some cool web comic about productivity and online school
Here’s why it’s hard for me:
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We don’t have the social (and other) rewards We don’t get the joys of seeing people! People! nature! The songs on our commute! that stuffs fun. People are fun to see. They make you happy. Getting out of the house every day, getting sun, getting a set routine and appointments with friends and the serendipitous happy little things that happen as a result of being out and about and going to things and experiencing beautiful life with other people and the sheer amount of novelty outside of the confines of our room
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We don’t have the social pressures No one’s expecting us anymore! No one is in class for us to engage in conversation with or even just the rewards of being around people (even the ones we don’t talk to). The guy sitting next to you won’t know you skipped :p The fear of the professor not seeing your face or your own desire for wanting your professor to see your face (for rec letters or whatever) is just not present.
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We don’t have the authority structure to really push us to do work Who’s checking on us now? It really seems like no one. It seems like we’re all alone here, only ourselves to be the sole motivator or judge of our actions. That’s a terrible way to run any society.
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It’s so easy to just go back to bed (or be unproductive) when you’re at school the friction to fall into laziness is so high: you gotta drive your ass home, tell everyone you’re leaving, leave class, and then boop on your way and you gotta confront your mom that asks why you’re home so early, etc.
Because of the safeguard mechanisms and frictions that normally keep you productive, we are pretty bound to being productive. It’s almost hard to be unproductive. But now without them, it’s pretty easy to be unproductive—through no fault of your own! That’s just the result of the factors of your new severely limited environment.
How do you maintain the same amount of productivity at home, remote school, etc?
Just go down your list! Whatever you’re missing from normal school, rebuild (as best you can) the systems that kept you productive and rewarded before Quarantine Edition™
No social pressure?
Enlist people to do work with you. You’ll hate being that one guy that makes people get up at 9 AM to do work and you oversleep. It’s hard to be lazy when everyone else in school and everyone you see is working hard on their missions just like you. At home, you probably don’t see very many people at all! Build up this system for yourself. Make all your close peers doing work super visible to you, so it’s just normal. So it’s no longer a conscious decision. Make study pods with friends that will make you feel bad for not attending.
No social rewards?
Incorporate school work into the time you get to spend (virtually or not) with friends! Study date! or some shit like that. Hang out on discord or facetime and just do work in the background of a zoom call.
No authority to push you to work?
This is harder. School grades and overachieving seem so important and all encompassing when you just see classrooms, books, teachers, advisors, and other people working hard everywhere you look. Build this back into your life! Make this kind of environment for yourself. Have people hold you accountable. Have people check in on you to see how your studies are or reading or writing or whatever you care about that used to be somewhat pressured to do in the old life.
It’s easy to be unproductive?
Make it hard to be unproductive! It takes a lot of mental effort to resist your bed if it’s right next to your work. It takes less if you sit in the kitchen and even less if you’re at the library. That bed or game will nag at you every minute of your productive crusade until it wears you down and you cave. If you move your laptop out into your kitchen or to a local library or cafe, it’s suddenly that much harder to slack off. It suddenly takes you almost no mental effort at all to resist the procrastination monster. Make your environment conducive to the work you want to do, and exclusive to what you don’t. If being unproductive is hard, it’s suddenly not that hard of a decision of whether or not you should be productive, and you tend to just stay productive.
From my Notes on Life:
Depend on systems and environment rather than will power: Want to do work? Wash your bedsheets so you can’t lay down.
Want to lose weight? Make working out easy and frictionless. Find a gym on your way home from work. Schedule an uber to the gym so you can’t back out. Find a workout partner you wont let down.
Want to eat healthy food? Make eating unhealthy food impossible by not buying bad food. Now, each time you want to indulge, you’ve gotta get in your car, drive, buy the shitty food, and then indulge. It’ll never be worth it and you won’t spend hardly any time resisting and depleting your will power.
Remove all the possible avenues for bad outcomes, avenues for not doing it.
To do cool things: Make it impossible to do uncool things.
Being productive is really just not allowing yourself to waste time on stupid shit. If you want to do cool stuff, don’t even give yourself the possibility to do stupid stuff, throw away your gaming PC, An. Applied to diet: don’t depend on your willpower to diet. That’s stupid, counter to biology, and hard as fuck. Just throw out those chocolate pretzels. You no longer spend the willpower (because it is a finite resource) resisting that decision and can use it for better things.
It’s not your fault, and it’s not just you.
Everything about school has changed! What was good about school and what kept you learning may not be present in zoom meetings at home, but try to make them be!
My current favorite productivity hack (with Pomodoro Timers): The Art of Not Thinking →
And the classic Wait But Why on Procrastination →
Hope this helps!
I love you!
An xoxooxxo