I love a good productivity read. Whether it’s a book or a blog, I’m there.
5 tips for a better morning routine. Yep.
5 tips to stop you checking your phone every 10 seconds. Click.
10 things all those people you want to be do before 5am. Check.
I know that it is click bait, but I can’t help it, I’ll click every time.
I don’t know what it is. I think I know myself pretty well, I think I’m self aware. I know that I can’t spring out of bed every morning at 5am and write for an hour before the rest of my house wakes up. I can squeeze in some frantic typing if my partner does bedtime stories, so that’s extra time picked up every few days for writing.
But when I see those few words, the optimistic idea that I could read one article and become this amazing version of myself that gets everything done and more, I can’t help but click.
Recently though, I’ve had a productivity break through and it goes something like this: do stuff.
That’s it. Do stuff.
It doesn’t matter if you are single tasking or multi-tasking. It doesn’t matter what you focus on. It doesn’t matter if you have every single one of the notifications on your laptop or your phone switched on or off. It doesn’t matter if you are listening to Bach, heavy metal or the sound of the kettle boiling.
What matters is that you are doing something.
This is the focus that I’ve lost. I’ve become so worried about what I need to be doing that I’ve lost the ability to do as much of it as I used to. Which further feeds into the worry that I’ll never get it all done. Which further gives me the ridiculous idea that reading all these productivity articles is a way to achieve what I was actually doing before my mindset starting to trip me up: doing stuff.
Yes, of course, once you are fantastically busy doing actual stuff there are many ways to become more productive. Deep work is a great idea. I remain convinced that no novels are written in the 10 minutes between tweets and Instagram stories.
No amount of Pomodoro Timers can distract from the fact that you aren’t actually doing anything. They can only keep you focused if you are actually doing a task.
So, in order to get over this, and hopefully do it as quickly as possible before my to do list gets way out of hand, I’m back to tasking. Just simple, good old, doing stuff. By any means possible. The productivity advice can wait until I’ve ticked some things off the list.
What’s that? 10 tips for focusing while you’re cat is sitting next to you on the table making eyes that say ‘why haven’t you fed me today?’ Well, go on then… maybe just for 5 minutes… click…
