As a self-professed productivity fiend, I feel super embarrassed and a little hypocritical that I can even have a lazy week full of irrelevant work.
I’m meant to be the one giving out advice. How dare I spend countless hours doing “busy work” and seemingly getting nowhere. The negative thoughts run through me like “I should log off and never write another blog.”
But of course, its the human condition.
I’m not a machine with perfect processes, and I shouldn’t allow myself to fall prey to this type of thinking, but here’s the salt in the wound. The “busy work” that I’ve been doing has been around a database and book on productivity.
That’s so ironic that I had to have a moment of silence as my self-worth died, and imposter syndrome kicked in. Too dramatic? Definitely, but it’s hard to see sometimes.
See, I felt this way in the moment because, and this is important, it’s super f*cking hard to see a spiral when you’re in one.
Just the same as a habit or a trend - we can all easily look at a situation from a third-person perspective and chime in. And we contribute with some great logic too, but of course, it’s a different story when it’s us.
I fell into every productivity trap last week.
I prioritized everything that wasn’t urgent.
I did work, scrapped it, and repeated that a few times Feat. Perfectionism.
I had creative block, a lot.
Yes, it sucked.
How To Get Out of a Spiral
After picking myself up from my figurative bootstraps, I started to employ some of the same strategies that I preach to others. You’ve no doubt heard these a million times before, but hey, a refresher’s nice sometimes.
1 - Leave the work, the situation, or the dilemma alone and do something unrelated. Hell, leave it for the entire day. To fix the spiral, you need to look at it from afar with fresh eyes.
2- Re-align your strategies and priorities. For me, this was looking back and realizing, “I need to produce more content, not develop everything around it.” This is where the Eisenhower matrix comes in - focus on quadrant #1
3 - Tuck away any guilt or remnants of the bad week into the “oh well” pile. What’s happened is in the past, and now you’ve got the priorities right for this week.
4 - Hyper-focus on shipping one piece of urgent and important work. This could be anything that you were avoiding or didn’t get around to last week. Making that dent goes a long way.
It’s Monday, and I’m at four right now - it’s been working so far.
This productivity fiend is saddling back up, and to you, good friend, I’m hoping you get back up if you’ve been feeling down too.
If not, tuck this email away for when you need it and have a great week. 😎
Enjoy the little link dump.
🔗 Link dump
🎨 This designer shared his iPhone screen on Twitter, and with 2 hours of work, has now made $25,000+ in profit - it’s a great story.
👩💻 I recently found a cool site called 30 Seconds of Code - you can find useful snippets for everything from CSS to React.
🏡 A great thread on how the Airbnb founders dealt with rejection and made it anyway.
Thanks for tuning in this week, ladies and gents. As always, I hope you got some value from this one, and if you know someone that’s having an unproductive week, send this their way. 👍
Cheers,
Sah