The pandemic gave many of us a chance to pause and reflect. The initial decrease of in-person interaction freed up time for self-introspection. Meanwhile, the increase of Work-From-Home setups can give us more flexibility over how and what we do. Wouldn’t it be nice to be full of energy and love what you do? It is a good time therefore to explore how to be more productive by working to be FREE!
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FREE stands for 4 effective approaches on increasing your productivity:
1. F is for FLOW — how to get in or achieve FLOW state, where you enthusiastically engaged in a challenging and productive activity without a care of time or other distractions.
2. R is for RELEVANT — identify and engage activities that are relevant to your personal values or purpose will go a long way in ensuring sustainable and resourceful engagement.
3. E is for ENERGY — checking in on your physical, intellectual, and emotional energy levels will provide solid foundation for your focused task.
4. E is for ENVIRONMENT — setting yourself up in the right environment will increase your chance of success.
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FLOW is a simple idea that when you’re doing work that’s engaging and challenging, time seems to lose meaning, and you’re highly focused with high quality outputs as results. You can get FLOW state by understanding your comfort zones, and then just taking an incremental step outside of it. The task needs to be realistic in your view, though requires some extra effort to pull it through. For example, if you can do your weekly summary in an hour, only give yourself 55 minutes next time. In the back of your mind, you know you can do it in 55 minutes, it’s just that you need to cut down in background noise, put phone on flight mode, or hold back the various distractive thoughts that pop up from time to time. When your subconscious is aware of your achievable intentions, it will automatically cooperate to give you the energy and space to focus on the task. The key is therefore to find the right “step” that is slightly challenging without being overwhelming. It can be a small reduction in time allocated for the task, or a minor variation on what you did successfully before. Think back on the last few times you were in the FLOW state, what did you do? How will you create your next FLOW moment?
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RELEVANT to your personal values or purpose is a great way to ensure motivated engagement. Any task that connects with who you are becomes a more meaningful task. When the task has meaning for you, it links with who you are which in turn makes completing it that much more important to you. While there may be times you will miss the stated goal, but at least the chance of getting there is much higher. After all, when you’re working towards your goals, you feel more energetic, resourceful, and well-motivated! The flip side is that if you are working on something that clashes with your value or purpose, then it’s highly likely the task won’t be done. So if you want to be more productive, it’s worth asking yourself: is what I plan to do in line with who I am or what I want to be? Does it align with my values or purpose? Will this help or hinder my pursuit of my long-term goals? If your sense hesitation or your body freezes up, it will be good to dive deeper to understand better what the impact of the actions are, and what meanings the results hold for you. By having a clear understanding of how what you do is relevant to who you are, you are assured of a consistent, centered, and driven approach to achieve your goal.
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ENERGY is what we use to move. Your energy comes from different areas. The three most common areas of energy are: physical, mental, and emotional. When you’re “charged up” on all three types of energy, you are very confident, creative, resilient and resourceful. You can do a quick check on your energy level by asking yourself: on a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the most charged up you had ever been, where are you on your physical energy level? What about mental energy? And emotional energy? Once you know which levels you are, you can then think about how you want to change it. For example, in case of physical energy, you may look at your sleep patterns, food or beverage consumptions, exercise routines. For your mental energy, which people or activities sharpens your mind? What tasks are intellectually stimulating to you? What problems do you enjoy solving? Which topics are you excited to learn about? How much of your maximum brain power are you using? And lastly for emotional energy, how aware are you of your or others’ emotional states? When facing a big emotional shock, what worked in the past for you? How balanced are you in your emotional state? What support do you need to improve it? Because you’re unique, it’s useful to think back to times when you felt very energetic and identify what you did. Actively monitor and charge your energy levels will give you the fuel for your productive engagements.
ENVIRONMENT is what we often take as given. We think we have minimum impact over the environment. In fact, we always have choices to change environment. It’s just that our fear of unknown or worries about possible failure that made us to continue our default path. But if we continue to do the same things as we’ve always done, how can we reasonably expect the outcome to be different? One important way to improve your productivity is therefore to change your environment. Think about your typical day, and figure out what people, places, or activities are good for you, and what are bad for you. Remember there is only one person that matters here — you! You can observe, analyze, present, judge and implement changes to improve the environment. It can be as small as locking away your phone for 30 minutes of family time each day, or going to office via the corner with the orange juice machine rather than the candy bar machine on the other corner. What is one part of your environment that you can change for the better today? By changing the parts of your environment that’s not working for you, you are proactively improving your chances of succeeding. Life is a series of decisions and executions, all of which takes energy. Because you have limited amount of physical, mental, and emotional energy each day, you’d want to spend them on the most productive tasks. Reducing the expenditure on non-productive tasks and boosting the focus on productive tasks will gradually increase your chance of long-term success, one decision at a time.
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What does it feel like when you are FREE? You’re working effortlessly (FLOW) on tasks that you have a deep connection to, either aligning with your personal values or your higher purpose. You feel energetic both because of how you charged up your physical, mental and emotional batteries, and because of how you actively manage how you spend energy by filtering out non-productive elements. In short, you are most productive when you’re full of energy and doing work that you love. Indeed, in that scenario, you are not working anymore, but living your dream: you’re doing what you love and getting paid for it! So start your journey and ask yourself: what can I do right now to be more FREE?
