What is your routine for higher productivity?
I have many ideas and side work but iam struggling to get things done.
what are your techniques? looking for inspiration and advice
I have many ideas and side work but iam struggling to get things done.
what are your techniques? looking for inspiration and advice
Hi!
I fill three to-do lists, “Today”, “Tomorrow” and “Later” (I actually call this one “Never”). Each task must be small enough to be done in 25 minutes, so it can be combined with the Pomodoro technique. If the task doesn’t fits, it must be splitted in smaller work pieces.
At the end of the day, even if you just completed a couple of tasks, you really feel you’ve made progress :)
I've tried something like this. And yes you feel great when you do all the planned tasks. But my issue I had with this method is that I felt pressure to do the tasks on the planned days. And sometimes, I had other things to do. So I didn't do them and then felt bad about it.
So I switched to a simple list of tasks. No scheduling, no nothing, just a list that I fill out when I come up with a task. Which can come at strangest moments. Once a task is done, I delete it. The list also serves as a reminder that a thing needs to be done. Sometimes I keep a task in my list for months, and that's okay.
I know exactly what you mean, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and just stop doing anything as "it's just a side project, anyway".
What works for me, to warm up after coming back from a while, is just having one really easy task in the Today list. As soon as I complete it in a single Pomodoro, I ask myself if I wanna stop there or grab another one from Tomorrow's list.
Even those days you thought you couldn't complete anything, you managed to get rid of 1-3 tasks. And that's between 30 and 90 minutes of 100% productivity.
I really hope you manage to find what it works for you!
Why are you struggling to get things done? Is it because you keep getting distracted by other tasks? Or are you overwhelmed by all your tasks? Or bored? Or maybe you haven't even broken down what you need to do into digestible and manageable chunks yet and that's why you're stuck? I think figuring this out would be a good first step!
Tuesday to Sundays I go to play football/soccer in the morning from 7:15 till 8:30 am. And usually, start work by 9:30 am. Playing in the morning helps me focus better and get more things done during the morning session.
I also make a list of tasks I wish to complete next week and each day I pick tasks from the list. There are days when I find starting the first task hard, I just say screw to everything and somehow get the energy to start it and then it becomes easier to do the other tasks in the list.
A bad habit I have is doing the easy/smaller tasks first but ideally, I should be doing the tougher tasks first and get it out of the way. My productivity becomes low during the afternoon so I should keep the easy tasks for the afternoon.
Motivation wont help you. Most people are motivated, but not everyone fulfills their productivity goals. So just do it. If you can do it now, but don't do it. When will you do it? When you are old? In the future when you probably will have less time than now? No, if you didn't do it now, you wont do it then. So just do it now. And do it tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and the day after that. Just keep doing it and it will get easier.
Split your tasks and make your goals realistic. Getting rich is not a realistic goal, it's also not a very good goal. Your goals should be small. Even cleaning your house is a good goal, because cleaning makes you feel better. It relaxes your mind.
I used to have issues with getting frustrated and distracted (and just going on the internet and consuming). I tried "brain frequency" music and noise cancelling headphones and it changed everything for me. Even though noise wasn't an issue it helped me get in a state of flow. That and keeping a trello board of tasks (and a paper to do list to make those tasks more granular) is now all I ever really need to get things done
This comment was deleted 6 years ago