Small discoveries on productivity
Getting started, the simple action of having something to do/ wanting to do something and actually doing it, is one the hardest tasks I face every single day.
Upon some reflection, I found a few things, I wouldn’t call them strategies exactly, just things that allow me to carry out my work, specially now that I have a full time job for the first time in years.
1. Having my own, mostly private space.
I’m a slob, the biggest slob ever to walk the earth. I come in, completely invade a space and then pick up and leave everything bare. I need to be able to do this or I’m uncomfortable and completely unproductive. Also, I need to have privacy, that is, not having someone behind my back constantly watching me. Yes, I know people aren’t actually watching me, for the most part, but it FEELS like I’m being watched and then I freeze in panic and want to drop everything and hide.
Now that I have a semi-private space, with my own computer, my own desk and somewhat closed off, I can actually work at my own rythm, mostly without unnecessary stress.
2. It’s ok to “jump” in between tasks.
I am physically incapable of sustaining attention on one thing for too long. I get uncomfortable, I feel too hot, or too cold, or I want to kick and scream and maybe cry.
For years, I berated myself for this. I thought I was being lazy or irresponsible, that “normal”, “productive”, “responsible” people just did the thing effortlessly and without whining. I thought I HAD to “train” myself to do this, somehow. Of course, every time I tried, I failed miserably, and then proceeded to feel like absolute shit. Also, I never got anything done.
Recently I figured out (finally) that I don’t have to train myself to do anything. This is the way my brain naturally works, I have to allow it to do it’s own thing in order to get stuff done. This means A LOT of distractions, A LOT of inconsistencies. I’ll be writing or checking emails and suddenly turn around and write something down in my journal or feel the uncontrollable impulse to go get coffee. As long as I remind myself to come back to the task at hand, I just roll with it, let the impulse come and go, and then actually finish what I’m doing.
One of the things that stressed me out the most was not being able to start anything because it would seem like such a huge task that I didn’t even know where to start. So I just avoided it until it was unavoidable and then did it all wrong.
Lately, I’ve been trying another approach: little by little. Of course there are urgent things that have to be done now but, if I have the chance, I mull it over a little, break it down into tiny (and I mean TINY) pieces and then take those on, one at a time. If something isn’t urgent now, but it still has to get done, I just work on it the littlest bit possible, move on to something else (work related or no), and come back later. By the time I finally have to turn it in, it’s been completed, checked, double checked, triple checked and my stress levels are mostly kept under control.
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