As a university student, we do not only deal with all the deadlines one after another and homework from classes, we also deal with ‘getting our lives together’ – getting the laundry done, cleaning up your messy rooms, maintaining your social life while also staying healthy. Although many would think that being a university student is better or easier than being a working adult – in which I agree to an extent, but I would like to argue that the drainage we receive from university is more on the physical side. For example, as an active student, you do not only wake up early to get ready for lectures, you might also need to sacrifice your lovely meal times to be involved in club and society activities (yes, I am speaking from my experiences). Depending on the club and society activities that you choose, most students would choose to be involved in sports or performing art related societies and these kind of societies would involve the usage of physical strength. So, when you are finally free to face your studies, you are most probably already drained physically and mentally. But hold up! I am not demotivating you guys to either choose your studies or your co-curriculum activities. Of course most of us want to have the best of both worlds, university life seems long but it really just ends before you even notice. So that is why maintaining productivity is important.
But what even is productivity? We say it so often but do we actually think about the definition? According to James Clear, productivity is a measure of efficiency of a person completing a task. He also argues that it is getting important things done constantly and not getting a lot of things done. I personally agree to this so much, productivity differs for everyone because we prioritise different things in university. For example, some might just want to study and have a social life but some might want to take part actively in co-curriculum activities while also acing his or her studies. If you do not know what are your priorities, you will just end up completing not a lot of tasks or a lot of irrelevant tasks.
We often assume that productivity means getting more things done each day. Wrong. Productivity is getting important things done consistently.
James Clear
So, if you have already figured out what are your priorities in university, your next question could be ‘but how do I maintain my level of productivity?’. Well, as someone who is not that productive but is extremely interested in being productive, I have come across this method by Ivy Lee as shown in the infographic below.
After giving this technique a try for 3 days, I realised one weakness of this method. Before I explain why so, I would like to clarify that I have only read about the general information of this method on James Clear’s blog and I agree that there might be aspects that I overlooked that could make this technique works. Now, let me explain why it did not work for me. Often while I was half way into a task, there were a few incidents where I needed to put a pause to my work due to some sudden disruption. Then, the disruption actually makes it more convenient for me to jump onto the next task but the rule that one should not move on to the next task before he or she finishes the current one makes it inconvenient in convenient situation. For example, I had dissertation reading as my first task and contacting this certain person for assignment related stuffs as one of the last few tasks. However, while I was doing my dissertation reading, this person texted me first and logically thinking, it is more efficient if I convey my message to him at that moment as the chance to get one more job done was already there. So, in the end, I ended up not following the third and fourth steps but I still managed to get quite some work done.
Now, although I changed up the steps a bit to make it more convenient for myself, you guys are encouraged to attempt the original steps and maybe, you guys could work it out. In my opinion, the very essential and important step in maintaining productivity is to have to-do list that can be carried around everywhere- be it a bullet journal or just the note pad on your smartphones. One of the easiest way to forget your tasks is when you do not record and plan. Therefore, the very first step to productivity is to record and plan your days and practice self-control in adhering to the plan!
This post is getting a little long-winded, sooooo now, go get yourself a paper or your smartphones and start planning your days away. Happy productive day!
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