Last updated on December 6th, 2023 at 03:50 pm
As someone avidly against the toxic hustle culture, talking about productivity might seem contrary to my stance. However, productivity to me is a lifestyle, it’s inevitable. We’re going to work (either a career we enjoy or not), we’re going to do our chores and we’ll always have something to do (whether a leisurely hobby or something more demanding).
To wake up daily, with a sense of purpose is to be productive. Where the toxic hustle culture expects results to the detriment of health and ties our value to how much results we can show at the end of the day, redefining your type of productivity should take a different path. Some refer to this as compassionate productivity.
We cannot practice compassionate productivity if we haven’t redefined our intention with work and what productivity means to us. To be productive, we need to carry out our tasks from a place where we listen to our body rather than the need to tick our to-do list. Yet, some days, we truly have a lot to do and still risk burnout even when it’s work that we really love or when we’re not working to show off or get our monthly salary.
Here are some tips to avoid burnout:
Take breaks in between long focus tasks
Many times, we want to sit with a task until completion and this might be a good idea if it happened once in a while. But if your work involves a lot of intense focus tasks, then it’s not sustainable to always want to see a task until completion with no breaks in between.
You’re most likely aware of this, but taking breaks between tasks is best and even more productive. Find a sweet spot for you, say every one hour and thirty minutes, you take a ten-minute break. You don’t need to do something in this period, like scrolling through your phone. What’s important is that you don’t work for the allotted time, and then resume once the time is up.
This gives the brain some rest and can provide more clarity.
Practice work detachment
One issue we all face with work is that it never ends at work or when we physically close. When we’re not physically working, we’re thinking about work, about what we still have to do—we’re mentally working.
It’s important to create a life of variety. Purposely detaching from work and thoughts about it or tiny tasks (like brief calls) once you have closed for the day allows you to focus on other aspects of your life. It also creates something to look forward to. Even if you enjoy what you do, it’s restorative to find other enjoyable things and commit to them as well.
Pause work and continue when you’ve hit a wall
We often hit a wall while on a task and sit staring and pushing ourselves. Other times, we might reluctantly shift to another task. What’s common here is that we don’t take this lack of flow as a sign to pause work.
Often, we’re more hesitant if we hit a wall just a few minutes into the task.
What seems counterproductive but is actually helpful here is to listen to your brain and pause. Busy yourself with something entirely different from the task at hand. Take a walk, read if you can, and just do something that gets your mind off the task. After a while, you can resume the task and find that the flow has returned. Sometimes, the flow doesn’t return fully but just enough to conclude the task. It’s fine.
Gun for consistency
Rather than short bursts of high-intensity work, gun for consistency so you can hit deadlines way ahead of time. This is better for the brain and your mental health. From the moment you have a project, commit to devoting a certain amount of time daily to it.
Highly intense work tends to be very demanding on the brain and can lead to faster burnout. It’s better to do a sustainable amount of work often rather than committing five hours in one day and then forgetting it until later.
Know that work literally never ends, so have a sense of enough and always highlight the most important work to do; once they are out of the way, you can feel a sense of achievement.
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We want to show up for ourselves consistently and at the same time be easy about it. We want to manage our expectations and make them less rigid.
Your point of view caught my eye and was very interesting. Thanks. I have a question for you.