Focus, productivity and... frustration

What a day...

While I'm writing this text, I'm living in one of those days when it is pretty hard to just sit down and start working on some task without my mind starting to travel to many other places, except work, which is what I should be focusing on right now.

Sometimes, understanding what a task is asking for, thinking about the best solutions, and actually apply any of these solutions become extremely hard when your mind is at the same time, thinking about that thing you should learn after work, in that course you bought, watched a few lessons and left the course, or just worried if you're doing a good job: "What if I'm not working well?".

Look, all of this is happening at the same time while I'm sitting and looking for my computer screen trying to work. Then, after a few hours, the workday ends, and you realize that you did (almost) nothing, and now you have one more thing to worry about: The deadline for this task is soon, and I haven't had good progress yet.

So what happens? Your leader comes to talk to you and says: "Hey, you're doing well, keep up the nice work" (🤯). What do you mean I'm doing well? I definitely didn't see that coming.

Having feedbacks is great, even if it is bad feedback, because it will help you to see where you can get better, or even better if the feedback is positive, as I described above. But then I realized, I'm having some bad days, but still getting positive feedback. So it means that I'm doing my work well, even if it's not clear in my head.

How to focus on work and be more productive?

Well, unfortunately, I don't have a formula that will greatly improve your productivity (sorry 😛). Actually, I'm still looking for a solution, but there are some actions that helped me to realize that not everything is lost, and there are some days that things are doing great, actually.

The most important and maybe the hardest: organization

Yes, we need to get organized. But I'm not talking about creating a complex routine and planning in detail what I'm going to do in my day. The more complexity we add to any task, the less chance it has to work or to continue doing after a while.

There's a thing that is helping me to no get lost among a lot of things to do. I write down the tasks that I have to do today, in the simplest way possible, which could even be a piece of paper. This helps me to organize everything inside my head, makes me think: "I have these tasks for today, if I finish them, great! Duty accomplished! ✔"

Then every time I finish something, I scratch the task, or I move to the 'Tasks done' column when I'm doing it on my laptop. When I do that, I can see the tasks getting done, one by one, and it feels good! But even if I can't finish all tasks, at least a little bit of that feeling that I couldn't do anything today goes away: "Ok, at least I finish some tasks 😪"

Another thing that I can see now, our work is not repetitive and requires a lot of concentration, creativity, and to think a lot to find out the best solutions. Therefore, it's impossible to be productive all the time. Understanding and accepting this is very important, or you'll end up frustrated.

Concluding

Probably this isn't the conclusion that you were expecting, but as I said earlier, there is no magic formula for productivity. Some days are hard and we'll gonna be less productive, and will be difficult to focus and you won't finish that boring task. And it's okay!

So get some rest, go do some hobbies you like or just take a walk (whatever you want, the important is to take some time off), because tomorrow is a new day, and that task will not solve itself LOL.

If you liked this article, leave your comment below with your opinion!

Thanks and see you soon!

Nicolas