I hate this so it causes anxiety, i can't focus because of the anxiety. So i work late and do all my work in the evenings, which ruins any hope of me having a normal life outside work.
How do you maintain focus or productivity levels?
For me, I do almost the same things every day: waking at the same hour most of the time (around 06:00 or 06:30), drinking a cup of coffee while planning the day.
I also do my work mostly in the same space in the house, at my desk: when I sit in the chair, I immediately start working. It helps a lot to have an excellent and curated todo list, action-oriented so that I can start working directly without too much time to think about other things.
Some other small things I do:
1. I use one account on my Mac for work and another one for personal/leisure.
2. I mostly use the computer for work. I don't play games on it, and I almost don't use social media on the computer (for this and for other things like reading books or posts, I mostly use an iPad).
3. I use a Pomodoro app to start working. I just open it when I sit on the chair and add the first task I want to focus on. But after 1/2 pomodoros, I drift off it and continue focusing.
4. It also helps me put on my headphones even if sometimes I don't listen to the music. But I think this is a habit of focusing from when I was working years ago in an open-space or in coffee shops.
5. I use multiple keyboards some days: I have three external keyboards on my desk, and when I feel I am losing focus and I need to maintain it, I change the keyboard. It gives me a similar feeling like using a good pen to draw something or to write a good text on a piece of paper and just want to continue using it :)
Big items to automate:
- Food: I have roughly the same meals a couple of days in a row. This makes cooking easier and takes the overhead of figuring out what to eat when I get hungry.
- Exercise: I got for a run in the middle of the day before my meeting. Having it in the middle of the day means there is not a lot of time to second guess. It creates time limit in my morning cause I want to be at a good stopping point before I run. Also, it’s a nice break from sitting at a screen.
-Sleep: I get in bed 1h before I actually sleep. I sit there and read. Before that I brush my teeth. Before that I do the dishes and clean the kitchen. It’s a routine that helps me get in the right mindset for rest.
I'm in my late 30s and I've found you need to embrace the non-productive periods of time as part of life. It's impossible to maintain the same pace forever. The energy you have will rise and fall with how life is going.
It's ok not to be ok right now.