A little but detailed guide to productivity

 

Hello Charlie!

Today I would like to address a topic that I believe would be really helpful to everyone, especially for those

in seconde: productivity. I have learned a lot about that subject throughout the years as I need to be organized 

between the OIB, the conservatory and my piano students. I also had the idea to write this blog article because 

you can easily lose a lot of time within the resources available online, as there are a lot of them on youtube for 

instance. So here are some of the tips that I actually use in my life, hope it can help you as well!

1. Manage your time

Productivity is all about time. So the first step you can take is to make a list of how you spend yours 

on a weekday. Be precise on what you do, even if you don’t necessarily like what you write. After 

making the list, rank the activities from the most time consuming to the least, and reflect on it. 

Check if your time is spent in a useful and meaningful way, will it serve you in the future, for your 

general knowledge, or does it bring you happiness/satisfaction. 

I got the idea from a designer with a youtube channel called “the future”. With his team and people 

he works with, he makes videos on various topics from freelance work to time management or 

sometimes video on mental health. However I don’t watch them very often as some of their videos target 

niches in the design, freelance or business world. You can find the videos you want by selecting the 

playlist Mindset & Personal Development. To start with, I would recommend this whiteboard session.

On the social media question, I believe it can be used as a way to relax but that we have to be careful 

about excessive usage. Everything is meant to incite people to spend more time on the application. 

For instance from a UX (User Experience in design) standpoint, your feed is made to be targeted and 

endless. It is an optimization of the movements the user has to make: they are meant to be minimal for 

you to scroll on and on and topics you like. And that is the biggest issue of this algorithm, it can waste 

too much of your time. In my opinion, social media can be good to discover new music, learn or 

connect with people for example, but there has to be a limited usage. 

2. Listen to your body

Online you will find a lot of people telling you to use the pomodoro method: you study for 25 minutes 

then take a 5 minutes break and repeat that cycle. I tried to do that but just the time it takes me to get 

into the subject and to focus sometimes takes me that amount of time, depending on the topic, and the 

break is I feel useless and prevents my focus. However it really depends on the person, maybe it will 

suit you very well but you’ve got to try. So my advice is: take breaks but not if you don’t need them 

and feel it would disturb your focus. What I do now is work until I find myself unfocused, and then 

take a break. If I am really not productive I go and practice my instrument for some time then go back 

to the task. 

If you are a coffee or black tea drinker, don’t consume any in the afternoon and especially in the 

evening. When you drink one cup, the caffeine ingested will take up to 10 hours to leave your body. 

And if you do the math that means if you have one coffee at 3pm it will still have effect at midnight, 

preventing you from sleeping. I personally quitted coffee more than one year ago because I was 

drinking half a liter a day (yes it is quite a lot!) and became a bit addicted. Like other addictive 

substances, if you take it regularly it won't have the same positive effect after some time. I still 

drink coffee occasionally if I really need it, but it works very well contrary to taking it everyday. 

Instead I drink green tea which has a lot of positive effects including keeping your teeth white, which 

you can quickly read about here: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/health-benefits-green-tea

Or a more complex and scientific article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2855614/

Maintaining a good quality of life is essential for your work. One of the hardest things to do for me in 

this category is having a good night of sleep as I always was an insomniac. If you are in my case and 

you want to limit the damage, avoid caffeine as I just explained, screen time before bed or at least 

install a red filter/anti blue light filter on your laptop and phone. It does not work as well as not 

touching your computer but it is still better. Don’t work out at night as it was proven to prevent 

sleep, don’t eat too much, too sugary or heavy/junk food in the evening as you will have trouble 

digesting it. Also keep your bedroom cold (about 19C°) and keep the room as dark as possible, 

without leds from a charger for example.

This quality of life also involves eating healthy, which I maybe will write about in the future as it 

would be too long to write about here, exercising and keeping a good hygiene. 

3. Set recompenses but...

In our societies we are more and more used to getting rewards really quick as when you play a video 

game. After playing 5 minutes one game, you can get this incredible skill for your character, or this 

amazing card. The issue is, you can’t eat one chocolate after a 5 minutes session of study, or you 

will become diabetic very quickly. Jokes aside, even after 50 minutes of study on your own, you should 

consider your break as a recompense instead of doing something else for a long time or allow yourself 

to eat or buy something. I found a really complete article on that topic here, in which they explain 

that though the result of experiments were not quite consistent (sometimes they found they had no 

effects, positive or negative effects), researchers agreed to say setting recompenses will be likely 

to decrease your productivity as you will work for the reward and not by interest or as a step towards 

your goal(s). To me, the ideal would be to set only one reward like watching one episode of your 

favorite tv series or doing something you like, but to make it “bigger”/longer than if you studied for a 

short amount of time.

4. Study less but smarter

This section is quite a big topic, as the smarter you study, the more you will have free time. I used 

to struggle a lot with that, reading over and over my lessons to learn them, spacing out for hours at 

night because I was too distracted, often multitasking. Here is how you can avoid doing that. 

Contrary to what most people do and think, reading your lessons like I did won’t be as effective 

as testing yourself and asking questions. I discovered efficient methods mainly by researching how 

med students work. Indeed they have to retain a lot of information by heart but also understand what 

they are learning. By testing yourself, you can learn everything, from your history lesson to learning 

a skill such as drawing. On the one hand you will need to practise a manual activity to learn it but on 

the other you will need to ask questions in your lesson. 

For manual activities you just have to start, even if you don’t know anything about the skill. Once this 

step is passed, you have to use the technique of space repetition for your knowledge to “stick”. 

You have to keep trying again and again very often if not everyday and you will get better.

