I’m a Duke student who’s double majoring in Computer Science and Statistics. In a past life (i.e. high school) I was an avid French horn player, and I’ve been reborn as a classical music apologist. Most of my free time is spent debating my NBA hot takes with friends, searching for new stand-up comedians to binge on YouTube, and thinking of new excuses to not go to the gym.
I like to think of myself as a master procrastinator. (Don’t we all?) My favorite technique is the following: Whenever I have a reasonable time block to be productive, say 40 minutes, I say to myself, Well, I’m not sure if that’s really enough time to get anything done. Having established this, I then take a completely unnecessary bathroom/stretch/water break. Once I’m back at my desk, there’s only 35 minutes left. Now I sit and think about how long the thing I need to do will take. After some generous overestimation, I determine that even 40 minutes would not have been enough time to complete the task, much less 35… and look, now I only have 32 minutes left! Well, I might as well just watch my favorite Bill Burr comedy compilation video for like the 10th time. And I proceed to do just that.
Of course, my logic above makes no sense. If I have a task that needs to be completed, then it doesn’t matter how long it will take – and my constant clock-checking certainly doesn’t buy me any more time. Yet during my junior year of college, I found myself falling for this same trick over and over again. While one often needs some time to get into a mental groove in order to be productive, I basically used this as an excuse for never utilizing small-ish time intervals to be productive. But what if I could train myself to switch into a productive mindset quickly, then just flip this switch whenever I wanted? This is, of course, easier said than done. However, by making two small changes to my work routine, I was able to increase my productivity in short time intervals by a large amount.
Change 1:
Earbuds in. As someone interested in data analytics as well as professional basketball, I was pretty psyched (to say the least) when Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets NBA team, visited my university to give a lecture. After the event, I had the opportunity to ask him a question, and so I asked how he got into a productive mindset if he had a deadline coming up.
“Good question. What I do is, I put my earbuds in, and I start playing my playlist… which, it’s kind of embarrassing, is mostly musicals,” he divulged.
Glossing over the fact that I didn’t ask him specifically what musicals, which I still regret to this day, I decided to do this with some of my own playlists. I had tried listening to music (any Guns ‘N Roses fans out there?) while working in the past, but it generally didn’t work because I ended up paying more attention to the music. I decided that this time I would construct a playlist with music that couldn’t distract me – so I compiled a bunch of classical symphonies that I had played in high school orchestra. I’d heard these so many times, in rehearsal after rehearsal, that they had lost most of their oomph. Which, incidentally, made them work like a charm!
But I don’t think that listening to music is the point. The real takeaway here is that if you want to facilitate mentally flipping the switch from chill mode to work mode, it’s easier if you train yourself to associate this mindset change with some parallel change in your environment. This can be listening to music, but it can also be something as simple as closing your blinds or more creative like putting on a special hat. Something needs to feel a little bit different to remind yourself, both consciously and subconsciously, that you should be working.
Change 2:
Clocks out. Listening to music definitely helped me switch into a productive mindset faster, but because I was still often working within small time constraints, I would keep checking the clock every 5 minutes or so. This not only wasted time but also allowed my old, unproductive thoughts to start creeping in and distracting me. (I mean, if there is only 1 minute left before you have to go do something else, it actually isn’t worth it to go back to work, right?) Left to my own devices without Daryl Morey to consult, I came up with an idea: If taking the clocks out of casinos makes people get lost in whatever they’re doing, why not use the same trick here?
I began turning the clock on my desk around so that I couldn’t see it, as well as hiding the taskbar on my computer so that my eyes wouldn’t inadvertently wander and take a peek at the time. To replace the functionality of constant clock-watching, I instead set a phone alarm for the time when I had to stop working and put my phone far enough away that I wouldn’t be tempted to check it. This ended up working even better than I expected!
Soon, I modified this strategy to manage long time intervals as well; every time I sat down do to work, I would set an alarm for 75 minutes later. At that point I would set a 20-minute alarm, take a break for that amount of time, and then go back to work for another 75 minutes. In this way, I could fully utilize my work and break time without worrying about when I would have to stop or constantly checking the clock. I was so proud of this strategy that I told my roommate about it. He told me that this is a known strategy called the Pomodoro technique and so I had basically just reinvented the wheel. 🙁
I looked up the Pomodoro technique and he was basically right, except the time intervals were different. But again, the time intervals are not really important. Calibrating these time intervals is a highly fluid process – I often try different combinations of work and break intervals to try and find the sweet spot, and I encourage you to do the same.
Finding your “productive place”:
The best piece of advice I can give to maximize your productivity is to not be afraid to try anything. I had basically already decided that I couldn’t work while listening to music, but it turns out that I just needed to find the right kind of music for working. And although hiding clocks sounds gimmicky and sometimes pisses off my roommate, it truly does help me beef up my productivity. Both changes truly helped me reach what I like to call my “productive place”. Think of it like a “happy place”; it’s more of a mindset than a physical place. Just like we all want to find what makes us happy in life, it’s also important to find what gets us motivated and ready to work. It sounds like a tall task, right? Don’t worry, you can do it – as long as you don’t procrastinate!
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