Tips and tricks for being more mindfully productive

In an age of massive information flow and constant connectedness, feelings of ineptitude can arise frequently and the restless desire to constantly improve every facet of your life can be overwhelming. The sheer volume of self-improvement material on the internet, ranging from YouTube channels such as Ali Abdaal or Thomas Frank, to books such as the 7 habits of Highly Effective People and Atomic Habits, can make the quest for self-improvement seem hugely daunting and unfeasible. In this post, I aim to provide a few tips and tricks I have developed over the years to help ease this restlessness and be more mindfully productive.

When surfing the internet, it is very easy to stumble upon new workflows or ways of doing things that seem to be better than ours. Encountering one of these methods brings panic that our existing system is inadequate, and we hurriedly try to adapt the new technique as soon as possible to appease our inner productivity ego. After several hours of wrangling with your existing workflow, you are left with a new, “improved” system that will solve your productivity issues once and for all. You seem to have reached productivity nirvana… until you stumble upon a new, even better method! And the vicious cycle carries on …

Not only is this hugely unsettling and completely unmindful, but it is also unproductive in the long run. Since we spend so much time trying to optimise our system using all the new fancy techniques that the productivity gurus on the internet bombard us with, we do not actually do much work, which kind of defeats the purpose of the improvements in the first place.

Luckily, I have come up with a solution to this issue that has helped minimise my time as the engineer and focus more on my tasks, without that feeling of productivity FOMO. You should only make these changes at weekly or monthly reviews of your system. If you have not incorporated one of these yet, check out my other article here to find out more about reviews. Not only will this help you get more work done, as you will not spend your whole time optimising your system, but it will also hopefully give you some needed distance between your discovery and your true productivity needs. By the time you reach your review, you may realise that the new, incredible optimisation you had discovered is not actually that incredible or necessary, thus abandoning the idea. Or, you may still be infatuated with the idea, and therefore decide to incorporate it into your daily life during your weekly review. You can give the new system a trial period until your next review and see if it actually yielded results. In either case, you will have saved time, protected your peace of mind by jotting down the idea but not being obsessed with it, and even been more productive as you will not have spent your week worrying about optimisation and have used the time to actually get your work done.

A simple way I keep track of these potential optimisations is using a list that I review every week. You need nothing more sophisticated than this.

My second tip is more of a mindset shift than a tangible one. A difference in mindset can make worlds of a difference to ease your restlessness.

While it may be tempting to make so many changes at once when you see there is a better way of doing things, and this is a good attitude to have because you should see every situation as an opportunity to improve yourself, it is super important to do your best and improve incrementally, rather than all at the same time. We are not racing to reach productivity peak as fast as possible, but we are constantly developing and getting closer and closer to perfection. In a similar way that you would burn out trying to run up a mountain all at once without stopping, you will also burn out and feel overwhelmed if you try to improve everything at once, rather than seeing improvement as an incremental process.

There is always something that you will be able to improve on, and if you adopt a mentality of wanting to change everything all the time, you will be perpetually unhappy, as you will always be unsatisfied with your progress. Instead, acknowledge that progress is incremental, and as long as you are making small steps to a better, improved self, you should feel satisfied.

Progress also comes from long-term commitment to our habits, so it makes sense to see progress as a long-term thing we are working towards rather than something we have to do ASAP, all at once, all the time. In order to see the changes you are after, you can try creating habits that will help you in your long-term goals. This will be much more efficient than trying to fix everything straight away.

As stated, in this age, it can be tempting to find solutions and optimisations for every single facet of your life. If there is no problem to be solved, however, and the potential solution has marginal benefits on your existing system, then it is ludicrous to set about changing what you already have. It is critical to remember that change comes at a cost. Not only is there a heavy, upfront cost of changing the system, but there will also be a more lasting one of getting used to it.

The marginal gains may also not even be gains, because you will debate between 2 new systems and whether you made the right choice for a while. Remember that restriction promotes creativity, so if you stick to what you have and what works for you, you’re enabling yourself to get good more work done.

If you end up going for a change, because the benefits of changing far outweigh the costs, then you should never look back with “if only” thoughts and instead live in the present and trust the judgement your past self made. Strongly evaluate whether the change is necessary first, and if you think it is, then your future self will take comfort in the fact that the decision was heavily informed first.

These tips may seem obvious and trivial to some, but they definitely helped me obtain a greater peace of mind and have even increased my productivity. If you are restless like me and always get too excited about new productivity tips and tricks, then this list should serve you well in putting you back on track.

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