I have been testing and adjusting various productivity techniques. Over the past five years, I have read a large number of books (most of which are repetitive). Here are some of my conclusions:

This is not a question about time, but about energy.

In order to be "efficient", we try to cram as many hours as possible into a workday, but in the end everything depends more on your attention, motivation, and good condition (which are directly linked to energy levels) than on working hours.

I recently mentioned my ideas on improving efficiency at an internal presentation at Grapefruit. The resulting presentation is on Slideshare: productivity porn.

Some key conclusions:

• 1. Decide what is important, because within 5 years, 80% of what you do now will not have any results. That is just wasted effort, with no useful results.
• 2.Sleep, diet, and exercisecan increase your results by three times, because they can help you enhance your attention, motivation, and energy levels.
• 3. The Two-Minute Rule:If you can finish something in two minutes (like replying to an email or doing a chore), do it now. Planning to do it later, remembering it, and completing it in the future will take five minutes or more.
• 4. The Five-Minute Rule:The best way to cure procrastination is not to set a goal to complete a terrible big task, but to spend only five minutes on it. You will find that in most cases, it continues smoothly past five minutes, because you have entered a plateau.
• 5. The Seinfeld chain:If you want to do something well, do it every day. Including Christmas, Easter, and Judgment Day. No exceptions.
• 6. Tiny daily habits:Highly combined with the five-minute rule, you can quickly form good habits. This is very useful; I have tested it.
• 7. Your memory is terrible.Even if you are a genius, get everything out of your head. Write them in a notebook, put them in a to-do list app, jot them down on your phone, or tell Siri. I don't care what method you use.
• 8. Use as few tools as possible. I have tested most to-do managers and finally kept using Cultured Code's Things app and Google Calendar (iCal is good, but Google Calendar integrates well with my default client Gmail). If you understand the next rule, it doesn't matter what you use (pencil or pen are both fine).
• 9. Rules are stronger than tools.You need discipline. For me, this means two things: the first thing I do every morning is plan my day, and I write a brief work log every day. This helps me stay clear-headed, have good prioritization, eliminate useless tasks, and do meaningful things. It saves me a lot of time.
• 10. Pomodoro timer,This is a timebox. For 30 minutes, only do the task at hand, and nothing else: no phone, no email, no talking to others, no social networking sites. Nothing else, except remembering to run out of the building if there is a fire.
• 11. Always wear headphones.You don't have to be listening to music, but it will discourage others from approaching you.
• 12.Email scheduling and inbox zero. Don't make checking email the first thing of your day, and don't look at it in the evening (this ruined many of my evenings). Try to check it only three times a day: 11 a.m., 2 p.m., and 5 p.m. Your inbox is not a to-do list. Empty it: every email should be an actionable task (link it to your to-do list), or a reference (send it to Evernote or archive it), or it should be deleted right now.
• 13. The same goes for your phone. Don't always be reachable. I always keep my phone on silent and return calls in batches.
• 14. Batch small tasks, such as email, phone calls, or Facebook, etc.
• 15. MI3, the three most important things (or change it to one must-do, three should-dos, or five could-dos). Start with the most important thing in the morning.
• 16. Willpower is limited.. Don't think willpower will help you when you get into trouble. Put the most important things in the morning, and automate everything as much as possible (delegate, batch, etc.). The U.S. President doesn't need to choose their menu and clothes color every day, otherwise their willpower would be depleted later when they need to press (or not press) the red button.
• 17. The most impactful thing. Always ask yourself, what is the most impactful thing you can do right now, then apply rule 14.
• 18.Ship new products frequently. Don't over-polish it. As they say in the startup circle, "If you are not embarrassed by your product, you have shipped too late."
• 19. Pressure can work wonders. Use rewards or social commitments. We recently implemented this on the new Grapefruit website. The previous website took two and a half years to go live, while the new one only took two and a half days. We used a weekend for a hackathon (plus Monday).
• 20. Planned procrastination. Your brain needs rest, and sometimes a new episode of Arrow can work greater wonders than the best TED talk.
• 21. Delete, say no, ignore, don't stick to your schedule. I like the last point. It comes from Marc Andreessen, because it allows him to immediately meet anyone he wants. Many people will hate you for this, but you have time to do relevant things. Do you think you will regret doing this in 20 years? Or doing things you don't care about for some people, just for superficial appreciation?
• 22. Pretend to be incompetent. This is a very strategic way of applying the previous rule.

That's it for now. My procrastination break is over, and I'm going back to work.

[Supplement]:

Colin Shillingford, in his reply, believes that the best way to "save" time is to make full use of our time. We cannot create time that did not exist before. All we can do is change the priority of tasks or adjust the order of tasks. Most of us are exactly where the problem lies. In addition, Colin also recommended in his reply the Pomodoro time management method, which he thinks is very good.

Source: http://www.techug.com/what-are-the-best-day-to-day-time-saving-hacks