These 3 productivity hacks will make you successful
Nobody begins each day with the aspiration to be unproductive, so why do we still act the way we do?
We live in a busy world. There is so much to be done, and we are constantly plagued with tasks and responsibilities that we need to juggle.
If you’re like me, you recognise the need for discipline and orderliness in pursuing your goals. You’ve surfed the internet and scanned through different websites and articles, hoping you'd stumble on some tips that would help instill discipline in you.
You’ve deployed a myriad of tactics and ''productivity hacks'' that you learned from self-help books, yet, here you are on a Sunday evening, thinking of believable excuses to present to your associates at work tomorrow for failing to meet up with yet another deadline. We've all been there.
Follow me as I uncover why you feel helpless and show you the way out.
1. Mental overload
If you step into a day you haven't planned for, one of the first things that happen is that you become completely overwhelmed by the number of things you have to get done. This taps you into a momentary state of paralysis. External impulses take the wheel and are conflicted about what to prioritize. Naturally, you either tilt towards doing what strikes you as urgent or, worse, what is more convenient. Throughout the day, you will be constantly plagued with the feeling of being behind schedule. The result is mental stress. Now isn't this uncomfortable?
What to do?
Schedule your day, even if you already know what to do.
We are most efficient when each outlined task has a specific time window. By doing this, we rid ourselves of the cognitive burden of determining what to give attention to. That is liberating!
2. No direction, no distraction
Nothing can be said to be a distraction if you don't know what it distracts you from. Scheduling fixes this ambiguity. Checking your mail during the time allocated for your study is a distraction. At the same time, studying during the time you've allotted for family bonding is a distraction. Likewise, having phone call conversations at the time you allotted for your sleep is a distraction.
The good intentions behind these distractions make them so hard to spot. With the rules and schedules to regulate your behaviour, it's easy for this kind of activity to crowd out other vital tasks.
What to do?
Minimise distraction, and do what you plan to do.
What matters is not what you do with your time; your success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do.
3. Automaticity
Have you discovered you do certain things without thinking? For example, you step into the living room; you sit in the same position daily. Consider when you found yourself at home even though you intended to go elsewhere. This is just a fractal similitude of how automated your day-to-day activities are. Your brain can only focus on one cognitive task at a time. As a result, your conscious mind tends to delegate lower-priority tasks to other brain parts to perform them automatically. This is what psychologists generally call the "autopilot mode". Research findings from Harvard psychologists Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert suggest that the average person spends about 47% of their day on autopilot mode. Now think of how beautiful your life could be if your brain somehow automates your daily tasks. Well, you can. We believe or act in a specific way when we follow a schedule. The more frequently we respond to that stimulus, the more likely we will repeat the same pattern the next time we find ourselves in similar scenarios.
What to do?
Follow a schedule and automate your daily tasks.
Make your brain work for you, not against you.
Conclusion:
To cultivate this habit of sticking to your daily schedule, you're simultaneously trying to rebel against your old habits. As such, you are going to be met with some resistance.
When trying to curb habits, it is crucial to identify the triggers that predispose you to your old behaviors.
How do you do this?
At the end of each day, review how well you were able to adhere to your schedule:
Let's use a practical example. You find out the notification tone from your phone apps constantly throws you off your focus. A quick way to sidestep this problem is to disable pop-up notifications. If you're radical like me, you can uninstall those apps from your mobile device while you keep the desktop version.
The less convenient it is, the less likely you'll be drawn to it. The next time the urge to see what's going on online comes, you remember you have to use your laptop, even if you still end up doing it. Over time, your brain quickly learns that online feedback isn't worth the effort.
As you cultivate this habit of scheduling and reviewing, you overwrite old habits with new ones. The paradox here is that by the time you attain this discipline, you won't need it anymore because a large portion of your routine will have become automated.
A blank schedule and a mile-long to-do list torment us with too many tasks. To remedy this, ClickUp’s free plan helps creatives, freelancers, students, and parents be more productive and give back at least 20% of their time to dedicate to other things. Save time, stay on schedule and achieve more with the all-in-one productivity platform.
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