Not feeling productive?

Like many, I struggle with never feeling productive enough. I work all day, but unless I reach some undefined, illusive marker, my day is a wash. This often leads to long days and long nights. I find it frustrating and it leads to a lack of motivation.

To address this I’ve heard a few suggestions, some of which I’ve implemented.

1. Define success
2. Celebrate success
3. Don’t compare.
4. Understand human limitation, i.e. your limitations
5. Focus on one thing

First it’s important to define success. If we don’t have a reasonable goal, we can find ourselves missing all the work we are accomplishing.

Another rule is we need to celebrate our successes. After we’ve accomplished a goal sometimes it’s tempting to minimise it, but if we take a moment to pat ourselves on the back we can begin to defeat the negative self-speak. Additionally, consider journalling, it’s a great way to capture your day and help you see where you were productive and where some bad habits are preventing productivity.

Avoid unhealthy comparison, sometimes the problem lies here. We see someone else who is much more productive and we feel that then devalues our productivity. That simply isn’t true. Whether we like it or not, we need to remember we are not the pennacle of humanity. We are not them, and they are not us. We all have different strengths and weaknesses. Some people have more strengths than others and that’s okay. You need to do well according to your ability and that’s has to be enough.

Understand your limitation. Our brains only have so much capacity for focused thought before it becomes difficult. I believe the average person has about 4-5 hours of focused usage of the prefrontal cortex before you fizzle out. Understand that will power isn’t going to help you overcome this limitation, at least not that I know about.

There are going to be times when your lack of productivity comes from bad habits as well. In my case, I try to do too many things at once. Write a blog, do some contract work, study a new technology and build a website all in one day. Being so divided makes it difficult to make any progress in any one of those areas. Often we need to pick on thing and devote a block of time to it.