Breaking the Cycle: Understanding Common Productivity Challenges

During a recent conversation with a friend, she opened up about her daily struggles with productivity. As she described her challenges, I realized with a profound sense of relief that I could relate to every single issue she faced. This shared experience underscored a comforting truth: I'm not alone in my struggles, and neither is she. Recognizing that these issues are widespread, I felt compelled to address them in this article. If you’ve ever found yourself grappling with similar productivity obstacles, know that you are not alone. This article aims to explore these common challenges and offer practical solutions to help you overcome them.

Scenario 1:
Usually, people are able to repeat something daily for a couple of weeks and it sticks; they are able to form a routine. Even if they miss one day or two, the habit still forms.
Then there’s you, you commit to doing one thing daily for one year and the one day you forget to do it, it leaves you and you are unable to return to it forever. You are incapable of forming a habit. If you struggle with this issue, it's important to acknowledge that habit formation often requires more than just routine practice.

Scenario 2:
You want to do something so badly, maybe pick up a new skill, learn a new language, but you are unable to find the motivation within yourself to begin, so you begin constantly in a state of paralyzing anxiety and self-doubt, all the while feeling worse about it every passing minute.

Scenario 3:
You have tried to use sticky notes with bright colors as reminders and set alarms with labels in all capital letters, or written out your schedule on an all white board. You have created to-do lists and they have failed, your brain just processes them as another object in your environment.

Scenario 4:
You think about doing your work all day but somehow you go the entire day without doing anything at all and then you’re exhausted from all the thinking and you vow to do better but you’re stuck in this cycle.

Scenario 5:
You have actual tasks to do but your brain always reroutes and you find yourself doing anything else, unrelated. You do anything from googling irrelevant things to crocheting an entire sweater.

You feel like you’re never doing what you’re supposed to at any given time, and no matter how productive you are, it feels less than enough. You have heard ‘you can do anything if you just put your mind to it’ a million times but you have tried and you only seem to fail. You just seem to require far more conscious thought and effort and energy and brainpower to begin basic tasks.

Here are few things you can do:

1. Recognize that habits require flexibility. Instead of aiming for perfection, focus on progress. Implement strategies such as setting reminders and forgiving yourself for occasional lapses. Acknowledge that setbacks are part of the process, and use them as learning opportunities rather than reasons to abandon the goal.

2. Set a deadline to learn whatever new thing you are interested in. A good way to keep yourself in check is to inform someone; have an accountability partner. For instance, you want to learn Selenium, tell your project manager you will start to automate the app in two weeks. They will hold you accountable, and because learning automation without any practice kind of defeats the purpose, they would also assign you tasks to help you along in your journey.

3. Create a community for yourself. Get a bunch of like-minded individuals who have the same goal as you and create a group chat where constant updates are dropped and actual check-ins are done to monitor progress. A reward system could also be encouraged.

4. You can also document your progress on a public platform as this can provide a sense of accomplishment and encourage continued effort.

5. All of these could also just be as a result of burn out, so take a step back, get some rest; ensure you are balancing work with rest to maintain long-term productivity.

6. There is a high chance that the ‘task’ is not something that you love so be patient with yourself or consider changing jobs.

CONCLUSION
Awareness is the first step to solving these problems. The way out of this rot is to stop looking at these as ‘deformities’ and accept them as the limitations that they are, and find a solution.