What I learned from my 28 days of Productivity Challenge
At the end of January, I was unhappy with my productivity. So I decide to apply some public commitment in my life. I started a challenge of 28 days of super productivity.
So I define the following objectives:
1. I will write one post per day on medium. Each post topic will be related personal development, productivity, life balance, etc. I will also share what I did during the day and how I’m improving my business.
2. I will get 25 new clients to use my services and I will tell you how I’m doing it during the process.
3. I will wake up early (6:00 AM)
4. I will always create a schedule for the next day so I have a clear vision that what I need to do.
5. I will walk/run 150km this month(93.2 miles)
6. Define an hour to get off the computer during the week. 8:00PM
7. Become super productive
This is what I accomplished
1. ✔ Write one article a day
Well, I will not tell you this was an easy task. But was a surprise since I don’t expect to be able to write so much in English.
I publish 26 articles in 28 days. So I fail 2 days. I can count as a win.
The prize was becoming a Top Writer on Productivity tag.
2. ✘ I will get 25 new clients to use my services and I will tell you how I’m doing it during the process.
I Create a tool to promote my services faster than ever and I create a database of 100k companies of my country and couple million companies I will start promotion Monday. With this tool, I can contact 1,5k companies per week with just 10 hours of work.
3. ✘ Wake up at 6 AM
On this topic, I have to admit I failed. I wake up 11 times in 28 days.
I really have to change that. Because when I wake up at 6 AM I felt really productive. The felling of have 2 or 3 tasks done before 9 AM it’s indescribable.
4. ✔ I will always create a schedule for the next day so I have a clear vision that what I need to do.
Every single day at night I used my calendar to define my next day. This was a pretty simple task to do. I create a reminder on my cell phone at 9 PM every day. 15 minutes was enough to do it.
5. ✔ I will walk/run 150km this month(93.2 miles)
Ohh yeah, baby! this one was a piece of cake. I did 215km (133 miles) in 28 days. I use Mi Band to track my steps and my runs.
I define an objective of 8000 steps per day. I was able to achieve this objective 24 days in a row. Check my stats:
6. ✘ Define an hour to get off the computer during the week. 8:00PM
I fail… I believe was one of the reasons I don’t wake up early. I was on the computer from 6 AM to 10 PM. At least I understand I have a problem here so I have to work on it.
7. ✔ Become super productive
Here I felt a big improvement boosted by the days I wake up early, by exercise and by planning everything the day before.
This software is called RescueTime.
January
As you can see I did 146h 49m of productive time and my productivity score was 39%.
Super February
On February I Did 177h 51m and productivity score of 51%. That’s a 30% improvement. So I don’t double my productivity but was a big improvement.
This stats don’t count 52h 10m of Gmail, calendar, as productive. So I have another 40 to 50 hours that I can more productive.
So my final thoughts about this experiment are:
- I achieve 4 in 7 objectives so was pretty good improvement.
- It’s important to define one hour to start and one hour to finish. Since I don’t respect the time to finish that hurt a little bit my productivity after ~15 days.
- You always can get better. Try to raise your standards every single day.
- Make sure you track yourself. Without statistics, you have no idea what you are doing.
- Go hard with yourself but at the same time make sure you look for what you did positive. For example, I fail at wake up early but I did 200km. I’m pretty sure I never walked 200km in any other month in my all life.
- Trust the process. You are improving … you are doing the right thing. The only thing you need is to improve one thing every month. Can you imagine yourself with 12 new habits in a year?
Make sure you fall in love the process
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