When do you feel most productive?
“Productivity isn’t about being a workhorse. Keeping busy or burning the midnight oil, it’s more about priorities, planning, and fiercely protecting your time”
Gary Keller
I am an early bird. I used to be a night owl and I have been a chronically tired pigeon as well. I am confident that every day when I get an early start, I feel I can achieve a lot more. So, the ‘feel most productive’ phrase in terms of time would be in the early morning hours, but in terms of achieving goals, it would be when I have accomplished more than I had planned.
In terms of the time of day, I feel most productive, I would say it would be in the early morning hours. If I have started my day early, then I already feel my day is productive. I make my plans the evening before. Even when on holiday/vacation, I figure out the plans and work my schedule around it. I prefer to wake up 3 hours before I need to step out of the home/room. My chai or coffee is when I rehash the plan for the day, to see if there is anything that I need to modify. There is a fine line between being productive and being busy and I go through my schedule to remove or reduce the things I may have added that make me look busy, so I can be more productive. Targets achieved, and project completion are what help me feel productive, the rest of the time, I am busy, trying to identify the best way to achieve those targets.
When I was in grade 10, studying for my pre-boards, I was convinced I was a night owl and I felt most productive when I burnt the mid-night oil. And if I had a ‘night out’ supposedly studying through the night, I felt that I had put in the effort. I did the late-night thing through most of the pre-boards that year and the last exam was the geography paper. Telling myself that this was the last ‘push’ I drank two flasks of super sweet tea that Dad made for me, and stayed up the entire night, drawing maps, reading the textbook, and making notes. Again! things were fine until about 11 pm, after that I drank a cup of tea every hour and went through the text and notes, plotted maps, and answered questions loudly.
The following morning, on my walk to school, the cool wind on my face helped clear the cobwebs in my head and I felt I could scale a mountain if required. The 9 AM bell went off and we got into the classroom. Compared to the cool wind outside, which felt crisp against my overheated, and exhausted body, the closed windows and the gently rotating fans made the classes warm and cozy. I had stayed up late most of the week, and last night I had stayed up the entire night, so I was sitting on the line of exhaustion. The question papers and answer scripts were distributed, and I looked at the question paper. I grinned! At first glance, this was the paper I had wished for. I started answering the questions and I was going at it so fast, that I was surprised I was so good at it. I knew that if I finished this paper, I would be topping the class. I had reached a little beyond midway in the paper when my hand started to hurt, and I decided to take a break.
Anyone that has given an examination, is aware that you are not allowed to talk or walk around while the examination is on. So, I had to sit in place and flex my fingers while I waited for circulation to be restored to my hand. The examination was ongoing and looking anywhere but at your paper roused suspicion. My hand hurt and I could not write anymore, so I had to take a break. But I could not look at anyone, so I decided to do the only thing I could, I focused on the silence in the class. The absolute silence, the rhythmic motion of the whirring ceiling fan, and the occasional sound of a paper rustling lulled me enough to entice me to put my head down. My tired mind and exhausted eyes shut down and I slept. For the rest of that exam!
I woke up to the bell signaling the end of the examination and much like the arrogant hare in the story, ‘The hare and the tortoise”, I felt stupid. I had only completed about 60% of the paper and now, after a brief nap, I hoped I had done enough to clear the paper. In my school, in those days, you could sit for the board examinations, provided you passed the pre-board assessments conducted by the school. Now, my only wish was that I had done enough to qualify for the boards.
That was the day, I realized that I had been kidding myself. I was not a night owl. Staying up at night, pretending to study, after an entire day of activity, when my mind was beyond exhausted did not allow me to remember much. So, I decided to try the early morning routine to see if that would work. It took a lot of effort, but with Dad helping me, I started to wake up early consistently. I find that I can do a lot more first thing in the morning than late at night because after resting the entire night, my mind is fresh and raring to go.
The other way I feel productive is when I complete more than I had planned for the day. My day starts early, and I plan most of it. The only bits of it that I cannot plan are the kind of art I create/design and what I write about. Although I am only a SAHM, (stay-at-home mom), I have targets throughout the day. I like rules, schedules, and organization, that I set up and work to keep my day functioning as smoothly as possible. I prefer to finish my house chores by 9 am. And then its breakfast. Post breakfast it’s time to blog and write. Post lunch is time to create and work on the art. If I am not working on the art, then I use that time to research or binge-watch.
I usually finish my blogs by lunch. There have been instances when I have been busy with something else, and the blogs get done later in the day. When this happens, it upsets my post-lunch art slot. It’s a rare occurrence but one that has happened and has upset me no end. There was this one day, when I was selling some furniture at home, and the person coming in to pick it up created such a lot of chaos, that my schedule was shot! I was irritated and decided to abandon my blog and just focus on the art, although I was working on a larger art piece. The odds of my completing it in one sitting were low. But I decided that I would work on it for at least two hours. This was a little later than my usual 2 PM post-lunch session. When I start on my art at 2 PM, I work until around 4.30 PM and an A3 size design of Zen tangling from start to completion takes me 2 days to complete. But, since the entire schedule that day had gone haywire, I decided to work on the larger canvas, which was a 1.5 ft X 3 Ft paper. The plan was to just create mandalas and use white space to add perspective to the design. I must’ve started around 3 PM that day, and by around 6 PM, as the room started to get dark, I was forced to stop because I could not see what I was doing anymore. And I am glad I did, because the piece I had picked assuming it would remain incomplete, due to lack of time, was now complete. Considering the chaotic first half I had assumed that the post-lunch session would be a washout as well. But completing it gave me a happy buzz, that feeling of productivity like I have achieved more than I had assumed I would be- considering everything.
“Once you have mastered time, you will understand how true it is that most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade!”
Tony Robbins
Just a little more 