*These weekly reflections are just a personal accountability thing for myself (Mr.Shift) to keep consistent with my weekly reflections of how the week went, and what I can do to improve. This is mainly to help me develop the habits I want to keep improving week by week moving forward.
Reflections - Week 31/52
The good:
This week has been really interesting for me. On one day I had my most productive day I’ve had in months and it was all thanks to using the Pomodoro technique.
Essentially the Pomodoro technique is having ‘study’ or work blocks of 25 minutes, with a 5-minute break in between. Then every 4 Pomodoro’s you’ll enjoy a longer 15-30-minute break. This really helps with not burning out too quickly.
I have always wanted to be more productive at work, as it’s been a struggle when working from home. I think all this time I’ve just been missing out on a good system. So yeah, the Pomodoro technique is a good system which has made me feel great about the productivity so I will make this a habit.
The bad:
On the weekends I can stray off track quite easily, in particular:
· Not doing my morning routine
· Not sleeping early
· Not having some time set aside to reflect on during the week (I should have done this on Sunday but now I’m doing this on Tuesday).
How can I improve? Habits I can develop now
I’ve got the system down for productivity now, which is the Pomodoro technique. Now one way I can improve on this is being more intentional on what I want to complete for the day. Note that this applies for both work and side hustle.
How do I come up with what I want to complete for the day? This will depend on my medium-long term goal. So for example, I need to know my goal of what I want to have accomplished by the end of the week, then chunk it down so that I will know what my mission is for that particular day and what I need to achieve.
So basically what I need to do is sit down at the start of the week and plan my week out – so for e.g. for work, what day will I spend on what project and what do I need to achieve.
Also, I need to improve on my weekend habits of just maintaining the consistency throughout Saturday and Sunday as well.
Future Habits
I think I recall from the book ‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear that we can only develop one habit at a time. So I will work on the one above for now.
So far after this week, I’m hoping to have the two habits:
· Productivity – Using my hours productively
· Accuracy – Working on the task relevant to my goal
However, one habit I do see in the future which I want to implement is efficiency.
Parkinsons’ law states that:
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
I’ll cover this topic later on my next journal post.