Tag Archives: productivity

Fast days

Yesterday went by ridiculously fast. I said to my secretaries at 10:20am, “I need a time machine to go back an hour and get all the things done that I thought I’d get done by now.” One of them said, “I think there’s a song about that, 🎵’If I could turn back time’🎶”.

Some days are like that, they zip by and even when you are working diligently, time escape you. After lunch was the same, except more interrupted. The interruptions and the follow up on them are expected in a job like mine. Other people’s priorities can become mine… I’m there to support my staff and students. But some days, like yesterday, happen so quickly that they seem to race by as if someone pressed and held the fast forward button.

I came home and after dinner I did a couple things I had planned to do in the morning. One job was about 5 minutes, the other about 30. Neither were very hard. Neither could get done during the day. The scary thing is that every June gets like this… but it’s not June yet and I’m already feeling the year-end crunch.

I might not be able to turn back time, but I wouldn’t mind if it slowing down just a bit!

A hard realization

There are times when I think that I have goals and ambitions to do so many things, and other times when I have the time to do things… and I just don’t.

Is it a by-product of being in a pandemic or is it my nature to be more lazy than I wish I was? Is it that I don’t really have the goals I thought I did, or is it the priority I put on things?

I’m about to head into my home gym for a workout, I’ve done my daily meditation, I’m doing my daily write. I’m fit, I’m restarting archery and loving it. I’m spending time with family.

So, why do I still feel like I should be doing more? Why do I feel like I’m letting myself down for not starting a big project or hitting some other target I’ve created in my mind? Why does binge watching tv make me feel as much guilt as pleasure?

It’s a hard realization that no matter what I do, a part of me feels I should be doing more? What drives this feeling? What makes me feel this way? I’ll start back at work next week and I’ll be so busy that I won’t have the time I have now. Then, I’ll look back and think, why didn’t I do more last week?

Am I the only one that thinks like this?

Insomnia strikes again

I tried exercising before bed yesterday to help combat it. Found myself eating an hour later and still up well past midnight.

I don’t know what’s different right now? I can see the holidays ahead. I feel things are going as well as can be at home and work. I am feeling fit. I see positive news about a vaccine coming months sooner than I would have predicted. So what’s keeping me up?

I wouldn’t mind so much if it was creative time, but it isn’t. It’s unproductive time that I can’t concentrate on anything I would really want to do with more awake time. And it makes me feel more unproductive during the rest of the day, when I feel not tired, but slow.

Meditation is all but useless because I can’t stop my mind from racing long enough to actually meditate. I’m scattered and not doing more than putting myself through the (attempted mental) motions. My mind is too noisy to be still. Too restless to be useful. Too sleep deprived to be productive.

Reading this, I make it sound a lot worse than it is. I’m still functioning well enough that I can get things done. I feel like a six cylinder engine running on four cylinders… Still running, still capable of getting me where I need to go… just not at full capacity.

I think I’ll really try and stay away from my phone and laptop this weekend, other than listening to a novel. I think I need to stop distracting my distracted and sleep deprived mind with a screen. But even as I say this, I know it will be tough because I don’t enjoy it when my insomnia brain has nothing to be distracted by, but it can’t be productive.

Meanwhile, it’s still Friday and I need to focus on a good day at work ahead. I’ll exercise earlier than last night (couldn’t wake up early enough for my morning routine)… and hopefully early to sleep tonight.

Distractions and interruptions

Sometimes a work day feels like a constant flow of distractions and interruptions, and while I spend the day busy, it seems that little that I hoped to accomplish actually gets done. For the last couple (rather productive) days I’ve noticed a pattern of distractions that I seem to create for myself that slow down my ability to really get things done. Here are two of them:

1. I’m working on a task and some information comes to me (a message or a person) related to another task… and I task switch. At this point, I start on the task that distracted me, even though it isn’t something I can accomplish without more information or work, so it isn’t something ideal to do in that moment. However, from there I let other tasks or distractions keep me from prioritizing or completing the task I was on before the distraction.

2. I let incoming information, emails or Teams messages, derail my attention. That isn’t to say these messages aren’t important, simply that if I didn’t let them distract me, I could have been more effective at getting my original task done.

