The Subtle Art Of Becoming Productive
Hi Readers! Have you ever feel anxious about your job? thinking that you’re not productive enough? wondering how you go to the next level? you come to the right Tips and trick. For some background, I’m a software engineer at one of the largest e-commerce companies in Indonesia (Blibli.com) and sometimes I feel anxiety when my work isn’t productive. That’s why I want to share with you all how I tackle this anxiety problem and give you some tips that work for me.
What you should do?
Having clear priorities, achievable goals, milestones, and checkpoints
Have you ever thought about what will happen to you in 2 or 5 years’ time? If you have this kind of thought, then it’s a good sign. You have to know exactly what is your short term goal, mid-term goal, long term goal and also the impact if you can achieve them. If you still don’t have any plan for your life, I urge you to start thinking about that.
Life is like video games, you have to create a milestone or checkpoints in your journey. Imagine if you play video games without a checkpoint, it’s gonna be so hard to finish it.
For Example, First, I want to have a good career path as a software engineer in a startup so, I have to find some time after the office to learn about new programming languageS and concepts (short term goal). After I got promoted to senior software engineer, I had to learn about management and mentorship to become a development manager (mid-term goal). Lastly, I have to learn about business and strategy to become C level employees or create my own startup company (long term goal).
Know your best path or shortest path for you to achieve the goal
Work smart rather than work hard, you have to know about yourself, your personality and which learning methods are the most suitable for you. As soon as you know what kind of learning styles you have (Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic) and find a good mentor.
For example, I’m more productive when I learn about programming with video courses like youtube and udemy. Because of that, if I want to learn about programming, I learn it from A video course, not from another resource like books or articles, because I know my best way to learn about programming is from the video course.
Set up Artificial Deadline and make it real
The ultimate inspiration is the deadline, most people become productive because of the deadline, so I urge you to practice creating an artificial deadline, and also create real punishment for yourself to make yourself keep motivated and make it real.
For Example, you can set up simple artificial deadlines like finishing 100 pages of books each day and if you break the rules you can punish yourself the next day by having to read 150 pages or a hundred push-ups for (do something that you didn’t like).
What you should avoid!
Know where most of your time wasted and throw it away
In this smartphone era, most of our time is wasted on social media and entertainment on our smartphones. Luckily our smartphone nowadays has a rich feature like screen time on the iPhone so you can know where most of your time wasted.
After you know that, you can limit access to that application and with a screen time limit or other application, you can make a promise to yourself and create a real punishment.
Avoiding distractions
Last but not least, when you need time to focus, you have to stay away from anything that can distract you. For example, silence your mobile phone and put it away from your workplace. If you’re using a laptop to work. You can block social media and youtube with extensions in the chrome browser called blocksite. I use it a lot and IT really helps my productivity since I’m a software engineer and using my laptop to work.
Thanks for reading!
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you have any notes, you can leave it there in the comment section. Made with love by Hans Sagita 😁
