Once we pass a certain point in life, our thoughts turn to productivity, mainly as the demands on our time increase beyond school and homework. As a topic that concerns almost all of us over the age of 16 or so, a lot has been written about it. I was tempted to summarise everything I’ve picked up here as a sort of cliff note, but it feels like an assault on your ability to google productivity blogs which litter the internet like so much dandruff.
I took a walk the other morning after dispatching the kids to school, a mouse hole size chunk of my day that I can call my own between kids and work. There’s a lovely bit of path that reminds me of the sort of path hobbits or robin hood or some combination of two would walk on to get somewhere important.
I wondered what important destination I had for the day ahead and began to draw a list of things in my head, sorting them by my perception of importance. This has become a must-have exercise as the ability to do everything that’s required, asked of me, or that I feel I need to do is extensive and totally unobtainable.
Well, anyway, this particular sunny morning, I just wasn’t feeling it. My mojo from the day before had departed like a child's balloon which slips out of one of those small hands. The sense of desire to achieve anything, anything at all, had been taken away on a gust of wind to land who knows where.
All the productivity advice you might summon up in these moments amounts to a hill of beans. Being able to derive a good list of achievable things to do is worthless if you can’t summon up the will to do any of them.
So what to do in these moments? Ideally, one would simply recall where the hammock had been stored for winter, nail it to two trees and pack the day with idle wonderings and gentle sideways motions. Perhaps even with a chilled glass of wine and some generous nibbles.
This almost always never happens, largely due to the demands of work and because if you just stopped in the middle of the week, it might upset the careful balance that has been established as being part of a team or, more broadly, a business. Goodwill is generated by being predictable.
So what next? This largely depends on your personality, but it’s the point I wanted to get to with this post. Productivity is human scale; it relates not just to good practices but to good motivation.
Perhaps one way, then, to free this motivational log jam is, and I will use a term which has always amused me since I heard it; Re-socialise my priority stack.
What “re-socialising my priority stack” actually means, I will leave to the expensive consultant who came up with it, but for me, in this given situation with motivation the size of a small grain of sand, it meant rethinking the priorities based on kick-starting the motivational engine.
Achieving things drives motivation and satisfaction; Prioritising administrative tasks can be just the job. These often small tasks can be done quickly and without much thought; I would avoid trying to get to inbox zero and pick something else instead. Email is a means of outsourcing the decision about what you do with your time (they ask, you answer).
Great tasks are checking some numbers in a spreadsheet, filling in your expenses, organising your files and folders on your computer; you get the picture, unchallenging but rewarding.
Picking up your pen and being able to draw a line through a task which has been languishing like a ball of dust under your sofa feels good. Once you’ve hoovered up one or two of these, you can start to wind yourself into bigger and more mentally challenging tasks which started the day on your must-do list. Progress begets progress.
This tactic for cold-starting my ability to “get things done” has worked for me more times than it’s failed me. But fail me; it has; some days are just doozies. The second-hand winds itself slowly around the clock, and I wonder, as time creeps by, how days can go on for this long.
There is no getting around it; you might be tired, chemically imbalanced, low in the water, blue or whatever the underlying but mysteriously elusive cause is. On these rare but infuriating days, nothing is going to work; accepting this and realising everybody else has the same sort of days and tomorrow is going to look different is the only thing to do.
Thank you, as always, for sticking around to read; it’s been nice to have you here. I’m heading to the hammock now.
I love this! I almost always start my day by checking off two ridiculous easy tasks "sort email" and "drink a glass of water" - just the act of checking those off my to-do list gives me the little jolt of motivation I need to wind up to other other nonsense I have to do!