5 steps towards developing a productive routine during uncertain times

A Daily Productive Routine

You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.

— John C. Maxwell

In Christopher Nolan’s 2000 film “Memento”, the protagonist Leonard Shelby, has anterograde amnesia and is unable to store recent memories, the result of an attack by two men. In one of the early scenes, Leonard is in a motel room speaking to an unseen and unknown caller. During his conversation with the unknown caller, Leonard recalls a fellow anterograde amnesiac, Sammy Jankis. Leonard touches the tattoo on the back of his hand and tells the unknown caller, “Sammy Jankis wrote himself endless notes. But he’d get mixed up. I’ve got a more graceful solution to the memory problem. I’m disciplined and organized. I use habit and routine to make my life possible.”

From reel life to real life, Henry Gustav Molaison, widely known as patient H.M., had a portion of his brain surgically removed to cure his epilepsy. Although the surgery was partially successful in controlling his epilepsy, a severe side effect was that he became unable to form new memories. Molaison experienced every aspect of his daily life — eating a meal, taking a walk — as a first. Yet his intellect, personality, and perception were intact, and he was able to acquire new motor skills. Over time, he became more proficient at tasks such as tracing patterns while watching his hand movements in a mirror, despite the fact that he could never recall performing the task before. The curious case of H.M. provided a lot of insights to neuroscientists into how people could form routines based on implicit memories when presented with the same stimuli repeatedly, even when they had no ability to form explicit memories.

We now live in a world where Covid-19 has caused lock downs, working from home (WFH) and a complete breakdown in our usual routines. Without our usual routines, we can feel frustrated and somewhat lost resulting in a loss in both our creativity and our productivity. So, using some of the things which I have learnt from various people and books over the years, I have put together a 5-step routine to reclaim control over life. It has worked wonderfully for me. I hope you too find it useful.

• Prioritize your tasks

Each day, you have a number of things to do, on both the personal and the professional front. It can be overwhelming if you try to keep it all in your mind. A better approach is to maintain a task list. However, a task list has two issues. One is that it could be a long list and even if you keep completing some tasks on the list, the list as a whole remains incomplete. Psychologically, it is not satisfying to maintain a forever incomplete list. The other, an even more serious issue is that a task list can tempt you to first focus on easy wins and tick them off the list, instead of the most important ones. A solution which has worked for me is to first prepare a consideration list of all possible tasks that could to be tackled during the day. Next, focus on identifying the top 3 to 5 tasks which are most important. How do you identify the most important? By applying the Pareto principle which says 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities. Make this 20%, no more than 3 to 5 tasks, your success list for the day.

• Choose your highlight

It’s great that you have now created your success list by prioritizing your top 3 to 5 tasks for the day. However, how do your tasks relate to your long-term goals, whether it is one of losing weight, finishing an important project or achieving your sales target for the year? Choosing a highlight from your success list can help bridge the gap between immediate tasks and long term goals. Ideally, pick something which takes an hour or two to do. Why? All of us still have many things to do in a day. So, it may not be realistic on most days to choose something which takes much longer. On the other hand, choosing something which can be done in say 5 or 15 minutes may not be significant enough to give you satisfaction. One important point, your highlight need not be always focused on work. On some days, you could also choose something fun, such as playing Foosball or dumb charades with your family.

• Identify your high-energy hour

Priceonomics is a firm which sifts through tons of different types of data to find insights from them. In 2017, they analyzed 2 years of data on RedBooth, a project management software company. In this data set, users had generated over 1.8 million projects and 28 million tasks. They found that users’ most productive day time of day was 11 am when they complete the most tasks. After lunchtime, users’ productivity drops — and it completely plummets after 4 pm. Recognizing this truth, it makes sense that you schedule your most important work, often your highlight for the day, at your high-energy hour. Of course, if you find your high-energy hour is different from 10 am to 11 am, you can use that hour. Be cognizant of the fact that for a majority of people, it will be before lunch.

• Develop your production capability

Imagine that you keep driving your car year after year, without any servicing being done. What will happen? The same will be the fate of almost any machine, be it an elevator, a water pump or even a simple saw. Without putting in effort into maintaining and enhancing its production capability, it will stop producing effectively. The same is the case with you and me. As humans, our production capability might be enhanced in multiple ways, e.g. the body through exercise, the mind through reading and positive emotions through gratitude. What will be the best way of working it into your day? The answer, as revealed by multiple bestsellers from “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg to “Tiny Habits” by B J Fogg and “Atomic Habits” by James Clear reveals, is it develop a habit. I will have to write a separate article to summarize the recommendations from these useful books. To begin with, keep in mind these two points -

1. Start small, e.g. commit to meditating for just 5 min if you want to develop that habit.
2. Begin with one habit at a time. A habit might take anywhere from a month to 4 months to be formed. Don’t try to form too many of them at once. If you cannot be patient to wait to start the second one, at least ensure that you have a significant success streak of your previous habit, say at least 14 to 21 days, before you begin your second one.

• Reflect on your day

End your day doing three things that can make you feel satisfied, grateful and happy.

1. Review the tasks completed today and the ones which need to be done tomorrow. This will prime you to be productive the next day.
2. Write down one thing for which you are grateful. It could be a person, an event or a thing which you are glad exists in your life. A feeling of gratitude will provide you a positive feeling of abundance.
3. Recall one thing during the day which made you happy. Write down the event and how you felt. The advantage is that you will relive your happiness through this Doubler.

What I have seen working as useful elements to develop a productive daily routine can of course work at any time, not just during uncertain times like the ones which we face right down due to Covid-19. However, it is more important that ever before to develop a productive daily routine now to reclaim control of our lives. What do you think?

References

The ideas that I have presented in my article can be found be in many sources. Some of the sources which I like and have found useful are as follows.

1. In his article “The Legacy of Patient H.M. for Neuroscience” published in “Neuron”, Larry R. Squire discusses types of memory and habit learning.
2. In their book “The One Thing”, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan describe in detail the challenge with to-do lists and the concept of success list in chapter 4, “Everything matters equally”.
3. In their book “ Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day”, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky discuss why choosing a highlight for the day strikes the right balance between immediate tasks and long-term goals.
4. In their article, “When Does Work Actually Get Done”, Priceonomics have presented a summary of their key insights derived by analyzing 2 years of user data on RedBooth, a project management software company.
5. In his book, “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”, Stephen R. Covey discusses the important of striking the P / PC balance. In other words, the need to balance time and energy between production (P) and increasing production capability (PC) at a personal level.
6. In his book, “Life’s Amazing Secrets”, Gaur Gopal Das describes how to live by the principle of gratitude in chapter 4, “Growing through Gratitude.”
7. In their short audio series, “Get Happy: Introduction to Happiness”, Michelle Gielan and Oliver Burkeman describe how to practice The Doubler.