Being productive in chaos
Day 236 / 365
In the last week, I had talked about plenty of methods to manage your time well and being productive. It all seems good when you first read it. It’s a whole different story when you go on to apply it in real life.
Consider the Pomodoro Technique, where you set a timer for 25 minutes and switch off all distractions and concentrate just on the task at hand. When I first tried to do it at my office, within 5 minutes my manager called me to ask me something, and I had to pause my timer and do something else.
A lot of us work in hectic environments where we have to constantly switch from one task to other and it’s simply not possible to switch off all distractions. How does one maintain their productivity in this case?
What’s the causing the chaos?
One thing that might help sometimes is if you try to figure out why is it that you are always being bombarded with tasks. Maybe the work that you are doing is incomplete and not properly tested, which would mean that even after you have submitted it and moved onto your next tasks, you will keep getting requests to fix things in the first task. If that’s the case then you should try and spend more time to bring a bit of perfectionism to your work. Similarly, if you think there’s something else that’s causing the chaos, try and fix that.
Try to say no more often
You would be surprised how many times you can get yourself out of a task just by saying no. Most of the work coming your way would be important, but there will be plenty of work that could be done by someone else. Maybe these tasks are being thrown your way just because someone else is being lazy and they think they can get some extra work out of you. You should identify such requests and politely decline. In addition to this, if you follow the other productivity tips and work in an organized way, you would always have a prioritized list of tasks already with you to justify you not doing the trivial stuff
This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here
Yesterday’s blog — The trouble with being productive in the current office environment