Trying to be More Productive

In my last post, I talked about my messy task queue.

My nature is to do the most simple thing first. Read emails. Read books. Learn from watching YouTube, not actually trying to figure out how to achieve something and put into (enough) effort to make that happen.

I don't like that.

So the tasks in the queue have many properties, like priority, deadline, and perceived difficulty and estimated_time_required.

My nature is to do easy and fast things first. Until the priority outweights my mental barrier to do important things, or when the deadline approaching, the most comfortable thing for me to do is to delay doing them, and enjoy the minor satisfaction from knowing ah I finished yet another (unimportant) thing

To change that, I have to think about what I want to do first, and when I should switch tasks, to achieve a better outcome (impact).

Scheduling Differently

My current approach is to assign difficult and important things in the morning, when I haven't been bothered by 100 things that sucked my precious and limited mental energy. Do the hard work first. Eat the frog. What you do after that matters less (since everything works according to the 80/20 rule).

Sometimes I got stuck and wanted to quit, I'd either try to convince myself why this is important and keep on trying to get unstuck, or journal it, or added to the task queue again, trying to bump its presence, reminding myself to get back to it later.

Previously I start my day reading emails, now I don't normally open emails unless I feel low on mental energy (because I consider spending energy on them at the start of the day a waste, since the energy is very limited).

No Perfect Time to Do Things, or Start Doing Things, or Change the Pattern

I've always known that there isn't a best time to start doing somethings. Instead of configuring Hugo for my blog website, I could just steal a working template from my friend or GitHub. Content is what matters (most).

Instead of trying to write the best post, just start writing.

There's no perfect time to hit the publish button, just publish it. Even though some people and Google may read an outdated (bad) version of the post, it's mostly fine. If it's important, you could ping them about the update later, or write a post about the update to a previous post. If I want to change something, I can't put if off again and again, it's never gonna work.

Identify what's blocking you, and try to work around it.

Sometimes I need a little push and courage to overcome psychological barriers. I'm still learning how to do that.