In Perpetual Search of Continual Productivity

This is an issue I have had for a while. While I feel over the long term I am productive, I always feel like I could be more productive in the short term. Or more accurately, I could have more guilt-free time if I could consistently be productive ever day. I am always looking for ways to basically force myself into this. Will power is overrated, as Jillian Michaels once said on The Biggest Loser, and I know that this is the case. Every so often, you are going to cave, unfortunately.

So I stumbled upon an interesting article on being a productive academic. I’ve read articles on this topic before, and I often find them preachy and written by people who seem to have no problem running on full gas all the time and who can just work work work. That’s not me. I am easily distracted, and well, at times lazy. 

However, very quickly in the article he points out that he 1) has lots of things going on outside of his academic life and 2) is lazy. I was starting to like this article already.

The key thesis is to reduce the barriers to being productive so that is the steady state. And make things that get in the way of productivity have higher cost. Effectively, make being productive the laziest thing you can do at any given point in time.

He talks about many of the issues that plague me, but one in particular gets me: the dreaded web browsing loop. Keep checking sites over and over. I find myself doing it without realizing sometimes. My laptop now has an edited /etc/hosts file. Again, willpower is overrated, I need something to break the cycle. You feel real silly when you go to facebook (sorry Harry) and see a 404 message staring you in the face. 

There are other tips in the article, and I plan on using many of them. Some of them don’t quite fit my/our life, but many of them do. Right now things are pretty easy to manage work-wise, but I hope to be a professor some day, and I know the number of things to juggle will increase dramatically. However, I don’t feel the solution is throw every waking hour at work. That can’t be the solution. Not all the time, not 365. I need to be more efficient, more productive on a regular basis. 

I figure if I can give up cheese and lose almost 40 pounds, I can get more work done, right?