A failed strategy to improve productivity
When I did the daily blog thing last year, I wrote a lot of blogs about proven ways to improve productivity. I had tried each and every one of them, to varying degrees of success. But I wouldn’t say that any one of them was a complete failure.
Lately, I tried to come up with a strategy of my own, and it failed miserably. I call it the “No Fucks Given” approach to productivity, or NFG for short. Not that you will ever need to remember the name, given that the strategy blows.
The Inspiration
Our willpower is a limited resource. A number of productivity books state this fact, and I have experienced this personally as well. If you spend a lot of will power forcing yourself to exercise in the morning, you will find it tougher to do those tasks at work that you don’t like.
One day I realized that I had been putting a lot of restrictions on myself with the aim of getting rid of some bad habits and picking up some good ones. I was waking up at 4:30 each morning. I had stopped watching youtube videos completely. I was tracking my time spent on different work activities, down to the minute.
So thinking back to the limited willpower idea, I came to the conclusion that I am wasting a lot of it in following these “rules” that I set for myself. So I thought to hell with it, I’ll just get rid of all of them. Thus the “No Fucks Given” method of productivity was born.
The Implementation
Following this method was extremely easy. At any given time, you do whatever the hell you want to do. That’s it.
So there I was, staying up late watching Netflix, listening to podcasts while I worked, eating whatever I felt like. Now, of course, I still had to work or I would have lost my job. So I made sure that I met all my deadlines. But unlike before, I wasn’t waking up early or making detailed to-do lists and time tables. I was working whenever I wanted to work. And I found that my motivation to do work increased exponentially as a deadline approached, so that worked out fine.
It was a dream come true, if nothing else I can say that I was happier than before. Or so I thought.
The Aftermath
I soon realized why this method wasn’t sustainable. My concentration level dropped drastically. I could never just do one thing. While I was working, I was listening to podcasts on my laptop. If I had to get up just to get water, I would open the same podcast on my phone so that I don’t miss even then 30 seconds that it would take me to walk to the kitchen and back.
I was also procrastinating a lot. While it’s true that some people are able to utilize their procrastination to force themselves to work, that wasn’t the case for me. It just led to more stress. Whenever I sat down to work, which was not very often, there was always loads of work to get done.
Within a month of this, I decided to cut my losses and go back to the old and proven productivity method — Write down what you want to do, take time out to deliberately focus on that one task, take regular breaks, and get it done.
I admit that this little experiment of mine was a failure, but it won’t stop me from trying new things. And it’s a good thing to document what doesn’t work as well, so that other people may not make the same mistakes. Hence this blog.