.The problem
You spend your days wasting away time, right? Productivity, what does that even mean? You got that one thing you should be working on, but you don’t feel like doing it. Where do you even begin doing that thing?! You tell yourself: “I don’t feel like doing it today, I’m sure that tomorrow I’ll feel more productive”.
WRONG! That’s probably what you said yesterday, and will say tomorrow as well (and you know I’m right). So how do we solve this? How do we give our days more structure? How do we motivate ourselves to do anything?
My situation
Everyone will at some point be in the situation described above. I knew what I should be working on. I knew more or less what I needed to do, but in a much more real sense I had no idea what to do. For me, my productivity low was in the middle of my graduation project when I was writing a program in Java. Every day was the same: I woke up too late, didn’t take time to get a decent breakfast, strolled around on YouTube for way too long, lunchtime, more YouTube. “Oh hey, I’ll be more motivated tomorrow!”. Since I didn’t make any decent progress on my project something had to change.
One day, I stumbled upon a video about productivity during one of my daily YouTube strolls. In a way this was my wake-up call. It is funny that I wanted to learn something about productivity, while being the opposite of productive. Now there are multiple ways to improve your productivity. Below I will share one solution I’m currently using and one that has helped me a lot getting more stuff done.
(One) Solution to improve productivity
One solution for our productivity empty days is to make a daily planning. Make this planning every night before going to bed. Ideally the planning is made roughly two hours before going to bed, when we are not (too) tired yet. How does such a daily planning look like. Below I show my planning of tomorrow’s day:
- 8:00 Wake up + prepare breakfast
- 9:00 Watch some TED talks about productivity
- 10:00 Re-read/write parts for discussion chapter of my thesis
- 11:00 Find related scientific articles which I can quote in my thesis
- 12:00 Lunch
- 13:30 Bring grandparents to the airport
- 14:30 Pick up sister at parents and drive back home
- 16:00 Do groceries
- 17:00 Start cooking + dinner
- 19:00 Buffer for doing things I didn’t finish today
- 21:00 Free time
Now I know you’ll probably be thinking: “how is a daily planning going to help me?” Well, in my opinion making a daily planning helps us in two major ways.
First of all: We define what we have to do tomorrow. There is so much stuff we can do every day, but we only have 24 (well, minus the hours we sleep) to do these things. This means we have to choose the things we want to do. Try to make the planning in such a way that if we manage to finish everything on our planning, we consider our day a productive day.
Secondly, by just writing what we want to get done down, we – quite literally – give our day structure. As we can see in the planning above, all points have an assigned time. I found that by writing a starting time for each activity it was easier for me to actually start working on the thing I planned. Sure, not all activities take the full time I plan for it. This is mostly the time I’m not doing anything and start strolling YouTube again. Say it’s 10:55 and finished my discussion part of my thesis. I look at my planning, which shows me I should be working on finding research papers in five minutes. Now I know I have five more minutes to do nonsense before starting on the next activity. There must be a way to solve this moment of lesser productivity, but I’ll leave that for a future post.
Conclusion
Will this solution work wonders? Yes and no, it depends how we define a wonder. Would it be a wonder if we get twice as much done as today? I believe that by adapting this method, we’ll be able to get twice as much work done. It never hurts to try, so start right-away! Grab yourself a piece of paper and a pen and start planning!
I’m eager to hear your methods of getting things done. Did this method help you? Let me know in the comment section! I’ll make sure to read all of your comments!