“How do you get it all done?” someone asked me recently, and she wasn’t the first. “I want to see your daily routine, learn your secrets.”
I gape around my messy desk, my ever-increasing to-do list, and marvel. Every day, I faff about on the internet, procrastinate, and lay on the sofa with my dog, doing Sudoku on my phone. This is productive?
In a way, yes, it is. Downtime is part of the process, and I earnestly believe trying to be productive all the time results in being productive none of the time.
It’s also a fact that you, my online friends, only see the highlights reel of my life. I spend three days in a depressive funk, hiding in my bed playing games on my phone, and a short story I wrote a year ago – over several months of half-hour sessions – comes out, and it appears as if I wrote that story just now.
But you’re not clicking on this blog post because you want to know that I’m not really that productive, you’re probably wondering – how do I become more productive?
Productivity isn’t one neat trick. Productivity is a zero-sum game. There are only so many minutes a day when you are awake and uncommitted. We may have different numbers of those minutes, based on how long we work, how many chores we have, but that’s it. Your productivity comes from those minutes, and you’re not going to get more minutes without drastic measures.
It’s not being “more productive” – it’s choosing how to spend your productivity time. I am a productive writer, at the cost of being a productive, say, seamstress. (I did a tiny time-use study of myself to come to this conclusion.)
When you marvel at someone else’s productivity, you are missing the things they have sacrificed for that. The real question is, “What did I neglect to do that?” Sometimes my day job takes priority, and I don’t write. Sometimes writing takes priority, and I neglect my family. Sometimes family takes priority. It’s an ever-rotating situation, and some things never make it onto the front burner. (Just talk to all my fighting buddies who keep asking when I’ll be back in armor!)
There are almost certainly things you are doing that I am not. I suspect that most people must get more done before 7am than I do all day.
Every day, I do not:
Brush my hair, wear makeup, or even wash my face – I am exceedingly ungroomed. I keep my hair in a braid to avoid brushing. Most days, I smooth it with my fingers and re-braid (five minutes). Some days, I just have messy hair, or I gather the fuzz with a scrunchie at the top of the braid. I only brush once a week, after I shower. Usually on Friday. (fifteen to twenty minutes for both shower and brushing) I only wear makeup on special occasions, and then only eyes and lips. I suppose I’m fortunate with my skin, because I’ve never looked better with foundation on. And not using makeup means not having to wash my face! Win-lazy-win!
Pick out an outfit – I have this system where I wear the furthest-back thing in the closet. Brian loads clean clothes to the front, so I’m always on a conveyor of clothes. While I’m at it, I don’t wear jewelry or hair accessories on ordinary days, despite owning some lovely pieces. I feel guilty about this, but I’m lazy! I wake up with barely five minutes to get ready!
Commute for more than a half-hour. I choose to live within five miles of my work, but that took a combination of luck and perseverance. I acknowledge that our car-dominant culture makes it far too easy to spend a big chunk of your day driving. My bike commute takes half an hour. When I’m extremely lazy or cold, Hubs drops me off and that takes about ten minutes. If I had an hour commute, my 8-hour day job would actually take TEN hours of my day.
Watch TV – it feels like a humble-brag, but let’s be real, I’d love to watch more TV; it’s just that I have this thing where I have never learned to watch on my own, so it has to be a group activity, and that means watching something my husband and brother-in-law want to see, when they are both in the mood to see it, which means I tend to see about one hour of TV a week. I haven’t binged since Buffy. SOB!
Keep House – my husband does vastly more housework than I do. He does almost all the laundry, sweeping and mopping. He and my brother-in-law split the dishes. I cook two nights a week. Yes, I’m in charge of home repair, trash removal, and lawn-mowing, but those don’t happen as often.
Put my toys away – really, really trying to be better… but I have hand weights by my feet, tarot cards, knitting, a bag of crochet needles, some jewelry findings, a pile of business cards I mean to sort and/or toss, and a dip pen on my desk right now.
So, yeah – what would you get done with the extra time you got from not doing all that? Conversely, what are you spending time on now, that you’d rather spend on your preferred craft? What can you cut out? I used to watch a lot more TV, including re-runs and commercials… and I realized I’d have plenty of time to enjoy those shows when I’m retired. One hour a week is still enough to have something to talk about when people talk about TV. I may never finish Ted Lasso (Brian and John didn’t enjoy it), but I loved the first episode!
When you choose not to decide how to spend your productivity time, you are still making a choice. Own it, and take charge of your time. Choose what to neglect, or that choice will be made for you.
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