[125/366] productivity

[cosmolinguist]

Maybe the last thing you need is another article about how to be a person right now but Captain Awkward wrote the one that works for me.

Pandemic! Productivity! Life! Hacks! (from a deeply unproductive & freaked out person)

Advice from competent, organized people who make goals and then make lists about those goals and then diligently do the lists to achieve those goals has never really worked for me (if any of it worked it would, like, work already?). No, I need the advice from people who are like “Here is how to maybe claw your way out of the depths of your own failure and outrun your self-sabotaging urges at least some of the time, godspeed little doodle.”
...
It is very likely that you are measuring yourself against all the things on this list [your entire mental load] and thinking about yourself only in terms of the things you haven’t done or might not be able to do (vs. what you are actually doing) and finding yourself consistently wanting. We are going to try to fix that and mentally take you out of existing only in the gap of shame between aspirations and rapidly shrinking capacity.

Also "I would advise not treating pleasure and comfort like afterthoughts or things you have to earn." These are words that I feel need to get in front of a lot more eyeballs.

I haven't done the big list yet but I woke up today knowing the three things I had to do, and I've done them:

• pharmacy
• work
• phone call

And I've done a bunch more: I made a decent breakfast and dinner (dinner was really hard; I was so tired when I got home from work so I'm proud of using up food that needed using instead of giving in to the lure of takeaway pizza). I did the dishes while dinner was in the oven. I didn't forget it's Bin Day. I started laundry and reminded Andrew to hang it up. I sent an email to try to mitigate the fact that the phone call didn't actually get me anywhere. Oh and I agreed to be on TV again (I was supposed to get a call about that this afternoon and didn't so I'll let you know more when I do).

I also did a bunch of Thinking about linguistics that's very definitely not related to my lectures or readings or essay work at all, and I wanted to talk about that but I'm too tired to do it justice so maybe tomorrow.

Comments

[worlds_of_smoke]

go you for doing a lot! <3

[xifeng]

I read that one earlier today and it is probably my favorite productivity article EVER.

[cosmolinguist]

Mine too. :)

[otter]

I stopped reading where it says Stop Reading. I think I'm going to get me a sheet of paper and try that later on. Those list things tend to help me.

Pleasure and comfort - so important to have them mixed in and not saved up for special occasions.

[tarasacon]

I’ve been practicing deliberate behavior around comfort/pleasure for a while now. It was sooooo hard at first, but I have learned that it’s much much easier to tackle the challenging things when I can trust myself to perform appropriate aftercare.

[jesse_the_k]

That's a lot in a week -- it's amazeballs in a day!

[tarasacon]

Thank you for this. It’s similar to how I already approach my todo list, and the validation is really helpful.

[silveradept]

I think that might be one of the better pieces of advice I've read about productivity generally, because it's not really prescriptive about anything other than getting the list together and making decisions about it. Which means someone can figure it out for themselves, for once.