Intentional Productivity Via Menus
Be compassionate with your busy self
Today I want to talk about how we can use menus to make our intentional decision-making practices more accessible during personal productivity sessions.
A personal productivity session involves working on a specific task during a set amount of time using the personal resources at your disposal. Personal resources are finite measures of time, energy, focus, physical comfort, mental health, and spoons that fuel our productivity practices. Once you identify your personal resource levels, you can use your menu to help you choose an appropriate task to work on during each personal productivity session. You could also call this an accessibility menu if that feels good to you.
Step 1: Identify your types of days
If you’re like me, you may have different “types of days” that affect your personal productivity sessions. You may have an ideal day, where you have access to a workspace that is conducive to your needs, your body and mind feel rested and comfortable, and you can be productive for an amount of time that feels fruitful. You may have other types of days, too, like a day when you have physical pain, or feel anxious, or don’t have childcare so you need to divide your focus between your work and care tasks. These are the days when your personal resource levels require you to shift your approach so you can be productive while also taking care of yourself.
The action step here is to brainstorm your most common experiences and give each one a label. Maybe you have a “Brain Fog Day” or a “Low Motivation Day” or a “Ready to Go! Day.” It may be helpful to limit your types of days to just the three or four most common to you so you don’t feel overwhelmed. Give it a try! Get creative! This is an experiment and you can always tweak, add, or edit later.
Step 2: Generate a menu of accessible tasks for each type of day
Have you ever shut down or given up when confronted with seemingly endless options? When you take time to make a menu of options ahead of time, it can streamline the process of selecting an appropriate to-do task later.
The action step here is to brainstorm tasks that are accessible to you during your different types of days and list those tasks in the appropriate menus. My reason for this step is twofold: 1) you can limit decision making when you begin a personal productivity session on a certain type of day and 2) you can choose tasks that will help you to make progress without overwhelming yourself or spinning your wheels.
For example, when I have brain fog it’s very difficult for me to revise a draft because I can’t access my full vocabulary. If I try to force myself to do creative and critical writing when I have brain fog, I’ll need to put in placeholders like “[the little table in the living room]” when I can’t remember the word for “coffee table.” While this method for writing is technically doable on a Brain Fog Day, I’ll find more success and feel better if I choose a task from my Brain Fog Day menu:
Look up titles of articles, podcasts, or books I want to check out later
Organize my office
Format documents
Run errands
Do bookkeeping
Bonus Step: Don’t forget to rest!
Developing a menu of appropriate to-do tasks for each type of day is a great way to make meaningful progress during personal productivity sessions, but it’s also important to think about how you can recharge your personal resources. I encourage you to generate a menu of rest and self-care practices that can support you on each one of your types of days. This might be its own list, or you might add activities to each of your existing menus alongside your accessible productivity tasks.
Here are some inspirations: close your eyes for 30 seconds every ten minutes, look out a window 20 feet away for 20 seconds, get up from your desk and go make a cup of tea, drink water, lay on the floor with your legs up the wall, do a stretch from physical therapy, etc. Be sure to write down your list somewhere you’ll see it, like a post-it on the side of your computer screen or posted above your desk.
For Your Consideration
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xo,
Dr. Kate