Personal UNproductivity (2/n)

It’s ironic (or maybe sad it’s a better word to describe it) that after writing a blog post about personal productivity I’ve experienced my most unproductive week (or 2 weeks).

Maybe you are wondering why… these are the reasons I want to forget these past 10 days:

• I focused on the wrong things (like procrastinating). This was definitely the biggest problem, I spent the full week with nonimportant, nonurgent, nonrelevant things. But there is a system in place that should have prevented it, what happened with the checks and balances?

• I didn’t review daily the pending tasks, nor the next actions. This is a check that usually helps me focus on the more important tasks and reveals if I have too many pending tasks as it was the case that week.

  I didn’t (unconsciously) wanted to do the review because I knew I had too many things. Instead of doing it and be aware that I couldn’t waste a minute, I skipped it and wasted 2 weeks :’(

• I had several hard-to-start tasks. I kept postponing them ad infinitum. These tasks are usually outside my comfort zone. In the end, there were really really easy (but long) and, because I started them so late, they took a lot of time.

  I should break the tasks.

  I should break the tasks.

  I should break the tasks.

  I’m reinstating a measure that has failed me in the past but I think it can be useful here. To assign pomodoros to tasks (spend at least 1 pomodoro on this task today) and rotate between the tasks to help start things.

• I postponed things (those hard to start tasks) to late in the evening imaging and estimating a huge-productivity-hour. Usually what happened was that I was tired and looked for excuses and went to bed instead (or procrastinated even more).

  Things take time, there isn’t a magical hour where you are 1000% more productive than the previous 10 hours. I’m usually wildly optimistic and I think that, without distractions, I can finish 100 things in one hour. In the real world, I can only finish 1.

• I had to deliver a demo (with cool technology like chat bots or face recognition) but we didn’t have business requirements nor access to the person that would show the demo. I worked with a tight deadline (and I badly managed time and expectations the previous week) and in the end, it was all for nothing.

• I had a bad week. Summer in Madrid and Valladolid, low motivation, too many long compromises. I didn’t feel really motivated. It wasn’t my best week.

I broke several compromises (with myself and others). These are the persons affected:

• I broke several compromises with openwebinars. I finished them 10+ days late :’(
• I had to cancel a course with luce (last-minute call affecting 10 people). Sorry :(
• I had to finish a demo. And more or less worked Ok. But it could have been way better :(
• I had to cancel a coffee with Antonio Pol. Sorry :(
• And I kept postponing several, not-so-important, tasks.