Here is my productivity tip. Get up, have coffee and shower, whatever else. Do a few puzzles, and then open up a word document, a chapter of your book, and start working on it. Then stop.
See, you have been productive. It is 9 a.m. now. Days where this does not happen are not productive. Do this several times a week, then the week is a productive one, and the month.
4 comments:
Productivity tips are great. Unfortunately, seen in a certain light, they only add to my problems. Not only do I have to get myself to do the work, I also have to push myself to carry out the smart strategy that's going to help me. Sitting at the keyboard with the right light and paper and headphones, at the right hour, may help me write -- but what's going to help move me from the couch to the keyboard at the right hour? Presumably there's some way out of this endless cycle of deferral, but I haven't found it yet. I wonder if, once it becomes easy to put on my lucky sweater, do the sudoku, drink the right tea, etc., whether in that new frame of mind, I'll find it easy to sit down and work without all the ritual.
I would say habit rather than ritual. I guess I can only give these tips with a facetious tone, because, as you say, there's a circularity there.
Fair enough, "ritual" is overloaded as "habit" is not. Nobody does without habit.
I do this, but what I open are the activist documents and projects. It is much harder to get myself to do something academic.
Perhaps I am onto something here: people always say they have writing problems, which I don't consider myself to have. So they have ways of forcing themselves to write, cajoling themselves. I don't, but I have problems with anything academic.
I can remember being 3 years old and wanting to do a Ph.D. in philosophy of language, and I like to study, but I can't handle the chaos of the academic life, the precariousness, the constant pulling out of the rug, and the general meanness.
I know you are supposed to suppress awareness of the situation but I fail, and I wake up in the morning thinking about organizing movements. I think it is procrastination but perhaps I just don't recognize my actual subject.
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