You’ve begun your day well: hit the gym, had your breakfast, turned on your laptop… and then before you know it, you’re caught in the middle of a Twitter battle or a LinkedIn kerfuffle. Half of the day is now lost.
It isn’t that all our days were productive in the pre-pandemic times; incessant calls and pointless meetings often made it difficult to have a productive day. But working from home hasn’t always been very productive either. It took us just a few weeks to realise that going to the office helped us get more done in our eight hours than working from home.
No matter what we do, our homes have as many or more opportunities to get away from our work. It’s easier to procrastinate when you’re at home and lot easier to lose the first few precious hours of the day. So how do you recover from an unproductive morning?
1. Identify the trigger points
Often, our mornings go for a toss because of one or two triggers. It could be a Twitter thread that sucks you in, an Instagram post that pushes you down the spiral, or even something someone said to you over a work call. Think back to the last few times you lost your morning, and chances are that you’ll recognise that each time there was a trigger that threw you off the wagon. Resisting the temptation to log into social media or hitting reply to that email you know can wait is often the best way to save your precious hours.
My trigger point is Netflix. As a freelancer, I often have the liberty to begin my day later than the rest. That means occasionally, at breakfast, I log into an OTT platform to pick up a show I left off the previous night. Invariably that ends up eating into the first few hours of my day. The breakfast is long finished but I’m still glued to Squid Game. Before long I realise it’s lunchtime and while I have finished a greater part of the show, I haven’t achieved anything real to speak of.
Once you identify your trigger points, you can not only beware of them in the future, but you can also catch yourself before you go too far down the rabbit hole.
2. Divide up the day into 2-3 parts
We often look at our day as a single indistinguishable lump. There’s a to-do list that you work obsessively to tick off. While that may work for a while, you’ll always have a day when you’ve been unproductive for the first half and then the list looks impossible to get through. As a result, you end up being so flustered that you lose your entire day.
Instead, consider dividing your day up into two to three parts and create your to-do list accordingly. So, even if you do lose your morning, mentally you’ll always know that it’s just one-third of your day and you have the potential to recover lost time in the remaining two-thirds of the day.
Planning my days this way helps me recover from my Netflix spiral. Sure, I may have lost the first few hours, but I also know that there’s much to achieve in the remainder of the time. Once I know that, I…
3. Set an end time to each task
Ideally you should set an end-time to each task anyway. But it becomes even more crucial when you’re trying to recover from an unproductive morning. Just as you divide your tasks into three parts of the day, you can deep dive into the list, set a timer against each of those tasks. Once you have an end time before you, it serves as a motivation to complete that task and push it off your list.
4. Incentivise yourself
Incentivising yourself is a great way to get through a tough day, even recover from an unproductive one. Fairly early on in my career, I began setting aside Tuesday evenings for dates, movie nights, etc. Tuesday became the day to look forward to on a Sunday evening or a Monday afternoon. It wasn’t too far off in the week and thus served as an incentive to get over Sunday evening blues or get through that rough Monday. It’s a practice I’ve carried into my unproductive workdays as well. The moment you realise you’ve lost a part of your day, plan to do something you really want to – it could be an hour on a shopping site, or a dinner at your favourite restaurant or just that movie you’ve been looking forward to watching. Incentivising yourself is yet another effective way to get over the slump and recover from an unproductive day.
5. Aim to accomplish just one task from your list
When all else fails, just pick one task you really want to tick off your list - it has to be something that can be realistically achieved. Then spend the rest of the final hours of your workday completing that one task. You may not feel accomplished, but you certainly won’t go to bed feeling like you’ve lost the entire day.
We all have unproductive days every now and then. If you’ve had one of those days this week, take a moment to reflect on what went wrong but also on what you did right. Acknowledge the trigger moments and avoid them in future. And if you have fallen off the wagon, know that you can always climb back on.
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