A Productive Week – The Climb #730

Sunday 21^st February 2021

This year my focus is on productivity. This comes after a year where lockdown caused me to be sporadic. Things got done, but it seemed to alternate between super-productive weeks and weeks of no productivity. Going into 2021, I wanted to even that out a little. I had a backlog of things I wanted to accomplish; to use lockdown as a opportunity rather than something to weigh me down.

January started well, but the news cycle wore me down a couple of weeks in. It wasn’t just me; loads of people around me have found things hard going of late. I’ve struggled to pull myself out of this, changed some approaches to organisation and work and have been making good progress since.

By last week I found that I was moving a large bunch of tasks forward but only by micro amounts. But hey, progress is progress.

As part of my changes, I’ve moved my admin day to Sunday. One of the things I do as part of my weekly admin is to reflect on the week that’s just happened. Given how the pandemic has done weird things to the perception of time (how was January 89 days long?), it’s proving a useful exercise.

I hadn’t been feeling particularly productive this week. Friday just proved to be one of those days where a bunch of things didn’t happen and I really didn’t have a lot to show for it. A wasted day. Then Saturday was playing Pokemon all day, and today was supposed to be the same – except the event that we thought was today is actually next week and all we had was a PvP tournament.

Friday’s apparent lack of productivity was really colouring my week, and I think had I not done this review, I might have been very frustrated with this past week.

Except:

I completed two IT courses over 3 days. No wonder I felt knackered on Friday!
I also completed my public speaking masterclass. This has been on my ToDo list for over a year.
I finished the Priest of Lies audiobook and Started The Traitor God.
I edited most of a short story, experimenting with a new way of editing.
I worked on themes of a short story, trying to figure out what this story needs to elevate it.
I started the edit of 4S
I read a bunch of comics as part of my Marvel Mega Read
I did the entire Kanto collection event in a single day, getting out and walking around for 6+ hours
I participated in our latest local Pokemon Go PvP tournament
I found a new way to level alts in World of Warcraft and did at least a level on each of the 8 or so characters sitting in Oribos.
I took 2 further level 50s through the opening Maw experience to get them to Oribos.
I made bags for a bunch of alts.
We got the 7^th boss down on heroic Nathria
I wrote a draft of my swordfighting instructor profile.
I started playing around with some game writing software tools.
I planned our rough draft scripts of a couple of videos I want to do.

Now, there’s part of me that feels I should have done more, but given the last couple of weeks, I feel that’s a mountain of things I’ve accomplished. There needs to be more focus on some things and better prioritisation of tasks, but I did get a bunch done. If I can build on this and not have any setbacks then I should be in a position come spring where I feel more on top of things.

My take away here is that I think weekly reviews are a good idea, as it’s so easy (especially at the moment) to see the negative and the things that didn’t get done rather than all the things that did.