In the new world of artificial intelligence, authenticity is becoming rare. Hence, being old school, I would like to share with you my personal journey of creation and staying productive. Living the life that I am happy with.
First of all, I am a thinker by nature. Thoughts and ideas came to my mind all the time. Being employed and married, there are countless things on my to do list to complete. Yet, days passed without me doing anything constructive. Ideas are left unexplored, and each day passing by aimlessly is making me feel worse about myself.
So, I created "to-do lists" over and over again, each attempt resulting in leaving more tasks incomplete. I started to ask myself questions, and started reading more about becoming more productive. I wondered how can I prioritize tasks when overwhelmed, and how to stop procrastinating.
The real breakthrough only came when I took a turn to understand myself.
Simple verdict — I had to understand myself first
I overthink, like a lot.
I am emotional. Daily unhappy events, or if people criticized me, I wallowed in self-pity and do nothing.
I am lazy. I am doom scrolling on my phone all the time and watches Netflix to satisfy my busy mind.
When there is too much things left undone, I just choose to do the ones that does not need me to think — giving me the false impression that I am actually doing something useful.
Time is something that we cannot ask for more. After much thought, my solution to becoming productive is simple: I need to keep things as straightforward and simple as possible. There should be no requirement to change who I am and my habits.
This is how I do things now
Be conscious of my thoughts. Whenever I am overthinking or realised that my thoughts are negative, I paused and ask myself: what is the one thing I can do today to be productive?
Define clearly the meaning of productive. For me, it is things that improve my life — writing this article, self-learning on investments, researching a course to attend, updating my financial portfolios.
Break these items down to smaller items that may take only a fraction of my time. Perhaps half an hour or even a short fifteen minutes.
Put them on a to-do list that is only for such activities.
The "One Thing" method
Next, I keep my overthinking brain busy by focusing and asking myself: what is the ONE thing from the list that I shall do today? How to allocate time to it? Then, ask myself again — what is the one item that I need to do but it does not help in my life at all? Clearing a cabinet, a one-time tidy up of the storeroom, or mopping the floor.
If it takes too long to complete, just break it down to parts. Take mopping the floor for example — instead of the whole house, maybe just do one room.
Finally, it gets really simple from here: just complete both tasks. One productive and one not productive. No matter how small, just try to get one done from each side.
Such small actions may not have a significant impact on your life straight away, and I don't beat myself up for days that still went by with me doing nothing. But overtime, small things done will start to shape up and accumulate. One thing will lead to another and you will find yourself growing, trying out new things and start to complete more stuffs. Just like how this article slowly got completed — for like 2 weeks to write 2 pages!
This is what has been happening to me. It's slow, but effective. Things are taking shape and I feel better about myself.
Thank you very much for reading my first written article and I wish you a lifetime of happiness!
Want to use the exact system I built?
It is really just a super simple set up — you only need to key in productive tasks or ideas, and the date you want to start. I built and designed it so you can enter and view it from your phone anytime. There are auto features in the template which make you want to check it every day. I wrote this after I back-tested it for 3 months, which outlasted all my previous to-do lists.