I notice that sometimes I work very efficiently and get a lot done. Other times I am constantly distracted -- I can literally feel myself looking around for something, anything, to avoid getting stuck into whatever work I have in front of me.
What is the difference, I wonder?
The funny thing is usually when I get all of the work loaded into my brain, it’s easy to keep going. Getting started on a particular block of work is the hard part.
I’ve also found I can’t really cheat this by forcing myself to do a tiny bit of work, like correcting a typo or writing a title or turning on a server. If it doesn’t force my brain’s RAM to load in all of the relevant info, the problem of getting into it remains.
Things I’ve found that do help tend to fall into three main categories.
Things That Lower The Difficulty Of Loading Information
What helps load in the information? A lot of things, actually!
One trick I’ve found super useful, but often forget to do, is to decide the day before exactly what I’m going to do the next morning. Something about sleeping on it, and not having to decide on the day what work needs to get done makes it way easier to just get on with it.
Another is to try and reduce the breadth of particular units of work, especially when I’m not in the middle of them already. Proper task planning, where larger scale projects are broken into smaller tasks, helps a lot with this for me.
I also leave myself a tonne of notes -- literally writing things like “TODO -- finish connecting button X” if I’m stopping (or having a branching web of things to do). I have a terrible memory, so this helps me a lot.
Things That Motivate Me
If the work feels meaningful it’s like the difference between gliding on ice and trudging through mud. Legit, if I can actually see exactly why I’m doing something and how it fits into a longer term plan, and I agree with that plan, and I’ve written out the steps of the project and know that what I’m doing now is needed for the next step, then I can do it easily.
When I don’t have this view, I turn into a slug.
As an aside, I think this is so important for teamwork and management. People need to know how their work fits into the whole so that they can make changes (and improvements) to the original gameplan. It lets them (and me) know under what circumstances they can drop a particular task, or can find some other way of achieving the same goal.
If the work is interesting it's a massive boost as well. Sometimes work just isn’t that interesting, so I don’t know how much of a tip this is, but I guess there’s usually something interesting about it, and if I think of it less as a chore and more of as “I wonder if I can X” / “I wonder why Y?”, then it is much better.
For example, a chore is “I need to read this report on X because I said I would”. If I try to read it in that mindset, I don’t remember a damn thing. If, instead, I can somehow change my motivation to a genuine “I wonder what this report says about X?” it works so much better (and I don’t necessarily have to trudge through the whole thing -- I can find sections that answer the natural questions that come up). Actually feeling that curiosity is a whole other problem, but knowing that a productive mindset exists for this type of chore is useful I suppose.
Other things that are motivating are just to work around other people who are working, and to have a social deadline to get something done. That is, have other people relying on me to have something done by a particular time. Somehow if I set arbitrary deadlines, they are completely useless. The deadlines actually need to be real, even if the consequence of missing them is just “John will be annoyed because he can’t combine our work when he planned to”.
Things That Raise My Intrinsic Capability
This last category is just the basics, and a bunch of little tricks.
Most importantly -- have I had enough sleep?
Am I eating and exercising properly?
Am I distracted by other things?
Am I in the *work location*. Ideally, outside of my house. It’s crazy how much this helps.
If I’m stuck, I get a coffee, or some chewing gum, or even go for a walk.
Putting some headphones on helps too, even if they are not playing music.
And planning a long period where I can work without interruptions.
And that’s about it. Here’s all of the above in dot point format. You can put it on a t-shirt:
TO WORK MOST PRODUCTIVELY:
Get enough sleep
Work not-from-home, especially at a cafe, library, or workshop, and especially where other people are working.
Decide what to do the evening before.
Make sure the work feels useful -- know why you are doing it, and how it fits into longer term plans.
Get enough exercise
Eat properly.
Coffee / tea / gum.
Put on headphones.
Break up bigger, vaguer tasks into specific, smaller ones.
Leave lots of notes.
Somehow become curious rather than drudging. “Because I have to for money” or “Because I said I would” are not very motivating reasons to work.
Have real deadlines.
Get long, big periods of work without interruptions.