Stop reading productivity tips every day!
Patience and belief is what you need instead.
Productivity is getting things done with minimum input to attain maximum output, consistently.
If you have been reading productivity tips every day it’s only fair you would feel guilty of not following some of them. The reason being, you believe that all that advice you read but didn’t implement would have made you better at getting things done. In fact, it could have if you took the time to evaluate the methods iterate over them to fit your specific needs.
Irrespective of the productivity methods you are following, it takes time, practice, and perseverance to instill them as a part of everyday life. Habits, especially good ones, take time and effort to form.
And yet so many of us get stuck in a loop, reading more and more productivity tips everyday yet making very little effort to actually implement them in our daily lives and then analyse their impact on our productivity.
This is what you can do to actualise the productive “You”:
Focus on your goals
The productivity goals you choose to pursue should never be random. They cannot be dictated by anyone else but you. Your productivity goals should reflect the objectives and accomplishments you set out to achieve. If your goal is to make your work-life easier, prioritize things that improve the efficiency and quality of work. If your goal is to understand the world better, make time to read books. It’s not rocket science, yet so many of us get it wrong.
Find your goal, then find the actions that lead you there.
Trust your process
You’re more likely to blame the process when you can’t follow through on your own methods. You do it because it’s the easier option. You misinterpret failure to effectuate consistency as a failure of process. Believe me, this is not the case most of the time. Make sure that you find what’s working for you and what’s not without bias or self-deception.
One way you can avoid this is by planning in advance how many weeks you’re going to give a particular method to see the results. Make sure you see it through. You can refine your methods and practices any way you see fit, but only after you’ve taken the time to monitor the process and analyze its results. Over time, you’ll get better at this. But trust yourself to make an honest effort at it.
Take time to refine your systems
The more you read productivity tips, the more it will make you doubt your own methods or the ones you firmly believed would work. You might feel like discarding your old practices and rituals on a whim, even if they were working just fine for you. But in order to see some real improvement in your everyday productivity, you must be ready to put in the effort consistently and refine your systems continuously. Because without consistency, no amount of productivity tips will help you.
When it comes to productivity, consistency is the name of the game. It’s all about the habits that you build up. Habits are the atomic items that make up your day, they’re the systems you operate on. Once you build the right habits, you’ll have more control over your day.
You’ll focus better on what needs your attention, and the temptation toward distractions will decrease substantially. As James Clear, renowned author of Atomic Habits, puts it, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
Tiny changes can lead to remarkable results, but humans can be needlessly inflexible sometimes. It takes time to make these tiny adjustments in our daily routines. It might be easy to lie to yourself that you don’t have the time to work on building productive habits, but remember this: you always have time, it’s just a matter of priorities.
Time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into into it.
Have the confidence to say ‘No’
There was a time when I used to devour productivity articles and books day in and out. The result? I felt more guilty than ever about my lack of productivity. I was spending all my time feeding my brain information that I wasn’t putting into actual use. Fed up, I finally stopped reading about productivity cold-turkey.
Over the next few days, I put in effort to implement a routine for myself and saw myself sticking to it, thereby instilling confidence in myself. After doing this for a couple weeks and improving my process, I was able to find a routine that works for me perfectly. I wouldn’t advise you do the same and stop reading productivity altogether. Rather, you should be more mindful of what you’re reading and how much of it is actually useful to you.
Make peace with saying “No”. In fact, make it your ally. Saying “no” to new productivity tips that won’t improve your process is something you should be fully comfortable with.
Learn the rules, then break them
In his book The 5 AM Club, author Robin Sharma says that an hour from 5 AM is victory hour that should be protected at all costs if you wish to achieve excellence. The book made a great impact on my life. I’m currently writing this in the early morning, and the sound of birds chirping is a bliss of its own kind.
The author recommends splitting the first hour into three sections of 20 minutes — one for exercise, self-reflection and learning each. When I put this into practice, after a few days of waking up at 5 AM, I realized I could skip the learning part as I already have a habit of learning for an hour before my work starts. Instead, I use that 20 minute section to do deep work that tackles my most important goal of the day. Gradually, I increased the duration of that section as well.
This is something that I’ve done often. I tweak the profound advice given by authors and make it my own. These tweaks work wonders for me. That doesn’t take anything away from the original advice itself, but rather adds a layer of complexity and personality to it.
I do the same with almost all the knowledge I consume. All my habits are the result of repeated improvement. And none of that is set in stone. Once you learn the rules, feel free to break them when you see fit.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment. — Ralph Waldo
Conclusion
Don’t get me wrong, there’s an abundance of knowledge out there for every walk of life. But being emphatic and discerning about what you choose to follow and what not to follow is an incredibly useful skill to have. Your personality shapes the way you are. Let your personality decide what’s best for you, you give yourself the best chance to find it.
So here’s what your take-away from this article should be:
- Know why being productive is important for you. This should be your goal.
- Make a plan and trust it to completion — after all, it’s fair that you trust your own plan.
- Be patient if it does not seem to be working for you. Humans are stubborn and reluctant to change.
- Find the time of your ‘maximum output’.
- Tweak the methods you learn to your needs.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt:
The commonly held but empirically unsupported notion that some uniquely “talented” individuals can attain superior performance in a given domain without much practice appears to be a destructive myth that could discourage people from investing the necessary efforts to reach expert levels of performance. — Anders Ericsson
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