Part 1: How to avoid the ‘sluff-off slide’
Ten lessons learned from my least productive week
A routine is a chain of habits, built one habit at a time. I had my most productive week but let that lead right into a ‘sluff-off-slide’. A ‘sluff-off-slide’ is when your routine becomes a routine of doing nothing, and/or none of your good habits that are in your current routine.
To break out of my slide I sat at my computer and forced myself to write. I ended up writing about the things that my ‘sluff-off-slide’ taught me. All ten of these things could have been avoided had I stuck to my goals, my routine, and held strong in my personal accountability.
“No matter how little, do your habits on a daily basis. Don’t skip twice or that will be the start of a new habit…a habit of not doing your habits.”
Lessons learned from my least productive week:
- Try all habits, read everything, and continue to try habits until you find what works. When you get off track, get back to those habits as soon as possible.
- There is no way to have a successful side hustle that goes around number one. Your daily habits are the things that make up what we can accomplish each day.
- Having a dedicated space where you go to work is more important than you might think. Whether you need to have a desk in your house or go to a coffee shop, just have your space and go there to work.
- If inspiration strikes, go with it until it stops and then get right back to the plan for the day and your routine.
- Routine works for and against you. Choose a habit to be the first in your routine and do it over and over until you do it without thinking. Then add in another habit to ultimately create your work routine.
- My weekly plan wasn’t perfect. I will be making some adjustments upon starting again.
- If you have a routine, don’t let one unplanned day off turn into two. Whether it was your routine or your personal accountability that failed on day one, rely on the routine and get right back to it so you don’t end up in a ‘sluff-off-slide’ of your own.
- A weekly plan goes a long way to getting things done. It took me three weeks before I got to my most detailed weekly plan, but that led to my most productive week.
- A rest day is important to recharge or for unplanned events that pop up. I never planned for a rest day and that would have helped to have a day to recharge.
- Work no matter how you feel. If a successful side hustle or goal is important to you we must work no matter if we are tired, already feel accomplished, or just don’t feel like it. There is always something we can do. This is a MUST.
I ended the weekend thinking it would be easy to get back to my routine Monday morning, but the sluff-off-slide I had already started was much easier to keep than restarting my work routine.
These 10 things I learned from my sluff-off-slide brought me to a couple conclusions:
Part 1: My routine is my most powerful productivity tool right now.
Part 2: My personal accountability is there when my routine fails. Part 2 is about how to get and stay strong with personal accountability.
My personal accountability started the productive routine I had going. When we fail to keep to our routine, personal accountability needs to kick in so one day off does not become two. Our routine needs to kick in to make personal accountability easier.
The routine I had:
- Get enough sleep
- Sit in my designated “work area” and work. I will write out my goals and priorities for the day.
- Work until quitting time (any time between 5–7pm, or when I am confidently set up for a successful tomorrow)
- Keep music on (my favorite flow trigger, more on flow triggers here)
- Log my time until at least 4 pm.
- When I’m not writing, I'm reading for ideation.
- Work until quitting time on something productive.
- Set myself up for a successful tomorrow.
I broke my routine slide by sitting in my “work area” and writing about the thing that is occupying my mind. I sat in front of this template, which originally started my most productive week, and just wrote. I am writing about personal experience, something I could finish without thinking too hard.
By reminding myself of why I am writing in the first place and writing about what I know, I am not only creating a “quick win” to stop the slide, I am getting back into the routine that started it all.
How I improved my routine:
- Write down my big goal as a reminder of why I am doing the work, the days priorities, and at the end of the day I will do an evening review of the day.
- I will get a full night’s sleep.
- I have a planned rest day
How to create YOUR routine
A routine is built one habit at a time. A habit is something completed without thinking about it. Whether you want to try:
- Wake up an hour earlier,
- Have a dedicated workspace,
- First thing in the morning, write down your goals and priorities,
- Try a flow trigger to incite a flow session,
- No social media, email, or distractions (until a certain time),
- Do your MIT (most important task) first thing,
- not multitasking, or
- Try the ROI rubric to name your priorities.
Any one of these habits would be a great place to start. Choose one habit to be the first in your chain that will make up your routine. Wouldn’t it be great to make less decisions about what to do next during your workday by having a solid routine that you do basically on autopilot?
How to avoid the 'sluff-off-slide’
When my routine failed me, I should have relied on my personal accountability to get me back on track.
Check out Part 2: How to Stop a ‘Sluff-off-Slide’ here, where I talk about cultivating personal accountability, a necessary skill for pursuing any side hustle or personal goals.
When your routine fails, personal accountability needs to get us back on track as soon as possible. When personal accountability fails us, we need to rely on our routine to get us back on track. After the least productive week that I have had in a while, I have realized it is these two important things that led me to be productive every day.
