A Noobie's Guide to Productivity

Author’s note

Well, this is supposed to be technically the last edition I write in, and hence I decided to share some of the notes that I came across in my quest of improving myself. I just wrote this to add more context. I have remained unmotivated for the most part of my life and I still am. It was the summer before the internship drive, and I kind of realized I need to work really hard/smart if I am to get an internship in any company. So, like my batchmates, I started coding. But it was not enough. I decided to reorganize my life and get the maximum out of those few weeks that I had.  And that is when I actually started digging deep in the productivity domain. I started meditating using Headspace (would totally recommend btw), started journaling, and reading Meditation by Marcus Aurelius. While it didn’t drastically change my life, it was a decent enough change. I also got into Minimalism back in the summer. Anyway, since then, I have kept in touch with the domain and kept experimenting with my methods and tools. And now that I am at the end of my academic period (at least for a while) I have some notes to share. Please feel free to comment if you have any new such methods, if you need any explanation or if this article helped you out in some way.

Author’s note 2

This article is going to be about Productivity in general. This is by no means meant to be an extensive foolproof guide to productivity. This is just meant to be an introduction and consequently, I will not go into much depth. Actually, these are notes, to be honest, and will feel a bit discontinuous at times (sorry about that). If you think you will suddenly turn into a productivity buff who completes all the assignments, writes a few research papers, and appears for job interviews in a single day, I think you are in the wrong place. Moreover, most of the productivity tips that you encounter are very subjective and differ from person to person. So if you’re facing issues in something, please feel free to comment below.

Introduction

So the first thing I want to address is why even bother. You can go about your life as you already have, but as I have observed, setting goals and working towards them have an inherent problem: goals end, most of the time. So all the habits that you have built when you were working towards a certain goal of yours will crumble once you’re done with it. In contrast, a system is the direct integration of a set of actions with your life. They mostly remain unchanged except for extreme circumstances. Hence, building good habits becomes really important. On the other hand, you should also have the essential skill of planning because not all actions apply to different goals (and you inevitably have goals in your life).

There are a lot of articles on procrastination and I have read some of them. However, the one line that stuck with me the most (I do not remember where it is from) is this: Procrastination is the brain’s way of telling that the plan is not good enough. Right? It simplifies most of the things for me. This is not the only thing though. Another thing is recognizing when you are procrastinating. If you want to leave this article with two things, these are the ones. Whenever I am procrastinating and I recognize it (mind you it is so terrible to even acknowledge to yourself that you are procrastinating – by that I mean sit for a minute without anything and say to yourself that you are procrastinating) and think of the former line, most of the times, I stop being self-critical and change my plan or make it more refined and then convince myself that it is good enough. Even if this works 50% of the time, I have cut my procrastination time by ½ which is a good win.

Goal Setting & Planning

• Getting Things Done (GTD): This is a method popularized by David Allen through his book of the same name. This book was a milestone in the history of personal development and efficiency. The essential idea is that your head is a not so good a place to store things so instead you record tasks and break them into actionable items. You have lots of different lists of lots of aspects of life. You have sessions where you sit and plan your day, your week, your month (clap clap clap clap) from those lists. I would suggest you look into this later as this system can be overwhelming. However, I felt the need to mention this early on.
• Long term goals: There are two main things I have to note in this part: The Impossible List and the Three Year Rule.
  • I got the idea of the Impossible List from Thomas Frank who in turn got it from Joel Runyon. In simple words, the impossible list is a list where you put a list of your ever-evolving goals that you want to achieve. It is unlike a bucket list where you just put in things that you want to do once in life. Impossible lists contain a variety of goals from various areas of life.
  • I got to know about the three-year rule from Matt D’Avella who has made a video on this on his Youtube channel. He was told about this by Josh Janssen and Tommy Jackett, who are two podcasters. The idea here is to devote yourself to a project for 3 whole years giving yourself permission to fail. Hence, in the long run, you kind of see your failures as small instances and so you are more likely to keep pushing yourself to succeed.
• Short term goals are anything from learning a new skill to finishing a semester project.
• SMART Goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely): This is something a lot of productivity articles talk about. The goals that you create, whether short term or long term must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. When you are clear about something that you want to achieve, you are much more likely to achieve your target. This also applies to little study targets that you have in a day. For example, when you plan your days, never write generic task names such as study for GMAT. Write precisely what you want to achieve for example “do 25 sentence correction problems from OG in 45 minutes”. This is a specific goal; its progress is measurable; you do have resources you need to complete this task and you can finish 25 SC problems in 45 minutes more or less; the goal is relevant since SC is a part of GMAT curriculum, and you have a set time limit of 45 minutes. Remember, the more clarity of your task, the more likely you are to achieve this goal.
• Plan your month, week, and day. By planning your month, I do not mean schedule things from minute to minute - even in case of planning the day you shouldn’t do that, more on that later, rather, I mean pick what goals or part of goals you’re going to achieve. If there are important deadlines or exams, you should know them at the beginning of the month.
• Plan your day on the night before - make a list of what you want to do, estimate the amount of time it will take and schedule it the next day. When the next day ends, see what time it actually took you to complete the task and consider these errors next time you make a schedule.
• Try to plan breaks and sleep; it is necessary that you know you’re also going to have fun and it is not all work. Productivity does not mean an infinite capacity to do work all the time. It means to achieve what must be achieved with the most efficiency. And as much as you’d like to believe, you’re not a robot. So do not act like one.
• Separate high-intensity tasks and low-intensity tasks. Batch low-intensity tasks together and allot them time slots. High-intensity tasks need proper time for intellectual combat and therefore they cannot be objectified as we do to the low-intensity tasks.
• Also, procrastination will occur – accept that. Because once you accept something, you can plan for it. We are bad examples of systems who tend to have a solid bad estimate of the best-case scenario. When you plan out your semester-long goal with milestones per month or something like that, and then you further break it down to the daily tasks - you have only a small task to achieve. Little-sooner reward rather than larger-later reward. Hyperbolic discounting refers to the tendency for people to increasingly choose a smaller-sooner reward over a larger-later reward as the delay occurs sooner rather than later in time. That is how checklists can help you feel good because checking off the task kind of acts like rewards. If you are into Role-Playing Games (RPGs), try Habitica.
• However, project completion should be the focus and not ticking off the checklists. While the checklist is an amazingly helpful tool, make sure you also have your eyes fixated on the bigger picture or you’ll keep on making small items with no substantial progress towards the goal

