Productivity Tips for the Anxious

Earlier today I had trouble getting productive and wound up feeling quite anxious. This used to happen to me a lot as a student, but over the years I’ve built up habits that help me quickly get out of that unhelpful headspace and back to the task at hand. The thought occurred to me that some of these habits and tips might be helpful for others, especially in the current times, so I decided to share!

Below are ten productivity tips, some of which may be especially beneficial for people who have anxiety, are prone to getting anxious, or have been feeling anxious lately.

Avoid the shame cycle

The shame cycle goes like this: you fall behind (maybe it’s your own fault, maybe it’s not), you feel bad about it, looking at your work gives you anxiety because there’s either too much or you don’t know how to do it yet, you’re afraid of how much there is to do so you don’t do anything, thus leaving you even further behind and feeling even worse than when you started.

As someone intimately familiar with this cycle, I can tell you firsthand that shame, anxiety, and fear are very unproductive emotions. They cloud your decision-making and prevent you from focusing on the task at hand. I’m not sure I’ve ever actually gotten anything done when I felt ashamed of myself--real work only really has gotten done after I’ve managed to pull myself out of it.

This is much easier said than done. “No, Lily, you don’t understand--I am so behind and it is completely my fault. I totally deserve to feel horrible about it.” You might even be so stressed and anxious that you’re unable to form a coherent sentence.

I’ve been there, and I can tell you: continuing down that path will not solve your problems. It’s more helpful to do whatever you can to escape from that vicious negative cycle and get yourself back to a neutral, calm starting point.

If you’re anything like me, what I’m saying right now might just sound like feel-good nonsense. “I haven’t been productive, so isn’t it right for me to feel bad about myself?” Well, sure, but if you’re thinking along those lines, then you probably already feel sufficiently bad to enact positive change. A small amount of shame can be helpful for kicking your butt into gear--just don’t linger there, and definitely don’t make it your home (i.e. don’t let it start to be how you think about yourself). Taking it further than it needs to go will probably not benefit anyone in any way, so why waste your time?

Taking this a step further, thought processes like “I did bad and therefore I should feel bad” are actually thinly-veiled attempts to make you feel better! You’re comforting yourself with the idea that even though you’ve been unproductive, which feels like a moral failure, at least you still understand morality and are therefore a moral person. In the end, it’s all emotional gymnastics that don’t land anywhere. Rather than deliberating over right and wrong, it would be best to simply breathe deeply for a minute or two, however long it takes, and to the greatest extent possible, step out of the shame cycle.

“Stepping out of the shame cycle”--in other words, “letting go” of the emotions of shame and anxiety--can be a whole article on its own. For a lot of people, meditation (specifically the practice of acknowledging your emotions without judgement and eventually letting them pass) helps with this. Different things work for different people, but for most people, a short breathing exercise is a good place to start.

Once you let the shame and anxiety go, it’s easier to focus on the task at hand. You’ll probably perform better if you’re feeling neutral as opposed to ashamed. Honestly, don’t even bother trying to feel “good”--it’s unnecessary and hard to logic yourself into. Neutral is perfectly fine.

Note that I very deliberately avoided saying you should “channel these emotions into your work” here. That’s because I don’t think such a thing is really possible in most contexts. Those emotions, especially in their extreme state, are usually unhelpful and can’t be “channeled” into anything. Your goal should be to set aside your shame and anxiety, lower your elevated heart rate, and enter a neutral, calm state.

Be communicative

This is definitely the hardest tip to implement, especially if you’ve only narrowly managed to step out of the shame cycle. “I am so behind that I am afraid to ask for help” is a common thought pattern. Honestly, this can be situationally dependent--some teammates and managers are more forgiving than others. Overall, though, I think that situations tend to be less dire than we think and people tend to be more understanding than we give them credit for.

Everyone has fallen short at some point in their lives. If you’re proactive and honest, people tend to be willing to help you get back on track.

