These thoughts are based on me having a fairly unproductive work week, and things that I can do to correct the issue.
- Get all the unproductivity out of the way, early on in the day. Don’t feel like this mix of being productive and unproductive, where you’ve tried to be productive throughout, but then you have difficulty focusing afterwards, and you’re still trying to be productive by focusing on other things, that are distracting you from your task at hand.
- When you’re feeling unproductive, just go downstairs and run around with the basketball, shooting hoops or anything to get your blood flowing.
- Stick to a more regular routine, rather than coming down to eat earlier and earlier. That causes you to lose steam faster, I’ve noticed. That means that you should probably drink milk in the morning, so that you can last longer in the day. I’ve been doing that though, and still having issues with this. I think I need to disable all my notifications, so I don’t see the messages about food, and I’m not tempted.
- In general, understand the fact that you will lose energy a bit throughout the day, and structure your routine to take advantage of that. Potentially do more menial tasks, that don’t require as much brainpower, later on in the day, while make sure I am only doing productive stuff during the day.
- Related to that, don’t do any inbox processing while at work. At least to the extent that I’m currently accustomed to the system, which isn’t very high, I still get distracted while I’m processing, and I tend to lose my focus a bit
- When I’m adding new stuff to my inbox, only mark stuff that I have to look at today as today, and nothing else. Then, I can look at the stuff I have to deal with, organize/categorize it first, and deal with the rest of the stuff later when I have more time to formally process everything.
- When you decide to do stuff from your task list instead of doing the task at hand, make sure you’re sure that the task will take two minutes or less. A lot of the loss of focus comes from your brain thinking that “okay, I’m doing this other task, but it’ll be fine I’ll be back to the original task in just a sec”, and that ends up not happening, so your brain starts to expect less and less that you’ll come back to the original task.
uid: 202005142042 tags: #productivity #selfgrowth