Simple Productivity Tricks I Learned The Hard Way
Life is too short to waste time you don’t have
In the summer of 2019, I accepted an unpaid internship as a UX Writer over the phone. The base of operations turned out to be a cramped two-room office space in the center of Chinatown. As an early stage e-learning startup there was new ground to be broken and a hum of energy for the sheer amount of work. I knew this internship would come with challenges, namely balancing a job to pay the bills. With a bare bones team behind me, all content strategy work fell to me.
The next eight months became a crash course in cutting out time-wasting habits. Here are some of the things I learned:
I was addicted to social media
Namely, social media commentary. If my fingers weren’t hovering over the Instagram app, it was scrolling Twitter, or browsing Youtube to fill up the silence while I worked. Like Pavlov’s dog, I perked up at every ding. I told myself, this made me more effective. That somehow listening to a random rant on “socially conscious game design” while organizing a competitor audit was stellar multi-tasking. I did it while I walked to the office, on my commute, and before bed. This routine left my brain exhausted with little quality work to show for. I battled this compulsion until I came across a 2009 paper by University of Washington associate professor Sophie Leroy. She stated that “people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another.” This causes feelings of becoming overwhelmed more easily and making mistakes.
What I did:
- Deleted Instagram and re-downloaded it after work
- Broke down tasks into 25 minute blocks with breaks in between
I was putting off hard work
I felt pulled in a million different directions and overwhelmed by the number of tasks on my plate every day. I had dozens of things to get done. I spent more time on putting out little fires because the biggest, most important task would surely take hours. As a result, valuable work fell by the wayside. According to productivity expert Cal Newport, in the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity = doing lots of stuff in a visible manner. To push back against all of those distractions, I prioritize the tasks that would bring me closer to my goal. I do that thing first thing in the morning when my brain is fresh and my willpower isn’t exhausted by the end of the day.
What I did:
- Ritualize my routine (coffee, breakfast, and hydrate) before work
- Identify the the most important task
- Do it first
- Batch low-priority tasks together
I was getting less work done
Busyness is a by-product of work culture. Whether it’s visible busyness without merit or actual busyness, there’s a better way to do it. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the period of time available for its completion. Meaning, if I give myself one week to do a two-hour task, the task seems more complex and daunting. One of my top tasks was to create a voice and tone guide to create consistency across the website and mobile app. This meant researching, rewriting, and auditing the website — a task that could mean a solid week. It was easier to be sidetracked by team members to rewrite company policies or write conversion emails.By assigning the right amount of time to a task, I could gain back more time to do other things.
What I did:
- Audit my schedule to track my habits
- Identify your project scope and trade-offs
- Set a timeline
- Schedule my day with time blocks
- Finish my work by 6pm
I wasn’t giving myself meaningful rewards
Hustle and grind culture are littered with sayings like, “sleep is for the weak. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Balancing a 9–5 job and an internship stretched me thin, juggling multiple tasks while moving at a fast pace. As a result, at the end of the day I just laid in bed, eyes wide open, thinking about the work on my desk. When I did manage to complete tasks, I turned back to Youtube to continue browsing as I had been doing on and off throughout the day. I realized these rewards were meaningless because they didn’t reinforce my good habits. In fact, they were a distraction, causing a vicious cycle of exhaustion and low productivity. I decided that these rewards needed to be special so I could be motivated to get started at work, keep focus, and get to the end of the day.
What I did:
- Identify worthwhile rewards
- Reserve rewards for the end of the day
At the end of the eight months, I learned to wear many hats at a small, scrappy startup. These habit changes set me up to prioritize work without sacrificing my mental well-being.
