Where did all my time go to?
4 underrated tips for rescuing your productivity
On the subject of productivity, sometimes we think we have all our ducks in a row, and we have nailed time management to a ‘Tee’. But it all unravels and our time seems to be drowning. These are practical tips to get on track.
Are you in that place in your life where you wonder what you did with your 24 hours a day?
Are you finding it difficult to get 6 hours’ worth of work done? though you use all the apps, timers, and planners? Then read on!
“It’s not that we have little time, but more that we waste a good deal of it.” Seneca.
When you start out trying to be more productive, the 1st advice you’ll get is — Track your hours. And that is good advice.
So you get to work and start tracking your hours. One of the 1st things you’d notice is pockets of time you could spend doing something else. Stuff like reading a few pages whilst in transit, taking calls on a walk, listening to a podcast whilst meal prepping, and so on. Life is getting exciting, You are that girl/guy!
The thing is people then fall into the error of over-scheduling their hours. To be honest, most of us do. Then we get overwhelmed, burn out, and fall below where we first started.
If it sounds familiar, don’t worry, you are in good company.
The journey to productivity shouldn’t be fireworks, it should be little sparks fuelled by a consistent supply of fuel till it grows into a furnace.
I’ve lost my bouts of efficiency often and these are the 5 things that helped me rescue my drowning productivity.
- Different tools make up the toolbox: Your day won’t always be the same, so a fixed itinerary won’t cut it. If you have this at the back of your mind, you won’t beat yourself needlessly because stick to your tradition of going to the gym by 5 a.m. this week. Perhaps the way this week was set up, 7 p.m. cardio at home is the only reasonable way to get in some exercise.
The trick is to proactively determine if the next day or coming week needs a different strategy to hit your goals.
Your itinerary during the pandemic changed, and so does your itinerary if you have kids and they are ill or back on holiday.
If you really want to keep something fixed, try out sleeping and waking at the same time each day ( but even this doesn’t work all the time).
2. Watch that Sleep: Sleep often goes into the bin when folks want to meet their goals. We try to compensate with coffee, cold baths, Red bull, etc. Very counterintuitive;
Have you noticed sleeping late and waking up early only makes you waste the next 24 hours operating way lower than your best? lol. Stop it.
Getting a good night’s sleep makes all the difference in your cognitive abilities and energy levels. What is productivity without a high energy coefficient?
3. Give room to catch your breath: Follow high-impact tasks with low-intensity ones. Scheduling cleaning your home just after a 1hr session at the gym will only lead to 1 result. A massive dip in your energy and ultimately failure.
Schedule your tasks to plan for high-energy-dependent ones to follow low-energy tasks. If you must have them back to back, then give room for recovery.
4. Create room for distractions: Going cold turkey on your guilty pleasures isn’t sustainable.
This is important, especially the ones that map to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; the need to belong, to be informed, and to be entertained. Those are in your hierarchy of needs, right?
Don’t eliminate them totally.
Instead schedule them as a reward for accomplishing a hard task, or at the end of the day. For e.g. schedule to scroll IG mindlessly for 30 mins after you have done your 1st 3 hard tasks or check Twitter for 15 mins after you have cleared the kitchen for the night.
I schedule 40 mins of my favorite series ( Blacklist or Suits at the moment), every evening when I am done with work. If I don’t get to finish my work, well that flies out the window, no questions asked.
As usual thanks for reading, let me know what hacks you have when you find the need to be more productive.
Until then .. stay safe and curious.