Planning helped me get rid of worry for the most part - it’s not that I do not worry anymore, but now I worry less than I used to before. So, yes, a small win.

Implementation

• Relying on your motivation isn’t the most effective strategy
• 2-second rule: Have the means of achieving your habit in the distance that can be covered in 2 seconds. You can also put things habits that you want to lose more difficult to reach. I would also like to mention this one popular test that has gained a lot of attention: the marshmallow test. A bunch of kids were isolated and given a marshmallow. They were told that if they did not eat the marshmallow for a certain time, they will be given another one. The people who took the test kept a track of these kids and the kids who did wait for the time were observed to be on average more successful than the ones who did not wait. Moreover, the ones who waited did not look at the marshmallow - they looked at the ceiling, floor, wall, basically anything that kept them from looking at the marshmallow.
  • A good example of this would be the time when I was preparing for my internship. So I faced the problem of overplanning, as you can clearly tell. So the best thing for me was to get started as soon as possible. To achieve this, I created a script that opens up a bunch of useful tabs on computer start-up. Now I just used to turn on the computer and log in and meditate while the websites loaded. It saved me a lot of unproductive days.
  • The marshmallow test also gives an example of Hyperbolic Discounting. As in the effect of the second marshmallow was kind of “discounted”.
• 2-minute rule: just do your work for 2 minutes → usually, it is the high activation energy that keeps us from working. Hence, to bypass that promise yourself that you’ll only work for 2 minutes. Once you’re done, continuing the work becomes easy. On that note, start the task whenever it is assigned or planned. I have found this particularly useful while preparing for GMAT - I started studying the night before and studied for only 25 minutes. That way I no longer had to deal with my OCD of having a fresh start.
• Pomodoro timer. Most of you may have heard about this. For those who have not, Pomodoro means tomato in Italian. Francesco Cirillo developed this technique after a tomato-shaped kitchen timer. Basically, you work in intervals of 25 minutes and separate those intervals with short breaks.
• Give yourself permission to do imperfect work. It is not necessary to have everything organized or do everything on the tip-top. Just do it. If you want to read something and make notes just read it, do not wait for getting notes, and getting a pen and stuff like that leads to procrastination. On that note, minimalism will help by restricting the choices that you get to make each day.

Do not go insane (Very Important)

• Do not schedule every single minute of the day. While it may seem productive at the start, the system will slowly collapse with you getting burnt out. Plus, some spontaneity is healthy.
• Numerous blogs have advised me - read/listen to audiobooks while eating, listen to audiobooks while gymming, and whatnot. Now, here’s the thing - you want to have fun while you’re doing stuff not related to academics. So unless you enjoy all of these things, I would suggest you live in the moment - do the thing that you’re doing properly. If you like listening to songs while gymming - do it. If you want to talk to people and socialize, use the eating time to do that. Not everything has to be work every time.
• Do not be an a-hole to yourself. Give yourself sufficient breaks and do genuinely fun things - and for most people, scrolling Instagram does not belong to this category. Maybe call a friend or play video games. But make sure to do the things you actually like.
• Make friends! Sometimes when all your systems fail, calling up someone and telling them how your life sucks might help. Not that they’ll sort your problem out (maybe they will) but most probably by the end of your rant, you’ll realize that you can sort it out yourself.

There are a lot of factors for a job well done. I have just highlighted some of the above. One last thing I would like to mention considering that a lot of people are studying/working from home is that you should have separate spaces for work and other stuff. Just the way you wouldn’t eat while shitting, you shouldn’t work while watching TV or sitting in the living room with your family. Not only that deteriorates the quality of work you do but it also damages your quality family time.

Where to go next

• Check out Habitica if you haven’t. It helps model your life like an RPG game where you complete Habits, to-do, etc. If you’re looking for a more simple tool, you can check out Loop Habit Tracker (only for Android as of now, they’re making it multiplatform; it is open-source so you can go help them out). For a simpler to-do app, Microsoft To-do is the best in my opinion. The three things that I mentioned above are free.
• Check out the following people’s content:
  • Scott H Young
  • Cal Newport
  • Thomas Frank
  • Marty Lobdell
  • Matt D’Avella

If you want help with planning certain things, please feel free to reach out to me.