Boosting your productivity
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Sitting for long hours in front of your computer can be exhausting, and planning your tasks is not the easiest. This fact has been exasperated in the last year due to the Covid19 pandemic. However, there are many ways students and any person can improve their productivity and lead healthier and more fulfilling lives. The key lies in Parkinson’s law, a thought experiment that states “time expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
Parkinson's law
So what is Parkinson’s law talking about? This law states that the more time you allow for a task, the less effort you will put into completing that task. Can you cast your mind back to your last project or essay that you handed in? If you gave yourself a week for that, then you probably didn’t put much effort until one day before it was due! Well, this is a time where you made use of Parkinson’s law, but not in the best way! Maybe you had to stay up all night, have a few cups of coffee and caffeinated drinks, but you handed in the essay at the end. As you allow more time for tasks, it will dawn on you that the task will just become more daunting, and you might even overcomplicate it in your head. Often the extra time people allocate to a task is filled with tension, stress and anxiety about how to go about completing the task. So careful assessment of how long a task actually takes is critical. Only experimentation will help you find that sweet spot where you balance efficiency and quality of work.
How do I block my calendar/time?
Now going back to organising your day and blocking your calendar with tasks, if you block 6 pm every weekday for a cardio workout, you will ensure that all your work is done before that time because you know you have committed to this task. Not only will this activity improve your performance the next day (or in the evening if you blocked tasks then), but it will also make sure that you have focused study sessions on ensuring that you finish your work at the allotted time. In addition, this method inevitably improved students' mental health who are often stuck to their computer screens all day! Of course, you might go back to work/study after you do that activity, but at least you will have given time for your brain to absorb the information you have been looking at all day.
How do I complete tasks in less time?
Now how do you ensure that you complete the usual tasks in half the time or less? One of the most important techniques is completing tasks in short bursts of time, and this has been termed the “Pomodoro technique”. The Pomodoro technique involves timing yourself for 25 minutes, working without distractions, and taking a 5-minute break. Alternatively, you can extend a session to one hour and take a 10-minute break at the end (it all depends on how long you can focus!). You can keep doing this until you complete 2-4 hours, and then you can take a long break or call it a day. Working in the morning (or late night indeed!) where people are asleep, and there are no distractions has been proven to yield better results since you can focus on those Pomodoro sessions! It has been proven that some people are night owls, and some are early birds, so take some time to figure out which one you are and what is the optimal time for you!
How do I reduce distractions?
During your Pomodoro sessions, you can use apps like forest and freedom to block distracting websites when deciding to work on something. With forest, you can plant trees whilst blocking all distractions on your phone or any other device. An extra tip with the forest is to plant trees with friends to act as your accountability partner! On the other hand, in freedom, you can block specific websites and apps on your devices.
Thank you for reading this blog post, and I hope you found it helpful. Please do include any suggestions or questions in the form below.
Read more on Parkinson’s law.
Happy learning,
TST team!
