Ditch the Quarantine Productivity, Focus on Yourself

You should find a balance between managing your tasks and prioritizing your well-being to not go crazy.

After all those productivity tips and tricks of all sorts and lectures on how to optimize our days when we have a plenty amount of time in our hands to utilize during this “once-in-a-lifetime” quarantine experience; it is important to emphasize that after all, we are humans, and some aspects of our day can go unstructured and unproductive.

Yes, we should strive to achieve our objectives. Especially when we have more time in our hands than usual, we can turn that into an advantage rather than being all moody about everything that is going on in the world.

But if your dedication results in sleep-deprived days, burnout and crying sessions, a general dissatisfaction of your state, and/or other red flags like this, that is the point where you should stop and think this whole situation through.

So these are the 2 things that I want you to consider when thinking about this quarantine productivity.

Don’t feel pressured to fill your time

It’s great to have plans and to fulfill them throughout the day to be and feel more productive, to tick all the boxes in your to-do list or your bullet journal, and feel like you are giving your days’ worth.

But when you can’t bear to finish that one task, remember that we, people are not robots, and we can’t function the same each and every day, with goals and tasks to be completed. We should give ourselves some space and allow ourselves to feel unmotivated every once in a while.

Those are human behaviors and are essential to our being. When you are in a time like that, or overall had a shitty day, remind yourself that it is normal, and it is something that needs to be experienced.

Don’t try to keep yourself busy all the time, being busy doesn’t equal being productive, it mostly means you can’t manage your time properly. Instead of jumping to unhealthy distractions (scrolling down Instagram, entering an endless spiral of watching unnecessary videos on youtube, obsessively checking your emails and your social media apps…) to run away from your boredom, let yourself be bored when you are bored.

While staring at the ceiling or scratching your head sitting on your desk, you can wander in your thoughts and maybe realize a thing about yourself or have a sudden inspiration about something. So don’t freak out when you are not doing anything. Let your mind wander a bit.

Believe me, it is so much better than procrastinating with useless distractions, and with the stress of the task you need to complete in mind constantly nagging you.

Things might not always go as you planned them to be

While it’s great that you’ve set goals for the day, there is always a chance of something unexpected to come up; maybe there is a sudden change in the due date of a project, maybe something urgent popped up from work, maybe your friends decided to gather for a friend-meeting on Zoom or Facetime at that moment and they want you too, or your mother came to you with a problem and you need to help her.

These things can happen in the natural flow of the day. Don’t try to patronizingly control your day. Control certain aspects, but flow with the rest.

Don’t miss those other events just because you have your whole day sketched in front of you. Try to find a balance between those things, just like you should in every aspect of your life.

For example, while planning your day, you can write to your journal the tasks and chores of the day but leave some extra time for any uncontrolled events or just some spare time for you to chill and relax or to fill with a fun activity. Try to not fill your whole day with preplanned tasks if not so urgent.

Every once in a while, follow your instincts, don’t always play by the rules, have a twist in your routine, do something if you feel strongly about it, even if you planned to do something else at that moment. Let yourself breathe, in this task-oriented but low-efficiency technology era that we are living in, don’t be fooled by your busyness!

Final Words

At the bottom of this, this short lesson can be extracted: set goals for yourself, and have the motivation to reach them, but also embrace the spontaneity along the way and don’t always feel like you should be filling your time with something. This isn’t a competition of productivity; everyone should go at their own pace.

If you go too hard on yourself about your goals, you will exhaust yourself after a short amount of time. But if you go at a rather slower pace, with knowing what you are doing, that productivity is way more sustainable in the long run, and your mental health won’t suffer, plus you’ll be motivated to do what you do even more!