Firstly, let’s address the title of this post, I really don’t like the term ‘hack’. You could use ‘trick’ or ‘approach’, but hack seems to be the word de jour for capturing eyeballs, and what is writing if not to tempt reading?
There are many schools of thought on being productive, beginning and perhaps ending with picking the right times to do work. If you fire up google or YouTube and graze the endless fields of productivity advice, one common, reoccurring theme is that you do your best work first thing in the morning. If you’re persistent and curious enough to spend more time driving google you’ll dig up specifics about deep work and getting “into the flow”.
To help you shortcut most of the fluff, the rule of thumb is that you should know yourself well enough to pick the right tasks for the right time of day. It may be when the sun is just poking above the horizon, first thing in the morning, which works for you, or at 11 am when you’ll nail enough cups of coffee to bring life to a small tribe of zombies. Timing, understandably, then, is everything.
For me, I should generally avoid scheduling anything meaningful for 3pm, this is when productivity is in the lower quartile for me. Ideally, a 30-minute cat nap would be on the cards, and I’d arrive through the other side ready to take on whatever else the world is prepared to throw at me until pillow time.
All this amounts to a hill of beans when it comes down to the real deal of being productive. Are you sitting comfortably, and I will impart the greatest(*), simplest wisdom of “doing stuff better than you were before you knew it”? (*) not really.
GO FULL SCREEN. I know, rather shouty capitals there, but I’m doing my best to emulate a big reveal, a bunny appearing out of an empty top hat vibe.
Productivity is a function of focus; picking the right time of day to focus is setting the right conditions; it’s having water for your crops to make them grow. Making sure you’re not distracted is the sunshine beaming onto the leaves to give the plant enough power to raise itself to the heavens.
Multitasking is the polar opposite of what focus represents. Monotasking is the way to get things done. If like me, you work on a computer, the optimal way to monotask is simply to switch your application to full screen. Let the thing you are doing take up all available space. Remove yourself from the temptation to check emails, slack, and social media or see if something new and interesting has been added to the internet (which it has).
Wisdom throughout the ages has repeated this mantra, be in the moment, live with complete conviction in the here and now.
It’s a simple productivity hack, but it’s surprisingly effective and probably worth this short post to remind you of its very existence. Go Full Screen, and suddenly your chances of getting into the flow and knocking out something worthwhile are much increased. That’s not to say distraction isn’t a few mice clicks away; however, remind yourself why Microsoft Word is taking up all 27 inches of your vision and nudge yourself not to tab out.
Thank you for reading; it’s been nice to have you here alongside me, in full screen/wide-screen as you were meant to be seen. Have a lovely productive or, even better, highly unproductive day because you planned it, not because it happened to you.