The ‘Realistic’ Experiment: Mastering Productivity, Organization, and Mindfulness

After three unsustainable experiments, I decided to focus on integrating several simple behaviors into my life. It was the most effective one yet.

This piece is designed to accompany a video I posted to my YouTube channel (linked down below for anyone who has 10 minutes to spare), but here I’ll focus on some of the key aspects of this experiment as well as some things that I didn’t bring up during the video.

To-Do Lists

At first, I wasn’t really sure that to-do lists would have any real benefit. I generally have a mental list of things that I want/need to get done, and as a result I’ve resisted to-do lists for a long time. I can confidently say that I was wrong. Writing a list of tasks for the day kept me more focused, reduced procrastination, and pushed me to fit more into my days. I started making time for professional development for the first time all year, I resumed my reading habit, and I found myself motivated to finish my schoolwork sooner rather than later. Though I initially had my concerns about using a digital to-do list instead of taking a physical pen-and-paper approach, I found that using my phone and computer made a lot more sense for my workflow. The only piece of caution: don’t overload your to-do list. If you put too much on the list, you won’t finish it all, and this will lead you to fall into a habit of leaving lots of things unchecked at the end of the day. It’s definitely a balancing act, but spend the time to figure out what’s realistically attainable in a day, and then put that on your to-do list.

Desk Organization

I’ve allowed my desk to get a bit too cluttered this year, and I had a growing feeling that it might be contributing to my stress. I decided to strip back my set-up to the essentials, removing everything that I don’t frequently use from the desk. This is essentially an upfront, one-time cost: take half an hour to clear your space and put things away in their proper places, and everything else just becomes maintenance. For my videos, I frequently need to have my hard drives, camera, and tablet out, and I got in the habit of quickly putting everything away whenever I finished a task. Though I have no quantitative way to measure the impact of clearing my desk, it looks better, and I feel better. I’ve quickly gotten used to the open space, and I have no intention of letting my desk get cluttered again.

App Limiters

In my second experiment, I kept my phone turned off every day for a week between the hours of 8 and 5. For this experiment I decided I would find a more reasonable way to curb my phone use without fully eliminating it — app limiters. These served as a hybrid approach: I could still use my phone during the day, but I put limits on how long I could use certain time-draining apps. The intent was to keep quick glances from becoming long doom-scrolls, and that’s exactly what happened. I became much more cognizant of the amount of time I spent in the app without needing to be reminded, and in the event that I continued to use the app I would be told after 10 minutes that I’d chewed through my daily allocation. I only tried this for two apps during my experiment (and I didn’t put any limits on my computer), but I found that this approach struck the right blend of flexibility and time-saving.

Daily Reflection

The last component of this experiment was mindfulness, which is something I’ve never really explored. I made several decisions early on: I would do my reflections in the evening before bed, I would do them completely in my head, and I would eliminate distractions before getting started. Given my lack of experience, I wasn’t sure where to start, and I ultimately settled on asking myself a series of questions meant to foster an inner dialogue. By not writing down my thoughts, there was no need to self-censor — I was able to legitimately reflect without worrying about someone else stumbling across it. I also wanted to make sure I kept it short — not because I think mindfulness should be rushed — but because I wanted to remove the urge to skip doing my daily reflection on busy days. Since I started doing this two weeks ago, I haven’t missed a day, and I hope to keep it that way.

What Did I Get Out Of It?

The most important part of this experiment was the fact that it was sustainable — all of these behaviors were easy to introduce, and they didn’t leave me feeling exhausted or frustrated. As a result, this has been the most effective experiment I’ve ever tried; after ending a week ago, I’ve kept doing all four of the things I discussed in this piece. As much as I’d like to quickly make radical improvements to my life, the past three experiments have proved that burn-out is much more likely than long-term habit-change. This experiment revealed that trying something small and attainable — at least for me — is the way to actually improve my life.

If you’ve made it this far, you might as well watch the full video.