How to Produce Your Best Work

For busy people, life’s all about efficiency. It was the same in my home. My mum would tell me to never waste time with anything that was unproductive and that made me mad because I wouldn't ever be able to play video games or watch films. But I now think that the best results come from a balance of work and play, a well-mixed juice that has just the right amount of sugar in it, the sugar being the sweetness that comes from free time.

During a recent dopamine detox, I learned three things:

1. You’re more productive when you do less. But that doesn’t mean doing less the same way. You need to make that reduced time as productive and valuable as possible in order to create better work.
2. Spontaneous work often is of very high quality since it flows straight from your thoughts and hasn’t been as filtered by your brain into thinking it’s work. For you, it’s just fun.
3. Relaxing time is fine and great if you can also maximize it as much as possible. Have just enough to make it feel valuable but not to the extent that your eyes hurt from staring at your Valorant screen.

Those three discoveries changed my entire perspective on my routine. I liked(-ish) the idea of a routine because it meant I wouldn’t have to think about what to do next and would just follow what was written and end up with things done, but I hardly followed through. I hated my routine.

You’re meant to come up with a schedule you actually?want?to fulfil, and it should be as fun and satisfying as possible. What would your dream day look like, both in terms of work?and?play?

For me, I thought it was working out before the rest of my household starts making noise, watching Youtube when I get home from school, and getting everything done before I get home. For you, it might look like simply getting your homework done a week before you need to submit it or an hour streaming with friends every evening. Whatever it is, it should be “you” and should make you feel like every day is going to be the absolute best you’ve ever had.

Now that I’ve triggered a few thoughts from you, let’s cut to the meat of it.

Scheduling

As I said, schedules should be something you actually?want?to complete rather than simply tasks to tick off, but how do you do that? How do you make each day different and fun?

1. Have theme days

During my hectic days at The Knowledge Society, I did no school work. I did, but on the day or hour it was due. I tried to fit all the work for TKS in every day, and ended up spending even my minutes on the bus and car on tech. But, boy was that a bad move. After a while, I got extremely tired of the daily drone of work that would never change and decided to ask one of the directors for advice. Ian Lockhart told me to set theme days and I did. Yay. It worked. Networking on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, self-driving cars (my focus) stuff on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Fridays were for long workouts. Finally my routine was no longer boring, I could look forward to something different every day. It also made me note down other ideas I had during the week until the next week when I could properly think about them and figure out if they were actually decent. Useful, you might think.

2. Leave empty spots

Another mistake was filling my entire day with things. I had no time for myself and when Sunday came, the day where I had no schedule whatsoever, I’d spend the entire day binge-watching Vincenzo, from 4 am to some point late at night. It was a huge contrast to the rest of the week and made my life overall very bumpy (not a straight line). Leaving a few empty spots would have given me time to start photography courses and watch movies should I have felt like it, without feeling guilty. Spending time doing nothing other than listening to the Inception soundtrack would have also been a good option, as well as dumping free-flow text onto Notion (you never know, it might turn into a viral LinkedIn post).

3. Remove distractions

How do you expect to just get better grades with less studying? You need to study, but make that hour or two the best it can possibly be. For all your study sessions, use Fiveable, start timers, clear your desk, put your phone out of sight or in another room, and tell your parents your room is Area 51 for the next hour. Then block all social media and websites you might randomly divert to, and grind. Remove all distractions during your focus time, and wow, you just finished the essay in an hour!

Fun Time ????????

This is probably the part you were most looking forward to. Mine too. You can come up with your own amazing systems to make downtime great, but here are mine.

Downtime as a reward for work time

The Pomodoro (Italian for tomato, don’t ask) Technique says that for every 25 minutes of work you do, you take a 5-minute break. You can do this in whatever chunks work for you, like 50 minutes work and 5-minute breaks. The idea is that you get an instant reward from doing work in the 25 minutes (brains’ typical focus time), like eating a bar of chocolate or listening to your favourite song and your next 25 minutes then become extremely productive because your head figures you get rewarded for it.

Specific downtime

The next levels of Candy Crush might be inviting but if you give in, you’re going to feel bad tomorrow. You’ll also ruin your sleep (too much dopamine right before bed). Say you’ll watch Spiderman for two hours, and specifically say it’s Spiderman because if you don’t, you’ll spend two hours simply searching for something decent to watch (from personal experience). So make sure you check reviews beforehand and can say, “HELL, YEAH!” to an imaginary person that asks whether you want to watch ____ film before you start.

Creativity

You’re probably not 6 years old anymore, but do you remember how fun those days were? You’d crawl under chairs, make pillow forts and fight your angry brother with lightsabers. Now you just go on TikTok. That sucks. Call me a weirdo but this stuff is the stuff. Make a list of fun things to do or find one on Pinterest. And they’ve got to be interesting. I’m only giving you these, find the rest yourself:

• Step on a train and note down the weirdest things you see people doing
• Try a new Cafe from a culture you’ve never experienced (bobaaaa ??)
• Find a random website generator and do something on there

This article is only meant to help you figure out what works for you, so try out a dozen different things then settle. Good luck.