Be Productive, Not Busy
Nine Changes I Made in the Shift
from Busy to Productive
By John Spencer, source
Ultimately, when I broke up with busy, I learned how to be productive. This is what it looked like for me:
Prioritize what was important. As a teacher, this meant spending more time assessing and less time grading, more time developing lessons and less time joining committees.
Learn how to say “no” to the things that don’t matter. There will always be fun projects that people want you to do. However, if it’s not something that connects to your ultimate priorities, it’s okay to say “no.”
Create a schedule and stick with it. I get up at four or five each morning and I’m in bed at nine or ten. I set a curfew for myself to be fully finished by four o’clock.
Create templates and use those. I kept recreating the wheel rather than re-using and re-purposing former lessons, materials, and content.
Engage in deep work. As a teacher, I would arrive an hour early to school and have a period of uninterrupted deep work. As a professor, I now block off specific time for deep work.
Do the dreaded work first. I’m not sure where I heard this productivity hack, but it’s turned out to work well for me. I find that one task that I’m dreading and I do it first. This way, it’s not looming in my mind the entire day. One of the core aspects of being busy was avoiding the dreaded work that I didn’t want to do.
Focus on one project at a time. Multitasking is a myth and a deceptive one at that. What feels like hyper-productivity is actually interrupted productivity. Instead of doing multiple tasks at once, people are switch-tasking and this start-and-stop process prevents you from hitting a state of flow and engaging in deep work.
Schedule rest the way you would schedule an appointment. Teachers often feel guilty about resting but it’s actually vital for productivity. However, I think it helps to treat rest like you would an appointment, meeting, task, or exercise routine.
Understand the emotional elements of being busy. Often, when I am falling into the “busy trap,” it’s because of my mental state. I am overwhelmed by too many tasks so I don’t do any of them well. I am anxious about an event on the horizon and I’m filling the space with activity rather than facing my anxiety. I am frustrated by hitting a creative wall in a particular project or I’m scared that what I am making will bomb when it reaches an audience. In other words, being afraid, anxious, or overwhelmed will ultimately kill my ability to do deep work. Other times, I am afraid to say “no” to activities out of a fear of missing out or a sense that I might disappoint someone. I’m trying to seek validation by doing more and packing my schedule.