Monday 17th May 2021
At the start of each week, as part of my admin I declare what my focus is for the week. It’s little more than a mind trick but I find it helps me keep my focus on the bigger goals as I work through the smaller ones over the course of the week.
My days have felt a bit sporadic the last couple of weeks. Couple that with the fact that I’ve fallen a little off the productivity bandwagon due to having some big projects I needed to focus on, and it’s no wonder that I put Productivity as my focus for this week.
Over the years, I’ve been pretty good at documenting what I’ve done. I task everything in todosit, and it’s a simple matter to go back over any week and see all the completed tasks, but I wanted more micro control.
I have a database in Notion that takes my yearly goals and breaks them down into weeks. At the start of each week I choose what milestones and tasks I want to focus on, and then at the end of the week I review to complete a record of my highs and lows.
But I’m wanting a little more hour by hour accountability. I can often find myself getting lost down a Youtube Rabbit hole or Warcraft sessions that are a little more than just a quick quest.
So I’ve built myself a new template that lists the day and allows me to note what I worked on hour by hour.
I don’t believe you can be 100% productive all the time. The human concentration span is only 30-40 minutes, and during the pandemic I’ve seen mine shrink to 15-20 minutes. But if I can get 20 productive minutes to every 40 minutes of less productive minutes, I’d be happy.
So the daily log is a little bit of self accountability to myself, as well as way to identify not only those things I’ve worked on, but those things that eat my time.
Today was the first time using it and I was genuinely surprised how productive I was. Whilst I didn’t feel it – I felt I wasted a lot of time with rabbit holes in the morning and then got roped into a prolonged Warcraft session this afternoon – I actually got a lot done with productive work in every hour.
I think it also encouraged me to work in smaller chunks. I might do 20 minutes of writing so to ensure that hour where I’d spent 40 minutes being unproductive was not a total write off. I got more writing done today than I have done in a long while.
I ended up being quite pleased with today, despite World of Warcraft taking up a lot of of my free time. If there’s one thing better than being productive on a productive day, it’s being productive on an unproductive one.
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