How do you stay productive?

I'm sure everyone had one of those days when you're just not up for any tasks that and you just want to relax all day and do nothing. This can easily turn into a habit so it's really important to find a way to stay productive especially in the situation of working from home.

What I try to do in the morning in order to stay productive is to make a coffee, do a little workout (it's more like stretching exercises), create a to-do list with the things I need to complete for the day and last but not least I try to ignore all social media until noon (courtesy to @bobbyiliev for this one.)

I'm curious what else you do in order to stay sharp and focused on your daily tasks. Please feel free to share your tips in the comments!

Comments

[tq-bit]

I'm going for the pomodoro technique. 25 mins of focussed work, 5 minutes break with a selfmade webapp. I used pomodoro-logger before: electronjs.org/apps/pomodoro-logger

Active procastrination also works pretty well, if you've got a thing to do you don't like, try and do smth else you don't like. works wonders sometimes.

last but not least, habits are key. I theme my days. Nothing fancy, but this might give you an idea:

• Get connected Monday (Focus on communication, networking, teaching & learning w/ team)
• Schedule Tuesday (Wipe by todo-list clean, focus on planning & conceptualizing)
• Get-Things-Done - Wednessday (Pretty self explaining)
• Catch-Up Thursday (Focus to handle open issues from past periods, housekeeping, etc)
• Retrospective Friday (Take an hour to write about the stuff that happened during the week.See if it's aligned to long-term goals)

[Alex Georgiev]

That is really interesting and also sounds quite productive. I'll try to implement some of these in my daily/weekly routine. Thanks for sharing this with us!

[fr0tt]

Personally I try to stick to some sort of a routine when to work and when not if the day allows it. I find it easier to follow an usual workflow instead of motivating me to be productive at other times on other days.
Having a (clear) goal also helps.
And last but not least, I try to keep a balance between work and freetime and reward myself with a video game or an episode of a good series ;)

[Alex Georgiev]

That is a great point of view. I also try to set a routine when I work in order to get more stuff done, but as you said this can vary from day to day. Rewarding yourself is also important. Thanks for sharing this!

[Kenadams9922]

I always start my day with light exercise in the morning and breakfast. When it comes to organizing my work, I use Quire's project management. It's simple and has all the features that I need. After I started investing in project management software, I could clearly project all the things I needed to do. And I somehow built a routine out of it, and now I just get used to it.