This will probably be especially true given the current global circumstances. We’re all aware that everyone is under varying levels of additional stress right now. It doesn’t matter if you think your level of additional stress is greater or less than others on your team or if they seem to be handling it better--different stressors affect individuals differently, and most reasonable people are aware of that. 

More specifically, especially if you’re early-in-career and are worried that you’re seemingly doing a worse job than coworkers who have kids or other family obligations (“They have it worse than me and they’re still performing better!”), try not assume that they definitely have things harder than you. Yes, they might be dealing with children underfoot, but they also might have the allyship and emotional support of a spouse. If they’re older, they also likely have more general life experience that better equips them to cope with hardship. If you’re a young adult, this might be your first time facing a truly uncertain future without being able to materially rely on your parents or an educational institution--that’s a legitimate stressor, too.

An example of how you can communicate your circumstances proactively might be: “Sorry for only getting to this task now--to be honest, I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed and it was hard to get started. That said, I'd like to tackle this task first, so I was hoping we could review and solidify the technical requirements sometime today. Can I put something on your calendar for this afternoon? I’d also like to use some of that time to review estimates for the remaining tasks on me for this sprint--I’m no longer confident in the current timeline and want to make sure we’re in alignment on scheduling.”

If you’re nervous about saying something like that, try reaching out to a teammate or other colleague who knows the person you’ll be saying this to, and ask for their feedback or their perspective on how it might go. Knowing what to expect might help ease some anxiety.

You will probably feel much better after getting both the facts and your emotions out in the open. By speaking up first rather than waiting for someone to check in on you, you will feel more in control of the situation and also come across as mature, professional, and communicative--which are all things you can feel legitimately proud of.

And if the worst comes to pass and the person you talk to ends up being a jerk about things, you can also know in your heart-of-hearts that a) they’re probably stressed, too, and this is how they’re handling it, and b) by being a jerk in response to someone trying to fix things, they’ve really not done anything for their own cause--making someone feel bad rarely makes them more productive. Try to forgive them.

Try a modified pomodoro cycle

Pomodoro cycles are a “productivity technique” (it is so simple that I hesitate to oversell it) that basically says that one should try to get work done 25 minutes at a time. In other words, work for 25 minutes, then take a five minute break, and repeat. After a couple rounds of this, usually four or five, treat yourself to a longer break.

I don’t always employ the pomodoro technique, but if I’m struggling getting started or remaining focused, it gets the ball rolling. I recommend not feeling too locked into the timing cycle--sometimes even 25 minutes can seem like a lot. If that’s the case, try just committing to five or ten minutes. Those five or ten minutes will likely go easier than you thought they would, which will put you in a good mood to start a new segment. It’s also a nice way to ease into the work day.

In the other direction, sometimes I can get so into the flow state that I don’t want to interrupt my work after 25 minutes. That’s fine too! It feels really good, in fact. You can just let the timer finish ringing and continue working for however long you feel comfortable. Basically, just go at your own pace, be focused in the time you’ve designated for focus, and when it’s time for your break, take your break without shame--you’ve earned it.

I also recommend writing down what you accomplished during your pomodoro cycle. It feels really good to watch the list of things you’ve accomplished grow throughout the day. That documentation can also be useful for jogging your memory while writing performance evaluations.

Make tasks even smaller

At the beginning of each work day, write down a list of things you intend to get done that day. Some people like to limit their lists to “the three most important things” for that day, and while that might work for them, I prefer to keep long lists with lots of small tasks. I do this so that I get to check things off the list often, which makes me feel good and fuels me to keep going. For example, the first thing on my to-do list every day is, “Figure out what my tasks are for today.” The second thing is, “Prioritize those tasks.” Two easy wins right at the outset!

Write down the tasks as you go: whenever you start on a new task, write down the first steps for that task. No need to get the whole list of mini-tasks for the day written down all at once--just write down enough to get you to the next step.

Checking off small tasks gives you a little dopamine burst each time, and getting those bursts at regular intervals throughout the day helps keep motivation up--it’s encouraging to know you’re never too far off from your next accomplishment.

