About Productivity Grids
I’ve seen more and more people starting to use the productivity grids I’ve been using this year to track my progress (which is awesome), along with concerns about them being toxic and putting the focus on “filling in the grid” rather than actually being productive. So! I thought I’d make a post about how I use them and how to avoid that icky feeling that you’re not being “productive enough”.
What is a productivity grid?
Here’s an example of my productivity grid from this week:
As you can see, I split my different areas of productivity into subsections and mark each day I do them. I fill it in each week, then I take a screenshot to post to my language learning log before clearing it out and filling it in again the next week.
A lot of people use powerpoint for their grids. I use excel with conditional formatting (so I just pop an ‘x’ or ‘/’ in a box and it automatically changes colour, which is super exciting for my dumbass monkey brain). You can use whatever works for you though - I used to print out tables and put gold stars in each square I completed.
What it’s good for
This grid is great for keeping track of things. You can therefore use it to:
See which areas you’ve been working on and which ones you’ve been neglecting. This is a major one for me, because I would go for literally months without doing any speaking practise and only realise when I went back through my blog to find that one recording of me speaking. Now I can see at a glance if I’ve done any speaking practice this week, or last week. All in all, it helps me balance my studying a lot more.
Help you decide what to work on next. Sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed by the choice of what to study. Do I pick up my grammar book? Do I watch the news in my TL? Do I read my book? So then I’ll look at my grid and think “well, I’ve been doing a lot of reading this week but I’ve not spent any time on grammar, so I’ll do that.”
Make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Before I used these for studying, I had a similar grid for self-care, which I filled with things like “went for a walk” and “ate three meals” and “had at least one vegetable” and “read a book” and “talked to a friend”. You can see I’ve included some elements of that in this grid, and honestly I think this is very very important to include.
Understand and predict burn-out. It’s quite easy to see if you’ve been overworking yourself. If you have a lot of full squares one week and a lot of blank squares the next, you can think to yourself “huh, maybe I worked too hard and that wasn’t good for me, clearly I need more balance.”
And of course, it does provide some motivation for yourself if, like me, you love things to be super colourful. Do I sometimes push myself to do a thing just because I want extra colour on my spreadsheet? Yes, absolutely.
Limitations
If you’re looking at this and thinking “I should do that so that I keep myself accountable to my followers”, then I highly recommend you do not use this method. If you do, keep it in a word document for yourself. The goal is not to threaten yourself with a blank grid of shame. The goal is, as I said before, to keep track of things for your own benefit.
Additionally, this only provides quantitative data, and doesn’t give any indication of how much you did. If you spend thirty minutes on an essay every day for a week, you’ll fill more squares than if you spend 5 hours on that essay in one night. Even though you actually spent more time on it, you would seem less “productive”. That’s why I always use it alongside a written log.
Another thing is that there are always situations you don’t account for that don’t fit on the grid. Spent all day cheering up your best friend after her boyfriend broke her heart? Yeah, that’s not gonna show up, so you might end up with a whole day that’s blank.
Some tips for using productivity grids
Be flexible! I’m always swapping my grids around to reflect what I’m working on. I used to have full grids for Icelandic and Finnish, but they took more of a backseat so I shrunk them down to fit in alongside Japanese. You can always add in more grids or take ones out.
Use it to track “unproductive” activities too (if you want). I cannot stress this enough: self-care counts as productive! Cooking yourself a nice meal is productive. Choosing to watch a Disney movie because you’re tired and the thought of studying makes you want to cry is productive. Calling your friend and admitting you’re not okay is productive. Spending time on your hobbies is productive (languages and writing are a hobby for me, so like 70% of my grid is actually devoted to hobbies). Of course, if you then feel like you’re forcing yourself to do your hobbies just to fill in an extra square, take that line out.
Keep a written log of your feelings and accomplishments. In my language log I talk about how well I feel I understood things, how tired I’ve been feeling, what I’ve struggled with and what I’m proud of. This will give more context to your grid, as well as help with identifying those patterns we talked about earlier (if I’m feeling tired and nothing’s working and I notice I’ve not been exercising, I can try the following week to exercise more and compare how I feel).
Never aim for a full grid. You should always have blank spaces - you can’t do everything all the time! If you find you’re consistently filling everything in, you might need to evaluate whether your habits are healthy.
If there are consistently a lot of blank spaces in a particular area, evaluate why. Are you not doing any writing because you’re uninspired? Anxious? Are you just focused on something else right now? Is it so important to you that you do it? Have a think about the reason and whether it’s something that needs addressing or not. (My writing grid is often blank or nearly blank, but that’s fine because it’s not something I want to pursue professionally. My stretching/performance grids being as blank as they are though, well, that is a problem that I need to address.)
If you’re not sure whether something “counts” or not, add levels to it. See how I have some boxes marked with a / instead of an X with a lighter background? Those were when I told myself “this doesn’t really count”. I only stretched when I warmed up, I only spoke a few broken sentences to myself, I did half a Duolingo lesson then quit etc. For a long time, I didn’t mark them in at all. Now I do because I was getting too harsh on myself. You could always try ranking your sessions based on how intense/productive they were, or putting in numbers to show how much time you spent on them. This doesn’t work for everyone though and can add further pressure.
Remember your followers appreciate honesty. Like I said earlier, you don’t have to post these to tumblr; you can keep them for yourself (either in a word document or a spreadsheet or print them out etc). But if you do post them, remember that giving your followers an unhealthy impression of always being productive won’t do them any favours. So embrace those blank squares and don’t feel ashamed.
If you start to feel anxious about how “little” you’re achieving, or like it’s preventing you from being truly productive, stop using it. No method works for everyone and you should never feel pressured to continue using a method that doesn’t work for you just because other people on tumblr do it (just like I never take aesthetic pictures because spending all that time and effort setting them up burns me out before I’ve even started).
Happy studying, everyone! Go smash those goals and remember to look after yourselves while you do it.
