Hello everyone,

today, I want to share my method for being productive with you. I only established it this week, so I don’t know how well it works long-term yet but it helped me to study for my exams very well so far.

It consists of three techniques, which can be summarized as “plan”, “execute” and “don’t distract”. This combination should stop you from procrastination and make you sit down and do your work.

Plan: Divide-And-Conquer Strategy

One major reason why we procrastinate is that our tasks are unconcrete and therefore feel big and complicated. That’s why we are postponing them for “later”, when we will “have enough motivation and time”. So, the natural solution for that is to make the tasks feel easily achievable by dividing them into smaller sub-tasks.

Here is an example: you need to write an essay in a week. There are two possible ways in which you can say it to yourself:

  1. I start working on my essay on Monday.

See how inconcrete this is? If you say it this way, you imply that you first will have to sit down and plan what exactly you are going to write on Monday. Furthermore, it is not possible to write the entire essay in one day and, as you didn’t specify what exactly and for how long you want to write, it seems like your entire Monday will be dedicated to writing an essay which feels overwhelming.

  1. I will write the introduction for my essay on Monday.

This feels much more like a task you will be willing to do, doesn’t it? You know exactly what you are going to do and this is a manageable amount of work which you know you will complete in an hour at most. You know that you have to plan in only one hour for the essay and the rest of the day is free to so whatever you like.

Execute: 3R-Principle

However, only planning what you are going to so on a certain day is not enough. A problem I struggled a lot with, is the “just five more minutes mood”. I would have a pretty precise plan for what I want to so on a certain day, however, as I come home from school, I would constantly say to myself, “I’ll watch one more video and then do my homework” (spoiler: I’ll discover a new interesting video I want to watch after that), “I’ll go for a walk to motivate myself for the essay” (spoiler: I’ll take a route way too long and be even more tired after that) and so on.

My plan for the day was set but I could not find the motivation to execute it. This is where the second principle comes in:

  • Route
  • Remider
  • Reward

The first step is to plan a route on how you will drive through your day. You can use paper or your phone’s calendar for that, it’s only important that you fill in every hour of the day (I make a screenshot of the calendar on my iPad and draw into that, don’t judge me).

The second thing is to constantly remind yourself of your route. Hereby, it is both important to limit the time you spend chilling but also the time you work. If you work too much on one thing, you will not have enough time to do the other things. This is why chunking your work into small managable pieces is so important. I personally use a 2:1 cycle, 1 hour of work followed by a 30 minutes pause, but that ratio can be adjusted for personal preference. I didn’t experiment with different cycles yet, but I would assume that you shouldn’t work for more than one hour without a break and that your breaks should be at least 15 minutes long. You can use alarms or reminders for that, but I use timers instead myself: whenever I start working, I set a timer for 1h, and when I start a break, I set a timer for 30min. The time ticking on my screen creates additional awareness and pressure for me.

The final element of this strategy is reward: without it, it feels like you alternate enjoyable and not enjoyable periods of time. You just want your work time to pass so you can enjoy the break. To avoid this and boost your motivation, make your work also enjoyable and comfortable. My personal methods for this are ventillating the room before work so I get fresh air, adjusting my chair and desk into a comfortable position and listening to music. When it comes to music, I listen to the Lo-Fi playlist specifically, not because I believe that it boosts productivity, but because I’m already used to put myself in the working attitude when I hear that music.

Don’t distract: Use Technology

It seems like technology is you biggest enemy when it comes to productivity: all the distracting notifications and addictive social media apps are one big conspiracy that wants to keep you from working. However, if you learn to use technology wisely, it will turn from an enemy into a friend.

I already discussed the role of calendars, reminders and timers in the previous techniques. The last important step to tame technology is to eliminate distractions, which is not as difficult as you might think with the tools we have nowadays.

The first step is just to turn on the “do not disturb”-mode on your device, it’s as simple as that. I advise against just putting the phone on silent and prefer “do not disturb”, because it doesn’t show your notifications completely. The other important tool to make use of are app timers/limits which remind you to take a break if you get soaked into scrolling through social media. There are also a lot of other little adjustments you can make, like setting your screen into grayscale mode to make using your phone less appealing, especially before going to sleep, but I won’t cover that in detail here.

Conclusion

Staying productive is not difficult if you use some tricks, but it is a very individual thing. I am happy to share my ideas with you and hope that they’ll help. If you found a mistake or want to add or ask me something, feel free to contact me at alex@alexcoder04.de.

Reading recomendations

Although my method is original, it is loosely based on ideas of other’s I read about. In this context, I particularly recommend jamesclear.com and sahilbloom.com.