That said, if you’re already feeling good, don’t force yourself to make mini-tasks if you don’t need them. Usually, once I get in the groove of working for the day, I find I don’t need to make the tasks quite so small. That’s fine, too.

Do one thing at a time ("bird by bird")

There’s a passage by Anne Lamott that’s always been a guiding light to me when I feel overwhelmed by work:

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

When there’s a huge mountain of work in front of you, it can be easy for things to blur together into a giant blob of stress. Not only is this emotionally overwhelming, but it’s also not very useful.

If you have a giant list of bugs that need to get fixed, try to not let your eyes jump all over the page from one task to another, heart rate accelerating at the enormity of it all. Instead, before looking at the page too closely, write down on your to-do list, “Read through the list of bugs,” and “Prioritize which bugs should get looked at first.” Then, look at the page again--your only job right now is to understand which ones are the most important. Don’t worry about fixing them yet.

Then, once you have an ordered list of most important bugs (no need to order all of them, maybe just grab and order the top three most important), you can write down tasks for the first bug on the list: “Read through the description and existing thread,” “Set up dev environment in order to repro the bug” (this is a big one--getting my dev environment working always makes me feel like I’m being productive), “Try to get a repro of the bug,” etc.

Schedule flow-state tasks first

Figure out what kind of tasks help you get into a flow state, then schedule those tasks for the beginning of the day. For me, this often ends up being coding something significant (i.e. not one-line bug fixes), or writing documentation. The goal is to find the sorts of tasks that get you “in the zone.”

In my experience, it’s actually better to not try and dedicate a whole day to a single flow task, because then you end up having one great day with nothing to trigger flow state the next day. If you dedicate, for example, three or four hours to a flow task before starting other work such as bug fixing, replying to email, reviewing PRs, etc., then you’ll build up some dopamine and pride that can carry you emotionally through the rest of the day. If you do it all at once, you’ll have no dopamine-building material left for tomorrow. Also, flow state can be quite tiring, so you want to preserve your energy for other things on your to-do list.

Additionally, as good as flow state feels, sometimes the hyper-focus can make it so you make wacky design choices, which is sometimes good because the ideas are creative, but sometimes not good because other people can’t understand them. For this reason, it’s good to take a breather and sanity-check your work before committing anything you’ve written during a flow state.

You might not be able to strategize this into every work day, but I find that days I take this approach tend to feel much more satisfying than days where I don’t.

Externalize as much as possible

Write things down as they occur to you; don’t take up valuable brain space and bear additional stress for things that can be written down and thereby cleared from your mind. If you realize while coding that you'll have to write a test case to cover a specific scenario, write down the details for that somewhere you’ll see it later (I tend to put such notes in the same document as my daily to-do lists). It'll take the mental burden off so you can continue on your main task and not worry about needing to remember that task. 

Sometimes this can result in getting sidetracked. In most cases, I'm actually pretty cool with that--grateful, even. Whether or not you should change gears depends on the situation, but in general though, for a lot of things, I’ve found that either order doesn't actually matter or you can delay the more urgent part by an hour or two.

In the director’s commentary for the 2007 movie Juno (which I watched when I was a kid and therefore am probably misquoting), the screenwriter Diablo Cody actually comments at one point something to the effect of: “I was so excited to write this scene; the whole time I wrote the screenplay I kept looking forward to it. This was, of course, before I learned that you can write screenplays out of order.”

I suspect a lot more things in life can be done out of order than we think--why not do the part that excites us first? Follow excitement when you’ve got it! There’s no guarantee it’ll be there tomorrow. If you’re lucky, that excitement from doing “the fun part” might carry you into the parts you were originally less excited about.

There’s no need to feel locked into doing things in a particular order if there's no need for it. For a lot of things, we probably just start at the beginning because, well, you gotta start somewhere, and the beginning’s as good of a place as any. But if one component of the project would come to you more easily right now than the part you planned to do, then consider re-evaluating your plan and doing the part that would come more easily first. You’ll feel better and still get a component of the project done. This feels especially good if you have to integrate that component into the larger project later on: “All that’s left to do is plug in this component I’ve already written!”

