I'm too good at multitasking!
I can waste time, be unproductive, and procrastinate all at once.
So, I’m trying to write this line while listening to Master of Puppets by Metallica, and quite frankly, my head is in auto-head bang mode. But I’m not able to think straight and write words. Okay, pausing the music now. Ahh, nice. Much better.
When you’re multitasking, the amount of cognitive load you’re enduring is unnecessary. Never multitask end of the story.
But, I only have 24 hours in a day and so much more to do. How do I manage my time? Ugh, that’s such a cliched question.
Welcome to MichiSpotlight! I’m Vaishnavi, and I write this newsletter. If you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe.
Also, if you’re not much of a reader, then go check out my brand new youtube channel in the making, subscribe before it becomes popular xD.
I’m gonna keep this one short because I have my Data Warehousing final tomorrow. 😨
Anyway, back to the point now.
No, I’m not going to tell you how to manage your time. Pfft.
The thing is that one single productivity hack doesn’t work for everyone. It would help if you customized it according to your work environment, living situation, interests, and mental capacity.
All of us are not in the same mental space. Some of us have suffered losses, rejections. At the same time, many of us guilt-binge anime or Netflix all day.
We all are a product of the different experiences we’ve had and the people we’ve met.
Hence the mechanisms that help us be more productive differs for everyone.
So let’s learn how to customize productivity hacks.
Dopamine Eisenhower Matrix
In my opinion, the way you spend the first 40 minutes of your day has quite an impact on your mental space for the rest of your day.
If you spend it checking your socials or tweeting, your mind will succumb to the dopamine rush in your head.
So make sure you do something boring like not looking at your phone, meditation, or yoga.
The matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that answers that helps you separate “urgent” tasks from “important” ones:
Urgent and Important: Do these tasks as soon as possible
Important, but not urgent: Decide when you’ll do these and schedule it
Urgent, but not important: Delegate these tasks to someone else
Neither urgent nor important: Drop these from your schedule as soon as possible.
If you add two more fields to this matrix, you’d be golden.
These are - low dopamine items (LDIs) and high dopamine items (HDIs).
Things that are boring and require conscious effort to accomplish, like solving coding problems on LeetCode, helping your mom with household chores, or doing yoga to stay fit, are called low dopamine items.
Whereas stuff like scrolling Instagram, building a personal brand on social media, developing cool applications - basically tasks you’d perform happily are called high dopamine items.
When you’re classifying your tasks into four categories, use these two parameters to rank tasks in each quadrant.
Perform your low dopamine items before the high dopamine ones or vice versa, depending on your self-control and mental space. I’d recommend doing the LDIs first.
Animedoro Technique
The Pomodoro Technique is all about doing focused work in 25-minute sessions throughout the day.
After each session, take a five-minute break. After completing four consecutive Pomodoros, take a 20 to 30-minute break.
Pomodoro is excellent for tackling tasks you don't feel like doing or jobs that require little thought.
However, other tasks, like writing or coding, require uninterrupted time.
The problem with the Pomodoro method is that the timer is a consistent interruption that prevents you from getting into a state of flow.
So, introducing Animedoro. As the name suggests, it involves watching anime. Although, it would still work for you if you find something to watch, like a Netflix series with short episodes or YouTube videos.
Let’s get to the deets then. Instead of making 25-minute sprints, in Animedoro, you can make 40 minutes - 1 hour-long sprint. Then, take a 20-minute break to watch any video that isn’t too distracting.
Be sure to set several alarms with unkind labels for you to get back to work. It might be tempting to stay and watch.
For some of you, this might not work, so instead of watching, you can read. Books or comics; it depends on you.
Personally, I like doing deep work using the Forest app. It ensures I don’t use my phone. When I focus for some amount of minutes,
Kanyeban Board
Kanban boards are the easiest way to visualize your tasks according to status or labels.
But you can use different variations of kanban with different labels and filters to visualize your work properly.
Making a Kanyeban board means using the kanban board in many different ways. Kanye West has nothing to do with it.
Let me show you an example. Trello FTW.
Convert any hack into your own
Converting any hack into your own is pretty simple. All the hacks I’ve mentioned above are variations of the original ones that didn’t work for me properly. There are a gazillion ways to be more productive. But you have to make it suit your interests and goals.
Before customizing a certain hack, you can identify what didn’t work for you and be honest with yourself. If you cannot follow a productivity hack, don’t blame yourself for not keeping up.
When you know what’s wrong with the hack, try to include something you like or drive you. For me, it’s food; for someone else, it might be anime. Use that.
Don’t take on too many tasks at once. Learn to say NO.
Believe in the power of deep work. Never multitask.
Last Remarks
There are some tools I use to be productive. If you’re interested, check them out:
Notion - To track my project work, internship stuff, and courses.
Trello - For my Kanyeban boards.
Google Calendar + Calendly - To schedule meetings and keep track of my day.
Publer - To publish my tweets and LinkedIn posts without hindering my dopamine levels from keeping up with post engagement timings.
Until next time, thanks for reading :)
Why is your letter called MichiSpotlight
Wow finally I get to see kanban being used for personal productivity.