Productivity
I’m not sure about the rest of
you, but I know I’ve got a big problem dealing with my impulses: especially
when I’m trying to be productive. Writing, music, painting – they’re all
creative endeavors that require a steely amount of self-motivation but our
reservoirs only run so deep. You obviously don’t just need to be a creative
type to have a desire for productivity it could be a work to-do list; it’s
summer vacation and it’s cram, cram, cram all the stuff in that couldn’t get
done during the school year; or you could, very simply, be like me and my
friends and want to juggle the demands of a job, a blog, a book or two, a
screenplay, lifting weights, and an
album into your life all the while trying to maintain a healthy relationship
with your family, friends, and spouse.
I don’t get something from each
of these categories done every day, mind you. When would I sleep? But it brings
up the first good point about being Productive:
- Know your priorities.
Priorities are everything. We
examine and adjust them every day, but we don’t always take into account our priorities
when it comes to the tasks we tackle every day. If you’ve ever had a deadline
looming over your head, you know what it’s like to take a hard look at your priorities
and start throwing things out the window that are just not important.
David and I once wrote two
drafts of a screenplay, five drafts of a teleplay and one start to finish
screenplay in three weeks. We actually had a deadline of four weeks, but we
finished early and had time to get a lot of feedback before submitting them. In
that case our priorities were pretty clear: we wanted a job and it was do or
die to us. You understand really quickly what you have to do and what you
simply want to do when these kinds of deadlines come around. If you don’t have
the “luxury” of having a deadline imposed upon you here’s a couple tips for
listing your priorities:
- Figure out your necessities vs your wants.
Necessities are simple, but
obviously essential. You need to eat; you need to sleep (a little); you need
shelter. To have food and shelter most of us need to have a job. So with those
things in mind, list To-Dos for each of those things you may have in a day.
Groceries, pay rent, go to work etc. These are things you have to do to survive
and you accomplish them very early on
your to-do list. Our wants are most often the things that we want to be
more productive with, but we can’t discount the things we do as part of our
necessities as productive. Remember, if you’re dead you can’t be productive at
all.
Next comes our wants. For me, I’ve
got a novel I want to finish before I go back to work in the fall. It consumes
the majority of my productive time (that and the blog). The problem with wants
is they aren’t really dangerous to our survival if you don’t complete them to
the extent we’d like. This is why it’s hard to write books and make records and
beautiful paintings – it’s not imminent to our survival and let’s face it, we
all want to have leisure time (we’ll have to talk more about leisure).
- Focus on one project at a time. Don’t stop until you’ve completed it.
It’s hard, if you’re like me,
and your brain is full of big projects you’re dying to complete and you feel
like no matter what you do you’ll be dead before you could ever finish them all
(let alone get people to see and appreciate them). The reality is no one will
ever see anything you do if it never gets finished. When I was younger I worked
on hundreds of projects that never saw the light of day because I had split my
attention among too many things or I wasn’t ready to release them out into the
world yet.
That fear will kill you. I don’t
care how perfect you think you can make a product if you just hang on to it for
a little while longer, if you never let anybody see it you may as well have had
a negative productivity (this idea deserves its own blog).
Don’t worry if it’s not the
greatest thing in the history of the universe. If it’s only your first or
second project chances are it won’t be that great – there’s a sense of pride
that can’t be taken away from the act of completing a project. That’s the whole
reason to be productive in the first place.
Impulse
I can tell you from experience
that there are certain impulses that are really difficult to deal with. If you
didn’t know, I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been
sober for over a year and still I have urges to drink. It isn’t easy, but
impulse control is the most effective way to increase your productivity.
We’ve all got impulses we need
to get a better handle on. Check Facebook more than twice a day? Got your eye
on those salty crackers in the break room? Maybe you’ve got writers block and
you think you have to go pee again for the eighth time in an hour. Whatever it
is for you, it’s distracting you from your priorities.
A good way to get a handle on
our impulses is by forming better habits to begin with. A great way to do that is
by creating a reward system for yourself. I found a tool recently that I use
every day called HabitRPG.
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| I'm a powwfuw Wowwiuw! |
Sloth Demon
This is where your impulses and
your productivity collide in a very peculiar way. I started calling it my Sloth
Demon after a character in Dragonage: Origins. Think of sloth as one of the seven deadly sins. We think of people
who are lazy, don’t work, possibly hedonistic. Sloth is the sin that keeps you
from producing.
Here’s the problem with the
Sloth Demon: I wrote a lot of papers last minute in college. The best part
about writing a paper last minute is that you’re on a tight deadline. The worst
part is that you don’t have time to goof around. I remember very clearly, one
deadline looming afternoon, a paper I particularly didn’t want to write. I
walked into the kitchen and stared at the pile of dirty dishes in my sink and
though, “I have to get these done, they’re driving me crazy. I’ll never finish
this paper with these dishes in the sink.”
Now, here’s the thing: what do
those two things have to do with each other… at all?! The dishes were by no
means holding me back from finishing my paper. The kitchen was, admittedly,
messy but it had been much worse in the past. So why did I have this intense
impulsion to do the dishes when something so important as my graduation from
college was at stake?
If you have a list ranking your
productivity items from greatest urgency to least you’ll find that the ones at
the top are likely the ones you want to do least – otherwise you would have
done them before they became urgent. Now, Sloth Demon is your buddy. Sloth
Demon is your pal. It doesn’t want you do have to do that terrible, nasty task
you’ve been avoiding. So it convinces you to do a different task from the list –
one that’s more appealing.
The really dangerous part about
Sloth Demon is that you feel as though you’ve been productive after it has
tricked you into doing something you shouldn’t have been doing. Did the dishes
in my kitchen need cleaning? Absolutely. Could it have waited until I had
finished my paper, there-by completing something tangible to show the world?
You betcha. Doing the dishes could have been the second most urgent thing on my
list, but in doing them before I completed my paper I was less productive than
if I had waited to do them until after.
It’s a bargain we make with
ourselves. I’ll do something I really don’t want to do in order to avoid doing
something I want to do even less.
Always have a To-Do list and
make sure you’re comparing it with your priorities. Your priorities are going
to affect the order of your list. A well-ordered, organized list is a
productive list.
Take care of small tasks and
chores immediately before something urgent arises. If you have a messy desk and
a project deadline, if you aren’t completely pulled off task by the Sloth
Demon, you’ll be distracted and unable to focus on your project completely.
Clear your environment, clear your head. As
above, so below.
Always reward yourself for a job
well done. It’s the best way to make the next day bearable. No matter how
productive we are, there will always be another project around the corner,
another goal to reach, another land to conquer. There’s got to be a reward at
the end of the tunnel to make the grind worth it. Externalizing rewards is a
great way to help yourself along, but the real prize comes from the
satisfaction of a job well done.
Just to be clear, the Sloth
Demon is not a real thing - physical or spiritual. It’s a concept. Designed to
identify a behavior I had trouble dealing with. Please don’t run around,
blessing your house in hopes of scaring the Sloth Demon away. You’ll have
already been tricked away from your productivity by it.
^_^
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