Google's productivity expert recommends using these 3 exercises to manage work and life priorities.

Laura Mae Martin, Google's executive productivity advisor, advises not to prioritize more than three things at a time.

By focusing on only three items, you must prioritize and determine what truly matters, as stated in a recent episode of LinkedIn's "SPARKED" podcast.

Martin, the author of the 2024 book "Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing," also advises Google executives on how to optimize their time.

Reassessing your three key priorities in life every three months is beneficial, but it requires a tradeoff mentality. For instance, if you're relocating with your family or taking on a new project at work, you may need to prioritize those areas and put others on hold.

Here are three techniques she suggests to improve your workflow.

1. Highlight your calendar

Before taking any action, it's crucial to establish your priorities and assess if your behavior aligns with those goals.

Martin employs an "eye-opening exercise" to help individuals recognize how they allocate their time. He advises them to print out their calendars from the past three weeks and use a highlighter to mark down their activities. Then, he asks, "Hey, you claimed these were your top three priorities. Let's see if your calendar supports this. What have you been spending your time on?"

The exercise, as Martin explained, encourages you to prioritize your tasks and avoid wasting time on unimportant objectives. It empowers you to decline commitments that do not align with your schedule.

2. Imagine a day free of any plans

Martin assists his advisees in creating a routine that aligns with their objectives by asking them to imagine a day with no interruptions or obligations and then determining when they would naturally schedule three specific types of tasks.

Martin recommended a "launch-and-iterate approach" to determine the times of day when you're most productive. To do this, spend a week doing certain activities at a specific time and then change that up the following week to see what works best for you.

"Following a routine simply because it's familiar or popular is not the key to discovering the optimal solution," she emphasized.

Martin suggests keeping a journal to record when you feel "in the zone." By analyzing your journal entries over time, you can identify the factors that enable you to work at your best.

3. Get preparations out of the way

It could be that you chose the wrong time to work on a task, or you lack the motivation to begin, Martin admitted.

What would you have your assistant set up for you to begin?

She stated that separating the "doing of something" from the "preparing of it" is like a "hack" for our brains, which thrive in a well-prepared environment.

To initiate the development of a presentation at work, you could start by opening a file and giving it a name.

When I have a fully named presentation open at my desk, I am more likely to kick it into gear, she stated.

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