The 1 Thing That Turns Productivity into Time-Wasting (How To Avoid It)
This is the one nobody wants to admit to
When someone says “productivity” everyone thinks ‘neat and tidy’.
Just look at the image below. The upsides are obvious:
Everything is easy to find
It looks and feels great
It’s fun to do
The last one is the down-side. You can get carried away, spending hours making sure everything is aesthetic and pleasant. But what about the work you were meant to be doing?
Part 1: The Issue
So you’ve spent 2 hours arranging your Notion into something that resembles the Sistine Chapel. Do you feel good?
The term ‘diminishing returns’ is what you need to think about. If I spend 2 hours organising, and 1 producing, thats a ratio of 2:1. The famous ‘sharpening the axe’ analogy coined by Abraham Lincoln is the impetus why most people feel justified in pumping hours into making things look nice.
I’m not saying don’t sharpen the axe.
I’m saying distinguish between sharpening and fingering your butt.
I define Fingering Your Butt (FYB) as ‘The act of time-wasting by means of conducting administration for the purposes of vanity and avoidance’. Sharpening the axe distinguishes itself by its utility in making future tasks more streamlined. As you can see, one is done out of forethought and diligence, the other out of foolishness.
And only fools have time to FYB.
Part 2: The Solution
In essence, our problem is a procrastination issue. The ways you solve such an issue (thoroughly) is by abstracting it into 3 major magnifications.
1x – The pattern of your life
If you don’t fix the underlying queries here, then your solutions are just bandaids.
Practice some radical honesty: Do you not want to work? Does the thought of work make you unhappy? Why does FYB seem more fun than doing what you’re meant to be doing? I’m like a Gestapo agent right now, with a gun to your head – Confess!
You need to decide whether what you’re doing is right for you.
If it’s not, then the problem isn’t procrastination.
Everyone labels this as the anti-Christ of productivity, when in reality, it’s just your mind telling you it’s not onboard with what you’re doing. Maybe you need a break, maybe what you’re doing isn’t that important, maybe your entire career is wrong for you. The human brain is a supercomputer, it’s evaluating everything all the time. Aversion is just one of its techniques to get its point across.
Work is something you should love to do (for the most part), if day-in day-out you’re struggling to make it happen, it’s time to re-think.
Contrary to popular opinion, the thing you do everyday to make a living shouldn’t cause you emotion pain.
Most likely you’ve been conditioned to associate work with ‘Ugh!’. If I was a conspiracy-theorist, I would say thats so they can keep you in an unpleasant job, “if all works sucks, why bother seeking anything new?”. The internet has blown the roof off this approach, you can go see for yourself all the people doing stuff they like, and making a good livings.
Not saying this is you, but if it is, there’s no excuses anymore – chase your passion.
50x – How You Work
You’re sure you’re meant to be doing whatever ‘this’ is. But still struggling.
50x zoom is where we look at habits, your environment, and work ethic. The fundamentals for productive work are as follows:
Mindset
Get yourself into a positive state of mind where you want to work, enthusiasm is the highest attitude you can achieve
Run, walk, write, meditate, manifest, review goals. Do whatever you need to reach this point
Invest time and effort into this stage, if you can go in with the correct mindset, the rest is easy
Environment
Optimise this to keep your mindset in place
Remove all distractions you know will throw you off: phone and people etc
Get everything you need where you need it, having to mess about will again throw you off
Bring awareness into everything
When you fall out of presence, you give the little devils opportunity to invade your life
You let your mind wonder off topic, next your thinking about something that happened earlier, then your opening emails to double check things, now your off mission.
It’s a downward spiral, stay focused
Work to manageable timeframes
If you go for too long, you have every right to lose focus
Try these techniques
Pomodoro (good for studying)
25m work – 5m break – 25m – 5m – 25m – 5m – 25m – Long break 20m – repeat
45 minute chunks, break 10 mins (good for getting big tasks done)
Go off your own intuition, if you feel like you can work, work, if you feel like you need a break, have a break
If you have these locked down, and are still procrastinating, consider going back to 1x zoom.
100x – The Problem in its Finest Detail
Let’s really breaking down the issue.
You’re trying to write cold emails, lots of them, to send to potentially thousands. You made the smart choice to create templates to save you time. This is where the danger begins.
You get carried away, and begin to spiral down into obsessive detail.
You’re on the path to destruction.
How do we save ourselves? By realising 2 things: 1) What you’re avoiding is what you need to do. You’re participating escapism by procrastinating, if you don’t want to do it, it’s probably important. 2) The bigger picture. If you stepped back and looked objectively at your life at this point, you would see that what you’re currently doing isn’t worth your time.
Stay aware, evaluate everything you do, don’t fall victim to superfluous productivity. Get it done.