Try to trigger a Pavlovian response to your workspace

Lots of WFH productivity tip lists allude to this by advising things like, “Get dressed like you’re going to work,” or “Set aside a special place in your home for working.” Tips like that are all alluding to this idea that we want to send signals to our brain in order to trigger a mindset shift of “I’m in work mode now.”

This works in both directions--try not to build up a Pavlovian habit of doing non-work things in your workspace. I read a tip once that if you ever have to sleep in your car overnight, you should make sure to never ever sleep in the driver’s seat, because if you do that, then your brain will begin to think that the driver’s sleep is an okay place to fall asleep. The same concept applies here--have a designated place for getting your tasks done, with certain things you don’t do in that place.

In many ways, this is probably the number one thing I miss about going to the office--I miss having a defined space where the only thing I should be doing is my job.

While we don’t have that same spatial separation these days, we can try to guard whatever space we can set aside for work. For me, that means I like to keep my desk at home a place where I don’t have snacks or watch YouTube videos or go on Hacker News. If I want to do those things, I have to do them somewhere else.

Many of us don’t have home offices or even desks that can be solely defined for one task like that, though. If that’s the case, try to change the space in other ways. For example, if you have to work at your dining room table, try taking the placemats off while you’re working, and replace them when you’re eating. Even the act of putting them away and putting them back can help shift your mindset into or out of “work mode.”

Other things that have worked for me over the years: playing the exact same playlist every time, tying my hair up while working, taking my glasses off so that I’m literally unable to see anything other than what’s physically in front of me, etc.

Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV): DON’T treat yourself to a fun distraction before you start working

This might not apply to all people. I have friends who like to watch a fun YouTube video or scroll through Reddit or Hacker News before starting a task in order to feel relaxed--if that works for you and doesn’t lead you down an internet rabbit hole, then by all means, follow your bliss.

For me, it is a trap. The idea sounds good in theory: “It’d be easier to work if I felt better than I do right now, so I’ll do something I enjoy beforehand so that I can start my work in a better mood.” In reality, what ends up actually happening is that more time elapses before you get started, you feel guilty about not working, the fun distraction isn’t even fun because you have work in the back of your mind the whole time, and you wind up feeling worse than you did when you started. Hard to get things done after giving yourself emotional whiplash like that.

In my experience, the only thing that makes me feel better about the fact that I haven’t done something is making progress, however small, on the thing that needs to get done. It’s hard to remember this fact before you get immersed in your work, but getting started is like getting a small child to take a bath: they put up a huge fight when it’s time to do it, but once they’re in it they wind up having a good time and don’t want to get out. Repeat ad nauseum.

A big exception to this would be breathing. Especially in situations where you’re completely overwhelmed with anxiety and have an elevated heart rate, it definitely helps to take a few minutes to focus on breathing before you get started and bring yourself back to neutral.

Another exception might be exercise. Exercise offers good endorphins and the feeling that you’ve accomplished something; however, it also takes a nontrivial amount of time, and in my experience it doesn’t always make me feel better. Sometimes you still end up with emotional whiplash. If you feel like a workout would be beneficial, try waiting until lunchtime or for official work hours to end; you’ll probably feel less guilty and get a better mood boost from it that way.

Huge YMMV: Consider your eating schedule

Everyone’s different when it comes to things like this, but if you get sleepy after eating lunch, consider eating a small lunch or just skipping lunch entirely. I personally feel more focused throughout the day if I just sip a protein shake throughout the work day and wait to have a full meal after I’m done with work. This also helps with the mental separation of “work time is at my desk, where the only thing I do is work.” Having a snack at the end of the work day also helps me mentally transition from work to personal time.

In conclusion

I hope this list was helpful for you; honestly, it was helpful to write it out just for myself. There’s no need to do everything laid out in this list, it’s just a collection of habits and tools I’ve picked up over the years as someone for whom sitting down and focusing doesn’t come quite as easily as anxiety does. If you have any tips of your own, feel free to share!