On Productivity

This article is a tough one for me to write because I feel a little like a fraud- I’m not always the most productive, especially this year. I often feel like I’m just treading water rather than moving forward, but I also know that certain things have helped me with being mindful about where my time is going, so perhaps I might have some value to add with this post.

Apps

Forest is an app that I have on my phone which motivates you to stay focused by “planting trees” which “die” if you navigate away from their app screen and try to use your phone’s other apps. To let the tree “grow”, you basically have to not use your phone for the given time period, which is helpful for me since I get distracted by my phone a lot. I really enjoy being able to see how many minutes of ‘focus time’ I’ve spent each day. That way, I can’t lie to myself and pretend I worked for 8 hours if the app shows a much lower ‘focus time’. You can set the timer to whatever you want, but I started with 25 minute intervals and worked my way up from there. I still can’t focus for more than 50 minutes at a time, but it’s really nice to exercise your ability to stay focused. The other thing to keep in mind here is to make sure that your breaks in between the focus time don’t get too long. I’m guilty of taking a 15 minute break in between 30 minute focus sessions (facepalm).

The best feature of this app, in my opinion, is that you can add friends and ‘compete’ for who has the most ‘focus time’ each day. If you’re a medical student, this could be a fun thing to do with classmates. God…I can’t believe medical school has made me think competing over who studied the most is fun….I digress.

Accountability Partners

This is really helpful, in my experience. An accountability partner is just someone you check in with to hold one another to a commitment. The commitment can be to exercise, to finish your Anki flashcards, or whatever else. You could both be holding each other accountable for the same thing, like exercising and send one another your selfies from working out every day. Or the two people could be holding each other accountable for different things. I feel like it works well if both parties benefit from the arrangement because they both want to be held accountable for something, though. It could be your partner, someone you see every day, or even just someone you aren’t as close with but you’re both working towards the same goal. I believe there are even apps for this, but I really think it works best with people you already know.

Additionally, I’ve found that posting my workouts to Instagram story (just a sweaty workout selfie or something of the sort) is another way to hold yourself accountable without a specific accountability partner. If you publicly commit to sharing whatever it is you’re trying to build the habit of doing, you can sort of pressure your own self into doing that thing.

Looking at your goals daily

This one really helps me a lot, and I recently shared about it on Instagram. I have an app on my iPad called Notability, which I do a lot of work in. I have a sheet that has my 2020 goals for all the different areas of life- fitness, school, each extra-curricular activity, personal enrichment activities, my blog and podcast, etc. It’s useful to look at those goals everyday because they’re things I could easily forget about in the day to day bustle of life.

Besides that, I also have my monthly to-do / goals list for each area of life. These are just specific things I want to accomplish for each commitment I have. Then finally, I have a habit tracker which is basically 30 boxes / bubbles for each habit I’m tracking, such as exercise, practicing the language I studied in college, etc. I’m the type of person who loves checking a box or crossing something off a list, so it feels nice to be able to fill in this bubble for each day I do the habit I want to build. I searched ‘habit tracker’ on Pinterest and used one of the templates they have. Pinterest also has a ton of cute calendar templates if you’re into that sort of thing!

Random Tips

• Sometimes giving myself a deadline is helpful. It’s usually arbitrary like “oh I have to log 3 hours of focus time by 12 PM so I can go have lunch with a friend” but this helps me a lot.
• A lot of my quick to-dos like replying to an email are things that I do during my breaks between stretches of reading or studying. It isn’t the most exciting break, but sometimes just switching to an easy task is enough to break up the monotony.
• I’ve always been the type of person who feels sleepy after a carb heavy meal, but the effect is more pronounced when I have to study or read for long periods of time and I’m likely to feel sleepy at baseline. I find that lower carb and higher protein lunches help me fight my daily desire to nap at 2 PM.
• Scheduling my day according to my energy levels is also something I’m trying to be more mindful of. I haven’t always been the best at it, but I know I’m more productive in the mornings, so I generally try to do practice questions in the morning or write for my thesis project in the morning. Anything that is easier can happen at night when my productivity levels are lower also.
• This is an obvious one, but I’ve been able to shift my sleeping schedule a bit earlier and it has made a big difference in how much I’m accomplishing. There’s just something so much nicer about working during daylight hours to me, so the difference between waking up at 7 AM vs. 9:30 AM is huge.

Thank you for reading, and please drop any additional tips in the comments below!