Productivity is something that I care about, and also something that I’ve struggled with. I’m not even sure that productivity is the right word for what I’ve struggled with: some mix of organization, choosing what to work on, finding time to work on it, and then working on the thing that I intended to work on.
It’s something I’ve struggled with both in work context and in a personal context, but recently I feel like I’ve made some significant changes – and one in particular – that have really improved my ability to get things done at work (I’m still working on bringing this to my personal time). I might touch on some of the others, but the biggest improvement seems to come from planning out what I’m going to do at the beginning of each day.
Historically I haven’t had much confidence in the work that I do, nor felt sure that I was working on the right thing. Many of my days have been bogged down in feeling like I wasn’t working on the thing I really needed to do, or like I was dancing around doing the thing I needed to, avoiding it. I would sometimes have days where I got lots of little things done but not the larger thing that would require me to focus for an hour. There was also a lot of time spent after I finished in a given task thinking “okay, what do I feel up to doing now?”
I’ve started taking 5 to 10 minutes at the beginning of each work day to type up a rough set of things I can probably finish that day, and it has helped with basically all of the above problems.
It’s not the full solution to all of the above problems:
- I had to do a decent amount of work around how I felt starting new/uncertain tasks.
- I had to switch from tracking an ongoing and ever growing list of to-do items to keeping a list of things I could do/things I can do
- I’ve stopped treating that thing about how it takes you 15 minutes to recover full focus after an interruption as a rule, or as an excuse not to work on something if I only have a few minutes left.
Still, since I started daily planning I spend very little time dithering, wondering what to work on. I mostly work on the most important thing (I say mostly because I think that sometimes it’s important to go with where your focus is drawing your attention, rather than always fighting it).