Let's clarify up front, there won't be any productivity templates, calendar schedule optimizations or cool new methodologies to organize your to-do lists. It is all fluff. Instead of discussing it, we're going back to core, the stuff that's always been sitting there in plain sight. Before optimizing every detail of any productivity system, we will need to build it first.
Take care of yourself.
To build anything lasting, we need to remember that we're just humans. We can't get stuff done if we don't look after ourselves. You might be able to push yourself to pass an exam at university, but that won't work in the long run. Productivity is a marathon, it was never a sprint.
😴 Sleep
Make sure you get enough of quality sleep. Just sleeping more than 8–9 hours in a room with fresh air and a good temperature, with no phone around, can make you more productive than any Notion template ever could.
☑️ Set an alarm when you need to prepare for sleep ~1h before actually going to sleep, so you have time to wrap things up.
☑️ Mentally prepare to oversleep the first week or two, while you're fixing your schedule.
🥗 Food
Simply put, our body turns food into energy, and our brain needs this energy to work well. If you eat junk food, your brain will make average or even bad decisions, and you'll get stuck in a cycle of such decisions, eating bad food, and feeling tired.
☑️ Estimate how often do you eat "bad" food.
☑️ Get rid of fast food at home as cookies and chips.
🕺💃 Exercise
Yes, it's that simple, you need to let your brain rest and your body to work out. Your brain can solve problems while it's resting. Plus, it works better with the hormones you get from exercising.
☑️ Try at least a few sports available nearby, search for the most fun for you.
☑️ Consider purchasing a watch, which can track your steps. Set a daily goal.
Focus
It's not about finishing every task, every challenge, every game, or every book. Being productive is about achieving the goals that matter to you.
🎯 Choose the Goal
To work on something, you need to choose what that something is. Keep it simple, you don't need to figure out your life's goal right away. Just pick something that you think will be important in the near future, like the next month or a quarter, and start working on it.
Trust the process
It might be a good idea to start with a goal of getting your daily routine in order, like sleeping, eating, and exercising. It's not as easy as it sounds, it took me two months to go from awful to kinda okay. It's just hard to break bad habits and start good ones.
☑️ Prepare a list of all your goals.
☑️ Pick one on which you would work next.
☑️ Set a deadline or achievable goal.
🛡️ Guard your time
While working on your goal, protect the time you've set aside for it. It's not easy, friends will invite you out, you'll want to play the latest games, watch the newest shows. You don't have to cut everything out, that would just burn you out. Just make sure you do something that gets you closer to your goal before anything else. If something can be put off, try to put it off.
Also, being busy might feel productive, but it's just a trick your brain plays on itself to feel good. Getting your goals done one by one will feel much better than working hard on them for years.
Try to focus on as few things as possible at once. If you have 3 main goals, but only 30 free minutes before work or university, it's hard to decide what to do.
☑️ Block 1h per day in your calendar, so you can spend some time on your goals.
Balance
Productivity, like happiness, isn't a goal you reach, it's a path or a balance you are trying to keep. One day you might have a good established routine, the next day work might keep you late, and a few days later you might find yourself playing games late night. Things like this happen, so you would need to bring the system back where it should be. It won't always be great, but the best part is it won't always be bad either.
As a summary:
- Sleep and eat well.
- Exercise or at least regularly go for a walk.
- Pick one or two goals important to you.
- Maximize time working on things, which are important to you (e.g. family).
- Minimize time spent on everything else.
What is your routine right now? Do you have any advices for people trying to fix their daily routine? Or for people who trying to find a next big goal?
Top comments (2)
Nice and short list for productivity.
What I do for exercise is taking a walk and dancing. My goal in this is to move around for some amount of time.
Walking makes your mind go relax, and dancing 10 minutes is enought to build up stamina 😁
On any point listed I set my stamp on it. It is so true, and it does not take a lot of time.
I assume to most beginners it is the hardest part to set small goals that are archiveable on a daily basis. Just don't stress yourself, start small and simple. Nobody grew from child to parent within seconds (except objects/elements/etc. in coding 😜)
Yeah, it's really important to move with small steps as walking for 10 minutes each day is much better than exercising in gym for 1h only each two weeks