to leave a comment and tell me if you’ve been able to increase your productivity!