Made in Canva
Productivity is such an important word and concept in today’s time. But somehow, we associate busyness with being productive. Stuffing your day with a long to-do list but when you finish it, you may feel fulfilled, yet you are exhausted. Our brain and somehow society taught us that. If our day is jam-packed it means, we are working our asses off which equivalents to convincing ourselves that we are not lazy but that’s not the case. I realized that we can be more productive without being exhausted just by focusing on one thing at a time.
I read this book “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. It’s a self-help book about making your time more valuable and teaches you how to efficiently manage your time by eliminating distractions. I never really read books like these— a guidebook. I always perceive people with different ways to handle situations. We all have different mechanisms so I thought that these “books” are useless because it will not be applicable to every single person. But I managed to apply several tips and concepts from this book that really helped me to clear my routine and be more organized.
One biggest take-away from this book is doing more does not equivalent to productivity as the writers call it “busy bandwagon”. I realized that doing more is for the lazy people and I was like that, I like being “efficient” with my time. I like having a 2 or 3-in-1 task, or I have that hitting two birds with one stone kind of mindset. I reschedule tasks to fit in a 1-day work where I can accomplish all of it, thinking “okay, I’ll do all of it tomorrow, that way I’ll just be tired for 1 day”. But I realized that this is a type of procrastination. Most of the time I don’t really get all the tasks done in that 1 day because unexpected situations always happens or the tasks do not fit the time, and I was just really convincing myself that I’ll get it done in that day so that I could delay the work that I was supposed to immediately do. What I learned from the book is that you have to be intentional with your time. You really need to push yourself to do the tasks right away. In your day, you need to set your mind on one thing, and you have to accomplish it at the end of the day. I’ve been doing this, and I feel more fulfilled and not exhausted because I didn’t stuff a 1 week worth of tasks in 1 day.
There’s 24hrs in a day and when we take away the hours we sleep, we still have plenty of time to accomplish our tasks. We intentionally use most of our time to sit and scroll through our phones which is probably the biggest distraction in today’s time. When people say they are “busy”, they’re not really busy— they were lazy. They were busy because they said “I’ll do it later” on a task that they should have done last week. They were unavailable because they binge watched a series rather than to work on the presentation they were supposed to submit yesterday. Those unfinished tasks accumulate, and it adds up to the new ones we get every day. It piles up and we add them to our weekend to-do list then we call ourselves productive when we get them done.
This is one of the things that stuck with me while reading Make Time. I like being efficient and I thought that doing things simultaneously is the way to do it, but I realized that I wasted too much time with this type of time management. We all need to stop and prioritize. There’s a lot of loads that will be put on us every day. Whether it be a workload, family matters, personal issues etc. We need to catch up with all of that but with all the distractions that surround us, it is easier to ignore the tasks until it’s too late and in the last minute we cram to get things done. It’s fulfilling to get things done but we can do it in a way that we are not pressured. Take a highlight that you want to do for the day and focus on that. One thing at a time may sound such a cliché but ticking one box at a time with precision is so much better than ticking it all but with a questionable quality of work and an exhausted body.
I highly recommend “Make Time”, it was such a great read. It’s a great read for someone like me who has a short attention span and who has a hard time focusing on what truly matters.
Be productive not busy.
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