How to enjoy productivity

In the modern age, life is as easy as it ever has been yet it feels so difficult. Whenever you try to achieve something, it just gets forgotten about after a few weeks or even days.

I cover why that is and how to rectify it.

Why life feels difficult

Technology, fast food, and entertainment has made it easier than ever to stimulate your brain. Although it might feel satisfying to watch an an expert wood carver or a cute video of a golden retriever, this is actually damaging you. Every time you indulge in something that is easy, you are making your life a little bit harder because you are getting used to it. In other words, you are training your brain to get used to this new stimulus and are therefore becoming more resistant to it, requiring more of it to get the same effect. This fact is true for other stimulants like drugs.

Yes, I just compared a golden retriever to drugs. But if you strip these two things back to their most simplest elements then you may not be surprised. These two things release happy chemicals (that's the technical term I use) into your brain. These are the same chemicals that have been programmed into our brain for when we accomplish a big goal. The "reward chemicals".

Thousands of years ago, reward chemicals would have been released upon a successful hunt, for example. In the modern age, it is released through much more PG things like reaching your goals. But it is also released from watching that dog video. This means that watching a dog video is just as rewarding as spending days, weeks, or even months to accomplish a goal. Due to the way nature works, by picking the path of least resistance for maximum reward, we will pick the dog every time.

No wonder you find it difficult to get up in the morning and work on that project, meet with your friends and family, or complete your school work. It is also why the process doing these things feels worse and is more difficult than they used to be; because you have raised the bar to become happy.

It's because you can get all that happiness from a phone.

So how do I be happy (while working my a** off)?

I don't want to act as an echo chamber for others, only for myself, so these won't be general tips. For those, here's some great tips from the NHS ! These tips will be for when you are hard at work but find yourself to be stressed, overwhelmed, or generally sad.

Before I go over the how, I must say that I only understand masculine happiness. So if you consider yourself to be masculine, or have a masculine side, then I hope this helps you!

Purpose

Purpose is the driving force of progress. When you progress, you feel happy! Without it, finding a direction to pursue becomes very difficult and your work becomes meaningless. That is why having a purpose, a reason, is so important to your happiness.

I will cover how to find your purpose in a later article but, in essence, you need to put effort into your life for it to become better. Everyday you make choices. Drive or walk, ice cream or no ice cream, night out with friends or concentrate on work. Each choice has a different outcome and is governed by your priorities and values. Usually the more difficult choice is the one that's going to make the better change and the easier choice will make your life a little worse. The more difficult choices you make, the better your life will become. Like everything, there are exceptions. For example, choosing to drive to work over walking isn't exactly going to destroy your life. However, eating ice cream everyday might have some undesired consequences.

To become happy, align yourself as closely to your purpose as possible. I saw an inspiring post about why Nursing students at University of the West of England chose their nursing course. One student mentioned their "emotional attachment to the role" which is a really great example of purpose. Personally, I wouldn't be able to cope with that type of work yet these people are able to do it and enjoy it! Why? Because "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” - Nietzsche. They have a deep purpose or reason for their work and therefore aren't concerned about the content (the how) of the work itself, rather the result from the work (the why).

Of course, you don't need to have some sort of traumatic low point in your life to have a purpose. Purpose can be built through passions too! The point is that with purpose, you work will become purposeful and you will therefore begin to enjoy it! As said earlier, I plan to cover purpose in more detail in a later post.

How to enjoy the process

I have covered the main factor that is going to make you enjoy you work. But working with a purpose can still be stressful and you will meet difficulties, many of them. So here are some ways to make that process a bit more enjoyable!

Understand sacrifice - as discussed, you make choices each day. Every choice requires a sacrifice. You need to choose one thing which means a sacrifice to the other, even if that sacrifice is a positive thing. A skill to bettering yourself is being able to accept that you are going to have to throw away one thing for something else. If you want to attend an event, you might need to call off/delay going to the gym. Or if you want to eat a few hazel nut croissants you may sacrifice your diet goals for today. Once you accept this reality, making choices becomes a lot easier.

Don't be hard on yourself if you tried - if you do something wrong then say to yourself that you won't do it again tomorrow and move on. If you do it again the next day then that's when you can be hard on yourself. Bring yourself back to the drawing board, figure out why it happened again, and don't let it happen again the next day. If followed properly, this simple rule will stop you from getting angry at your mistakes and has the added benefit of preventing the formation of bad habits.

DO NOT allow work to invade your free time - this is a common piece of advice because it is so important yet under appreciated (even I forget this sometimes)! Have a solid cut off to when you stop doing work. This will prevent thoughts in the back of your mind and will allow you to enjoy your free time and maximise your productivity, in the present moment. Read more about how to do this here: End of work ritual.

Allocate free time - following from the last point, you should have some time to relax. Allocate some time for you to not think about work and relax instead. I have the evening after dinner free and every Sunday as free time then every 6-8 weeks I take a week off. I cover this in more detail in the same article.

Set and track goals properly - setting goals is underrated. If done correctly, you will become a lot more fulfilled in your work as you will feel that you are progressing and will therefore feel happier. The usual advice is to write SMART goals. Although this is a great start, having a way to track them is also important. You can use paper, your phone, or some over-complicated system that you may or may not have made!

TL;DR

Do things which make you happy as often as possible. The more things you do that you enjoy, the more enjoyable your life will become. The more people you help, the more helpful you will become. The more time you spend doing things you love, the more you will love your life. You can become whoever you want to be, it's your call.

Contact

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions then please do message me!

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Updated: 14.05.2023 at 20:10

Version: 1.0