All of us have been indoors for about a year and a half now. The only work we did on some days was hoping things would get better. We haven’t really bothered about being productive. And we really can’t blame ourselves for it too. I mean, who would have thought, right?
I had never even dreamt that something like a pandemic would happen, and all of us would stay indoors for such a long time! I learnt a few words like Pandemic, Unprecedented, Black swan events etc., during this time.
But it is what it is. Maybe this is the new normal. And if this is the new normal, how long can we afford to hope things will get back to the same as they were before a year or so? Just hoping and praying will only make us waste a few years of the very few that we get to spend on this beautiful planet. How do we make the most of the time while staying indoors?
It all boils down to your thought process and how you approach things. Keeping track of time while sitting all day indoors has become a task. So make a schedule and stick to it. It shouldn’t come to looking back and realising that you didn’t put this time to good use. Making frequent progress is the secret of productivity. Making progress is what produces results. Being busy is not, in itself, an accomplishment. Following a plan helps you take control of how you spend your precious time.
And it’s essential to learn how to manage your time. If you spend all your time doing the things that seem essential, you will have very little time left over for the things that are really important. The hardest thing, then, is not to waste time. You have to be strategic. You should start with the thing that is the most important to you.
Once that’s done, the hard part is making sure you achieve those priorities in your limited time. It’s very easy to lose track of where you are. So it’s imperative to schedule everything. If you have planned everything, you can make sure you’re on track. If not, you can at least see where you’ve gone wrong.
But can we be productive at all the things we do?
It’s very wrong to think that productivity can be something that can be learned. Albert Einstein said clearly that “ideas are a gift from the gods” — meaning, these are things that you are able to achieve not because of your hard work or trying to achieve them, but rather because you are lucky enough to be given the idea. And that holds true for creative work. You can’t expect to be productive with it. The best results come with obsessing over your creative work for a very long time.
But not all work is creative. Certain processes have to be carried out in a specific way to get the best results at the lowest amount of resources (i.e., time).
And productivity doesn’t equate to simply getting things done. It is subjective. But quite often, there’s also the quality of the work you do that determines it. You could do a job just for the sake of finishing it, but that isn’t productive work. I think you get the point.
Productivity is about perfecting a process. And this generally holds true for repetitive work. Learning is the best example of it. The way we approach studying a new topic is repetitive. A few of us always refer to books and notes; some of us get the best results by watching videos and so on. But we all follow a process. If you perfect your learning process, it will give surprisingly better outcomes.
For example, if you structure your learning process rightly, it saves you from burning out and helps you better organise your thoughts. Stick with your process and keep iterating. Make changes to your strategy until you feel that is the perfect process for you.
How has the Pandemic changed the way we spend our time?
For starters, we don’t travel as much anymore. We don’t have to go to schools, colleges and offices. So we save some time from all the commutes we used to make. And especially if you are living in a metropolitan city, you must be saving a reasonable amount of time. That’s time that can be put to good use.
You can choose to spend that time with your family. You can pick up that new skill you’ve always wanted to be better at. It could be anything from taking an online finance course to learning how to play the guitar. You can pick up a new skill, follow the news, or simply learn a thing or two from the internet!
Even work-from-home has increased productivity levels for a few of us. While working from home, people can find themselves surrounded by an environment conducive to learning. Being around pets is a bonus. You can pet them, play fetch with them, or simply having them beside you is comforting in different ways. At the same time, this period is not a vacation period but rather a bleak period marked with numerous uncertainties and laced with fear and stress. Although this virus is not going away anytime soon, technology has helped us cope better and become productive even during these stressful times.
All of us have started using gadgets a lot more than we usually used to. Sometimes consuming valuable content is not so helpful. There are so many apps, games, and fun distractions that it is sometimes hard to remember what I was even working on.
And it’s really easy to get distracted while surfing the internet with everyone trying to scream the loudest to catch your attention. Things can go south if you aren’t conscious of your habits.
Are you someone who gets distracted easily from what you are looking for, or are you laser-focused on your goals?
Either way, we have just the right thing for you. There’s a good chance that you keep losing your bookmarks. And if you’re bookmarking on Google, may god help you find that one article you saved a few months back.
We’re all hooked to our phones, laptops consuming more content than ever before. We’re reading articles about that one thing we have always wanted to do our entire lives. We’re watching creators practice that craft we have always wanted to learn. We are listening to podcasts to know in detail about specific topics.
We want to take notes on it, bookmark a few of them so that we can get back to it if we need it in the future, and add them to a checklist to keep track of the ones we’ve gone through. You probably have downloaded a different app for each function that you need. Switching between apps makes the process all the more inefficient and scattered.
Beyond a point, it gets really frustrating to search for your bookmarks, notes, saved videos etc. You need to have a smooth learning process to concentrate on just learning — no more losing track of bookmarks, no more switching between apps.
We give you absolute control over your digital learning process.
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Varun, Content Writer
