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How to Be More Productive by Hacking Your Perception of Time
The abundance spiral
Without the time pressure, you view time from an hourglass half-full perspective.
This perceived abundance of time improves wellbeing, which in turn increases productivity. When productivity is high, there is less time pressure, and time feels even more abundant.
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Evolution of time management in 5 stages
- The Clock-Slave: you are either begging for the clock to speed up or slow down.
- The Time Tracker: some find it an excellent way of ensuring they stay on track. But when combined with excessive time pressure, it becomes unhealthy.
- The Smart Breaker: you use like the Pomodoro technique or the Ultradian rhythms.
- The Free Spirit: you opt for a more spontaneous and free life, and avoid keeping a rigid schedule at all costs.
- The Enlightened One: you understand that scarcity of time is an illusion. That enemy does not exist.
The scarcity spiral
When you are time-pressured, you see time as a precious and scarce resource. This triggers a stress response, which can improve motivation in the short term, but often at the expense of morale in the long term. And an unhappy worker is a less productive worker. With lower productivity, there is even more time pressure to get things done.
And on goes the cycle.
The inner tyrant
When a time constraint is placed on you, it will play on repeat in your head: “Get to work!”. If a task takes longer than expected, thoughts like “What is taking so long?" might appear. And at the end of a chaotic day, you might find yourself thinking “You have done nothing today!”.
But you can overthrow this tyrant.
The abundance spiral
Without the time pressure, you view time from an hourglass half-full perspective.
This perceived abundance of time improves wellbeing, which in turn increases productivity. When productivity is high, there is less time pressure, and time feels even more abundant.
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Key Ideas
Productivity is a deeply personal thing
Action has momentum
Work as a linear function
We assume that the amount of productive output we create is directly proportional to the number of hours we input. But the truth is that most thoughtful, brain-intensive work does not unfold like this. The only work that is linear is really basic, repetitive stuff.
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Constraints and productivity
If you make work a scarcer quantity, you’re more likely to use time wisely and get things done than if it feels like an endless to-do list.
And you cand do this by restricting your hou...
Time vs workload
- Restricting hours: set aside a certain chunk of time for work and don’t work outside of it. For example, the Pomodoro technique for working in short bursts of time.
- Restricting workload: instead of deciding on a set number of hours, you decide on a set number of tasks.
Constraining time
The biggest advantage of constraining time is that it’s always unambiguous. If you decide to work for three hours and then stop, there’s no confusion there.
Disadvantage: time constraints can encourage a sloppier attitude towards work. For example, you might decide to spend all day studying in the library—but without tasks to constrain your productivity, you end up checking your phone.
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Key Ideas
Clean up your workspaces
End the workday by taking a minute to tidy your desk, save everything you’re working on, and close of all your tabs and windows. Make sure your work app notifications are automatically snoozed outs...
Review your "to-done’s"
Boost your mood and motivation by taking the time to review your completed tasks at the end of each day.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to stay motivated and build momentum at work is to celebrate your progress.
The procrastination “doom loop”
Confront the things you’ve been putting off. If you keep putting things off, you'll feel guilty and that makes you want to avoid them even more. You will get stuck in the “doom loop” of anxiety and avoidance.
Break this loop by identifying the tasks that you’ve been avoiding, break them down into smaller tasks and schedule the next step for the following day.
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