Last year, in October my business partner, and I decided to take 10 days to visit a new city, and try working from there on our new app. It was one of the best decisions ever! We finished the app, and thoroughly enjoyed the new environment. This little work vacation was responsible for a new experiment in productivity that has made me more productive than I ever was.
What’s productivity?
Most dictionaries will tie this word with economics, and the production of goods or services. People often reference or use this word to implicate, and relate their work product with time spent, quality of the produced work, work satisfaction, and quantity etc.
I am of the opinion that the word is much more emotional than just something that gets defined as something to do with economics, and the creation of goods or services. That’s is to say that it encapsulates more emotion than what we give this word credit for — for example on a day on which I’ve been super ‘productive’, I often find other things going well too. Which leads me to feel satisfied, happy, and wake up the next day finding myself raring to go. And, being productive, for me, doesn’t really just end at good economics, creating goods, and generating services. It involves helping others, understanding my thoughts, getting to know my motives, writing, studying, learning, sharing, observing, reading, and much more. All of those verbs, I cannot term them, or collectively call them as work. It’s more than that. Being productive, to me, means being myself the most on any given day; enjoying whatever it’s, that I can term as good, that has managed to fill it often extending the feeling that comes with it to the next day.
Fretting over productivity.
I’ve read countless posts about the four hour work week, read the book, read about other super productivity hacks, and read tons about procrastination (guilty as charged, before October 2015). Often, I found myself half assing my way through a combination, and permutations of the advice offered in them; boredom struck often while I tried to use these methodologies to stay productive; more often than not I’d usually end up bored, while reading self help books, and articles. Videos did help, but not much so. Sometimes it go worse — I ended up spending more time with trying to stay productive, while trying someone else’s mantra instead of doing anything else of, much. It was as if my Brian wouldn’t allow me to focus, and get things done. Such days had to reduce. There had to be something that would work for me — that’s what I thought. So, I kept looking.
Yet another productivity mantra, and one that works for me.
A day has only so many hours in it.
I’ve been trying this since the last 6 months. Not too long a time, and not too short either. This has worked for me, and it may help someone out there — that’s the reason of writing this. I haven’t come across something like this online, so I thought I did share it here.
The 2–1–2 Mantra, as I like to call it, is a really simple way of making sure that I do whatever it is that I set out to do. It’s also the reason that I end up with more time for other things, that’ve had always taken the backseat for some other critically required work.
Let’s assume that it’s the 1st of January today, for the sake of brevity. I’ve already decided that the next two months, including January, will be spent in my Super Saiyan mode. I’ve allocated two months for the things, whatever they might be, which I want to finish within these two months. Here you can use any planning, etc you want to.
Once those two months are done, over with, and the third month begins (March in our example), I leave everything I had planned to do within those two months. I just drop it. This third month (march), is now a free month that I can take off. I take an entire month off after making sure that I’ve done as much as I could in the previous two months. This has seemed to work like nothing else before. It keeps me going to think that the third month is free, I can travel more within that month, I can do or catch up with more of my hobbies, learn something new, etc. The wait for the third month, it keeps me in my Super Saiyan mode for the previous two.
I know that this is not for everyone, because not everyone has working hours like I or their job won’t allow for it. If yours does, and if you do find yourself trying this out, do let me know the outcome!
What’re your productivity hacks?
I would love to know what works for you! Leave a comment, or simply leave a tweet, and let me know!