For lessons, the best way is to write precise questions about them, create a list and answer them either 

in your mind, especially if it is a short and easy answer, either on paper. Recreate the entire lesson 

with interrogations. For written answers, you can draw diagrams, doodles, sketches etc… This 

principle is very close to flashcards if you want to google that. Otherwise I sometimes make mind 

maps, and search further into the topic studied seeking more details to better understand.

The second most important aspect is to avoid multitasking at all costs. To me this is very difficult to 

do as I often used to listen to music, play a mobile game and paint or do my homeworks at the same 

time for example. I could not stand doing a single task at the time except for my playing instrument 

which requires multitasking in a way. It is still the case but I have learned to concentrate better by 

eliminating the sources of distraction or going somewhere else than the place I use to relax and 

entertain myself. 

The only exception is “auto-pilot” activities, like painting as you don’t actively think about it, like 

when you are walking, physical activities or eating. For these situations you can multitask by 

listening to a podcast or by listening to music and thinking at the same time for example.

To work, you have to focus only on what you are asked to do, like in exam conditions though you 

have no time limit. You can eventually listen to music if it is not distracting. For instance I can’t 

listen to classical music because I will intuitively start to sing or whistle for music I know, or analyse 

and listen intensely to them if they are unknown to me. However, I know some people like to listen 

to classical music when working as it helps them to concentrate. I eventually listen to lofi especially 

when my work environment is noisy. This preference really depends on yourself. 

5. Use apps to help you

I use plenty of applications or/and websites to help me in my everyday life, and here are some of them:

Notion: Probably the app/website/software I would recommend the most. It is completely free 

for personal use, and the biggest advantage is that it is highly customizable. It is basically like a 

website you create without having to code (though I believe they implemented a code section for 

those who wish to use that), where you can put everything you want: a shopping list, a diary, a 

timetable, your expenses for the month, a habit tracker etc…

As it is based on block design you can arrange pages however you like, starting from a template or 

creating everything yourselves. It is an advantage but also an inconvenience as the user can be lost or 

too lazy to create plenty of pages. But hopefully you can find free or priced customizable templates 

online and just copy them unto your notion. 

To give you an idea, this is what a notion template dashboard looks like:

Credit: u/Ellllaa’s post on Notion subreddit

Another advantage is that it can be collaborative, so it can help if you need to organize a big project 

with someone else. Notion can be hard to use at first but once you learn it you will gain a lot of time.

Trello: If you decide Notion really is not for you, then you should try Trello. I used it for quite a time 

before I discovered the existence of Notion which can include the same service (I promise they are 

not paying me...) and I really enjoyed it. When you open the app, you have to create a “board”, in 

which there are a number of columns of your choice. For academic use, you can name the columns 

“to do”, “doing” and “done”, and add cards inside which represent your tasks. You can add another 

column “started” if you wish to. Here is a little example I made just for you:

Anki: This app is linked to the “study section” of this blog. It is very practical to learn information by 

heart, such as a list of words in other languages, or a lot of information, basically anything you want to 

learn. The principle is that you create decks of flashcards, and learn while revising. On each card you 

have one first field which represents one side, and another field for the other side. I especially like 

it because when you revise it asks you the level of accuracy/confidence you have in your answer. 

Based on your answer, the app will ask you more the answers to the questions or associations you 

did not know and less the ones you already know. 

Study bunny: This one might appear really dumb, but it already had helped me quite a few times. 

The concept is really simple: you set up a timer or a stopwatch during which you study and win 

coins at the end. These can be used to buy scenery, objects, outfits or even pets for your rabbit. 

It really motivates you by the idea of buying something you like for your virtual pet, a bit like a 

tamagotchi but with work. You can also try Forest, in which you grow trees by setting up timers. 

The issue I have with it is that you can’t plant real trees without paying (whereas they could 

generate money by ads), and that the trees only grow beautiful if you study for an extended period 

of time (more than 1 hour), which would not necessarily be the way certain people work. But overall 

it still is a very good app.

(Health apps): I put this category of apps between brackets because I don’t believe you need a 

specific application to track your health. I use it because I own a watch that tracks sleep, steps 

and heart rate. But I really don’t think you need some device to tell you you slept 4 hours because 

you spent your night on an assignment or on your new video game… However it could be useful to 

watch over the regularity of your sleep, the hour you fall asleep, physical activity etc… and try 

to change bad habits on a regular basis, as you don’t have to make any efforts to have these datas. 

Red filter: Flux if you are on linux or windows, twilight on android, it is already preinstalled if you 

have a mac (at least on the new versions), after a bit of research I found it is also preinstalled on 

the iphones, you just have to enable it. 

Of course if you feel more “old school” you can apply the same principles on paper (special mention 

to Ines here). I just feel it is more practical as I can access everything on my phone. 

6. Don’t be obsessed with productivity

This last tip is really important as as I mentioned it is easy to get lost in productivity videos as there 

are a lot of them and they are visually very appealing (well filmed and very aesthetic for the most 

popular and well made). Some of my days I spent hours and hours researching or just watching 

without really doing anything else… which is the exact contrary of their initial purpose! 

If a system is too time consuming, or if you feel you want to be productive but it is not working, then 

the method used is maybe not for you. Everybody has its own way of studying so what I explained 

here might not work out for you.

I also think we don’t need to manage time like robots, studying for 2 hours for 6 to 8pm then eating 

then practising for 1h then brushing your teeth from 9.45 to 9.48pm precisely, then going to bed at 

10.24pm at the latest on Thursday evenings. However, I believe time management is more about 

being conscious of what we spend our time on.

Thanks for reading, I hope this can be of help to everyone!

Astrid