Friday 14 October 2016

Screw Internal Motivation I Am Externally Motivated By Fake Virtual Trees: On Procrastination and Productivity

First of all, I hate the word “productivity”.

Productivity smacks to me of a kind of capitalist ablism, where people’s worth is determined by how much they produce. It also has connotations of quantity over quality, of tweaking factory assembly lines, of getting up two hours early and multitasking and the constant fear of wasting a single second of your life.

(Apparently the Ancient Greeks reckoned that anything that is not a waste of time is not worth doing. I like the Ancient Greeks.)

But I’m also very much inspired by the idea that “Leonardo da Vinci had as many hours in his day as you”; and I’m into the dignity of work; and I think if you’re lucky enough to be a sentient being with opposable thumbs and/or speech and/or some equivalent of these, then using part of your life to create stuff is A Good And Noble Thing.

So I want to be productive; but Getting Shit Done makes me anxious.

Like, I look at the work I need to do and I panic because I remember that every other time I’ve sat down to try and accomplish something, I’ve instead checked my phone 17 times and then gone for coffee and then stopped for a “quick chat” (lies!) with someone in the hallway and then I’ve gone to the bathroom twice and I’m like well clearly I’m not a person who gets work done quickly and easily so why should I, a loser, think that this time will be any different?

I’m scared that I’m going to distract myself into uselessness.

In the end I do actually do quite a bit of work. We all do. Well, most of us. But we spread it out over the maximum time possible and intersperse it with a crap tonne of facebook (guilty) and youtube (so guilty) and other distractions and at the end of the day we have no sense of achievement, no sense of what we’ve done, or if we've even done anything at all.

So anyway, I’m not going to write a manifesto on productivity here, but I do want to write about one particular thing that I have found helpful with the anxiety bit, which is:

Don’t do more; just be more clear about what you have done.

Because it's not the amount of work I end up wringing out of my pores that worries me; it's all the things I mix in with that work that makes me uncertain about whether I can concentrate enough to do what I need to do or whether this time, this time I'm just going to fail.

Being more clear about what I’ve done means trying to work in a more focused way over shorter periods of time and keeping a record of it.

I get that “work in a more focused way” sounds like “just don’t procrastinate!” which is really like saying “that thing that is a problem for you, don’t do that thing”, but I think my version has a positive spin on it that’s helpful to me, and also, there’s an app for it.

Look, you do you; the Pomodoro technique is great for this, and there are many other similar options. I use an app on my phone called Forest and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Very simply, you set a timer on Forest for 15 minutes or 1 hour or however long you want to do a work session, and if you don’t leave the app in that time, you get a virtual tree to add to your virtual forest. If you do leave the app, the tree dies. And you know what, screw internal motivation, I am externally motivated by fake virtual trees.




This works for me because when I grow virtual trees, I’m creating evidence to prove to myself that I have done this before and I can do it again.

Now, obviously using the Forest app on my phone doesn’t stop me procrastinating on my computer (although there is a browser version) so I do need a bit of will power to say, “when the tree is growing I’m only going to do my work”. But usually that’s enough for me.

It also makes it easier for me to decide whether I’m going to procrastinate in other ways  - like if someone wants to ask me about something, I’m like “yup, I’m just growing a tree now, can you ask me 12 minutes” or however long I have left on my timer.

And maybe 12 minutes later after I’ve grown that tree, the “quick question” turns into an hour long lunch break but that’s fine too. Again, the point isn’t to do more work - the point is to be clearer about what I’ve done by concentrating it and keeping a record of it. (”In that 30 minute session I read some of that chapter and I wasn’t distracted by questions and I have a cherry blossom tree to prove it”.)

And I find time-based goals are easier to achieve than outcome-based goals. “Read this chapter without getting distracted” is too hard; what if I never finish the chapter? “Read for 20 minutes without checking my phone” is much more achievable, and the time will pass either way.

The focus isn’t on changing your habits to be more productive; the focus is on creating evidence to use against your anxiety to give you the confidence to produce in the first place. That’s my one piece of productivity advice.



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