I have a job that tends to be filled with constant distractions and interruptions. I can’t allow these to derail those moments when I actually have time at my desk to get things done. There is often only a few precious times in the day where I have time to focus on a single task and feel a bit of flow as I get something done… when these moments come, I really need to ensure that I’m not creating my own distractions and task switches. This is a sure fire recipe to having a very busy day, and still nothing feeling completely accomplished.

Choosing well

Some choices we make are hugely influential and others are not, yet we seldom make distinctions when we should. Or at least, we get lost in the importance of decisions that are not important, giving them too much value.

We can spend a couple minutes choosing the right cereal to buy in the store… but both of our choices result in bringing home a breakfast that is loaded in refined sugar.

We can spend hours watching a TV series that is less interesting than it was when we started watching, but we feel committed to finishing the season. We don’t allow ourselves the choice to stop watching. On that note, when was the last time you chose to walk out of a theatre because the movie was bad? You probable chose to stay until the end… but it likely didn’t feel like you had a choice. You think or justify, ‘It might get better’, but it never does.

We can spend hours making a big purchase like a car, then let a salesman talk us into features and add-one we don’t need. Our choice for the car is done, and suddenly we are more easily persuaded and less likely to exercise choice.

How many unimportant choices do we spend too much time on? How many times do we passively do something without giving ourselves a choice to do something different? And how many times do we delay important choices to the point that our choices diminish? For example, you can’t decide what to do, and 2 hours later one of your choices is eliminated because there isn’t enough time to do it.

‘To do’ lists can become not do lists. I will choose to do a few easy things on the list, but those big things will sit on tomorrow’s list. I will write down the things I’m choosing to do later instead of now. I will add more things to the list so that I don’t have to do those things already on the list.

We make thousands of decisions a day. Some are big, but most are small. We also make thousands of non-decisions a day, doing something without realizing we can do something else or choose to do the same thing differently.

What’s something that you can do differently today? What’s something that you can make a choice not to do, that you do out of habit? Where in your daily routine can you empower yourself with better choices?

Work and Flow

Today was busy, but I never got into a good workflow. It’s the nature of being a principal. I had several meetings, and they all went well: an admin meeting, a parent meeting, a teacher meeting, and several meetings with students… some planned, some not. I had to organize a lunch, and I had to problem solve an issue with secretaries. I had a phone call with a vice principal about a student, and had another student visited to share work his class had done.

Another unplanned meeting with a student and parent after school went really well, but also took away some key time I had scheduled to create a form that I need to share with some online teachers in all our high schools. That form will be completed tonight or tomorrow morning before this is posted. It was the main thing on my ‘to do’ list today. That ‘to do’ list of 7 items was only down to 6 items when I left for the day. I had more unread email at the end of the day than the start of the day. Tomorrow morning the list will only be down to 5 items after I get that form done, the email will be a bit lower.

Some days you can get into a flow and check off things that need to get done, one after the next. Other days can be consumed productively yet productivity is low. The biggest challenge for me is to not let too many days like this pile up.

Slow starts

Summer is a time to rest for educators, but it can be hard going from 100 miles an our to 1 mile an hour without a little lethargy kicking in.  For me, it’s my morning routine. With no time constraint to push me, I can wake up early and get almost nothing done before the day really begins. Today, for example, I’ve had my coffee, I’ve done my meditation, and I read an interesting article on LinkedIn. Beyond that, I haven’t really done much in an hour and 45 minutes. Bleh.

Part of me wants to rationalize that it’s ok, but then part of me just wants to complete my routine… Finish writing this #DailyInk, get my exercise done, shower and really start my day. By that, I don’t mean that my day starts after this routine, I mean that my routine really starts my day!

I’m in a quiet house, everyone else still sound asleep, I’m feeling refreshed (I don’t need more sleep), and yet I’m being hard on myself about my slow start. Why? I think that I thrive when I’m intentional with my time. Even if that time is entertainment, or giving myself a break. But watching time disappear unintentionally is painful.

Part of my plan today is to create a list of ‘starter’ ideas for my daily write. I think that if I can get this done early, I’ll feel better about how my day started and that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy for the rest of the day. On that note, I’ve just added a new Daily Ink idea to my Notes on my phone: Why #dailyink. Let’s see what time I get that completed tomorrow?