Productivity Fails

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The first step is the hardest.

I learned to swim when I was a kid on one of the summer breaks. My mother would haul my brother and me off to the early morning class along with a few cousins every day. I was terrified of the water. I spent the first week sitting on the sidelines watching the rest of the kids in the swimming class and my younger brother playing in the kids’ pool.

The swimming coach decided one day that he had enough of my starting troubles, so decided to pick me up and throw me in at the deep end. I plunged, came up, gasped, flailed my arms in panic, but managed to stay afloat. From then on, I had no trouble, and I enjoy swimming to this day.

It could have gone horribly wrong and I might have ended up never swimming again, so I don’t recommend that approach at all. However, that nudge or push from an external source can help you get over the initial obstacle, which at times seems to be the hardest thing to do.

Take a deep breath. Make that leap.

Getting over that mental barrier to change is something productivity books don’t necessarily talk about enough.

The lack of inertia or momentum makes it very hard to start and sustain a new habit. And when you gather enough motivation and willpower, you start with a burst of energy. And in that enthusiasm, you can take on more than what you can chew.

Habits are about consistency and commitment. Not motivation and willpower

Productivity during a pandemic.

I wonder if any productivity books were written around the time of the Spanish flu. There is one from 1908 that I could find.

With life affected so drastically because of the global pandemic, standard rules don’t apply anymore. Health risks, anxiety, loss of jobs, death and economic gloom isn’t the best environment and might only aggravate mental health issues for many, making productivity a less important goal.

But if you view productivity as improving your quality of life and not the quantity of your output, it is even more important to implement changes and new habits that will improve our mental wellbeing and quality of life.

Creating a simple new habit and sticking with it can be a good anchor that can even boost your mood when everything else around you is chaotic.

This blog post for example has been sitting in the draft stage for almost a week. Death, wedding, nanny issue, and ageing parents. Add work and a child to the mix. The perfect recipe to derail the best of plans.

The only sane way to deal with it has been to accept that these disruptions will happen. These disruptions seem exaggerated but I suppose that’s also a reflection of the time we’re living in.

Making up for the lost time.

The number 1 culprit which has affected my habits negatively is this – Working late as a result of feeling guilty that you didn’t accomplish enough during the day. I suspect this might be true for a lot of people.

Working late into the night is a desperate attempt to regain control of our lives.

Working late and finishing tasks makes you feel good before you go to bed. And you stretch your bedtime from 10 pm to 11 pm and before you know it the clock has passed 1 am. Your morning plans of waking up early and the routines go for a toss. This again has a knock-on effect and you end up staying up late the next day. A vicious cycle.

Chalk it down as a bad day and go to bed early. Trying to make up for the lost time is a futile exercise. 

Daily Disruptions.

Unexpected calls or meetings derails your day. Tends to be worse when you don’t sequence the tasks for the day before you start. I’ve started to ignore calls until 11 am unless its from family. And as much as possible, I now do only scheduled calls with clients and they happen only during a time period, 3 to 5 pm. Running my own business affords this flexibility, but might be more difficult for people with jobs. 

Asynchronous communication 99% of the time. Calls and meetings for the remaining 1%.

Too many tasks in your to-do list.

This is another one I’m often guilty of doing. Also why to-do lists are bad tools of productivity. A general to-do list should be used as a catch-all device to capture everything that pops into your head. But using that without sorting, filtering and prioritization make it a dump yard of ideas. 

The 1-3-5 system of prioritizing your daily tasks comes in handy. 1 big and important task. 3 smaller and must-do tasks for the day. And 5 tasks which are not critical. At the end of the day, you ensure that no matter what, your 1 big “rock” is always taken care off. On an average day, you might complete 1 + 3 and you can feel good about it, even if you missed the smaller 5 tasks.

Take your to-do list and chop it down by half, and then chop it down by half again. 

Software apps are not an elixir.

Keeping the distraction devices close to you and try your hardest to ignore them.

It always fails.

DND mode. Focus apps. Productivity apps. I’ve tried them all, but they don’t stop you from picking up the phone.

They are effective, but sometimes its best to just leave the actual device outside the room. If you do not need to work on a computer, switch off the internet and work offline. I have used the apps, but sometimes being a little extreme in banning the use of the device or internet itself might be the best option when doing focused work. Even with the focus mode on, I reach for the phone out of habit. Leaving the phone outside the room is harder than I thought. 

Finding the balance.

How do you find the balance between long-term view, medium-term planning and the day to day grind?

Productivity tips are often about day to day management of tasks. Some talk about long-term planning. But how do you find the balance your daily tasks and long term goals? I’ve found the 12-week system to be a good system that strikes this balance. 3 months is long enough to accomplish something meaningful. This can be broken down to weekly agendas and you can set your daily priorities accordingly.

Productivity apps and tools are additional habits you need to build.

Productivity Tools – physical and digital can help, but using them consistently also requires forming a habit. A meta habit.

The apps are great for tracking and providing feedback. You can choose to do it manually as well. But even this is a habit you have to build. A lot of the times I’ve forgotten to make a note of the habit that I have completed. I’ve seen this happen with my diet and workouts. For the latter, a wearable tracker automatically logging it is a good way to automate it. 

Maybe setting up a trigger before or after one of these habits to log the activity might help. [Habit Stacking from Atomic Habits]

Productivity for a parent.

This is a tough one. We survived the lockdown, for the most part, thanks to the help at home. But with the nanny going away recently, we’re struggling to manage a 3-year-old while also juggling work and other responsibilities. Waking up early and creating a morning routine before the little one wakes up has given me an anchor. Even if the entire day is unexpectedly lost due to unavoidable circumstances at home, I don’t feel so bad.

Working in bursts is the only practical way of getting things done when you have a child at home. But this is hard as it breaks your rhythm. I find it hard to go in and out of the work cycle. A big to-do list just makes this worse since you’re worried about completing those tasks all the time.

Mothers have it worse. A full-time working mom with a young child is a superhero. Many hopefully are now discovering the work stay at home moms do as well. The physical and mental exertion is enormous. And in this work from home situation, they’ve been working the hardest. I wish companies acknowledge this and cut them some slack. 

You can make the perfect plans, read books and watch videos, but your circumstances and nature of work are unique to you. The choice is between resigning to how things are or make small improvements through trial-and-error and constant tweaking.