My Pretentious Productivity Routine
I’m pretentious, well at least with my productivity routine. When I think of pretentious, I think of rich bourgeois women in England, having tea and cakes at noon, prim and proper, and never throwing around curse words. Well, this life choices only looks aspirational, if it’s in the early 19th century. But yeah I trump the pretentious list. Here’s why:
Reminders
We live in a world of reminders. Reminders are great don’t get me wrong, they help us keep our lives on track. With our crazily busy lives, we need to be constantly reminded to do stuff. Like many other millennials, I’ve daily reminders set with my Google Calendar. It runs between the lines of finish that task today, take out the trash, send a slack message, reply an important email and on and on it goes. The way I see it, reminders are designed to tell us what to do.
But when you think about it, how often do we remind ourselves to be kinder and gentle with ourselves. I set a reminder to read for an hour everyday, this is to enable me to finish up the books I have cued up on my Anybooks app, books which I’ve been otherwise struggling to read. However, on days I don’t get to read a book, I still click on the "did it" option, because I feel the online articles I consume daily makes up for my daily reading goal. This way I am not in this crazy chase to meet my daily reading goal and foregoing the true essence of that goal; discipline to read something everyday and grow my mind. Again, remind yourself to be kinder to yourself.
This is pretentious because I know that I sometimes don’t take my own advice, hence why I set this reminder too;
Enough With The Productivity Apps
With the explosion of tech, there’s an app for everything now, even productivity apps. So Google introduced these Digital well being apps that’s supposed to help you focus on work, become more productive, eliminate distractions and generally unplug from tech often. I got pretty excited and decided to download it. I didn’t quite understand why an app which allows the focus mode option still allows me to access other “distracting" apps I locked away with just a click. I can’t begin to fathom how many Apps locks or productivity apps I have installed and uninstalled. It’s like I’m a productivity app junkie.
Whenever I decide to take a break from WhatsApp I would go in search of App Lock apps, only to disable it and go ahead to sneak into WhatsApp. This continued until I realized having apps isn’t the solution, instead I hide the WhatsApp icon from my main menu and with a little discipline, I never log on to WhatsApp until my self imposed break is over. Sometimes, a simple "do not disturb" feature on my phone does the magic. I know this but how often do I use it, not as often as I should and I still get excited by every new productivity app on the play store.
Do The Cheering Sometimes
So few days ago, I’m washing the dishes and my mom is making eggs. She flips the eggs and it turns over in the frying pan and she starts hailing herself, "I get am.". "I’m a chef". She’s smiling.
My point. Be your own cheerleader, your personal hype man. The ridiculous standards we have set for measuring productivity in the modern work place has put so much pressure on us, that we forget to celebrate the little wins. It's like a giant rat race, with every I achieved xxx in just xxx number of months, I stayed up for 6 hours and did productive work, I ticked off everything on my to do list today, I didn't sleep a wink for 48 hours to code and I feel fine, my life is so organized and all that yada yada.
It’s funny how we are glorifying our bodies being immune to coffee and using it to set impossible productivity standards for the rest of the planet. You worked on one problem for 8 hours today and got it done or didn’t, hey that’s a victory. You didn’t tick everything off your to do list, or you couldn’t stay up and continue your online course. Celebrate it still, you deserve A for effort. Pat yourself on the back and tell yourself you did a great job today. Don’t stay up asking yourself, what you are doing with your life or comparing, that others got their lives all figured out. Shocker, nobody has it all figured out and nobody’s 100% productive everyday, well expect they are robots.
Sometimes, modern productivity to me seems like, us breaking our backs to complete a task, so the next guy can tell us what a great job we have done or how our work ethics is off the charts. Be hard working but don’t pressure yourself darling.
This is pretentious too because I let myself get sucked into that giant loop of thinking that I am not putting in the work, not being productive enough or achieving the impossible standards I have set for myself.
But this might only mean that I am a human, constantly learning about productivity and figuring out that what works best will take a bit of time. If you want to know more about productivity, this article by Chuba Ezekwesili - I enjoyed reading- is a great place to start.
