Post #860

Recently tried productivity technique called “time boxing”. It helped me to keep healthy flow in my productivity, life and leisure. Problem: I used to get stuck on working on one task until I finish it. Last time I was preparing tutorial on how to use Erzy service I spent countless hours for 4-5 days, stayed up late till 5 in the morning which messed up my sleep cycle. All other tasks were put on hold. Needless to say it’s very unhealthy and it’s actually not effective, because after 1-2 hours you tend to get unfocused and distructed by all kinds of things. Solution: Work only in 30 min bursts I use Pomodoro app to measure exactly 30 min per task. I turn off all notifications, if someone calls I ignore! The rest of the world is not important in the next 30 min! If I finish the task in 30 mins, good. Case is closed! If task is not finished, I record/save the progress of the task and create new task(with status of previous task). If I feel like I can finish this task in next 30 mins and there’re no other urgent tasks I go for another 30 min session. If I cannot finish task after spending 60 mins of focused time - it’s a hard stop! It means I will not finish it today. Move on to next task. Why does it help? Focus! It’s proven fact that our brains are able to focus for only 20-40 mins on one thing. If you stay too long on one thing you tend to get distracted by bunch of different thing like: - “oh I received message notification, must be important! It’s not going to hurt if I peak for 5 seconds” - I feel thirsty, I'm just going to make drink real quick; - I’ll just check my social media quickly…I’ve been working for 2-3 hours it’s not going to hurt…end up scrolling feed for 2 hours… - Mom called, must be very important!.. turn out it was nothing important, but you got distracted and ended up watching some Ted talk on YouTube. You can afford to postpone everything when you know that you can back to whatever you want in 30 mins. It teaches you self control. Feeling guilty for not finishing project. You don’t feel guilty for not finishing up things, because you did finish your task. You constantly get finish stuff. If you paid your full attention to the task and turns out that it takes longer than 30 mins. You still have a result! So you should feel good about the work done and create new task to continue it afterwards. Endorphin high! You get a little endorphin spike when you finish task. If you finish task every 30 mins you get many endorphin spikes throughout the day! Most people people have to take drugs or alcohol to get high. You will get high of work!