Reduce Stress And Increase Productivity — tips to focus and finish your tasks

Raj Pradhan, PMP
15 min readOct 7, 2020
Be a SuperHero in productivity by managing and reducing stress

You have a plan to accomplish lots of work in the week, but by the end of the week, you will find that most of the tasks are still there with you. That gives rise to stress and impact your productivity. So why some people are so efficient, manage with work with less stress, and have high productivity. Why are you not able to execute those tasks? This article will help you to focus on your goals, avoid procrastination, reduce your stress, and increase your productivity.

Enjoy your life with less stress and being more productive

You have a great plan, but things may come up during the week and ask for your attention. You tried to push the deadline of a less crucial task and respond to request from your boss, colleagues, or family. Simultaneously try to negotiate with stakeholders for resources to complete the work. You have a finite time in hand, but you have unlimited demands to manage.

The majority of us feel guilty in denying requests from others or break promises to others. So at the end of the week, you will find that while you are afraid to break a promise to others, you have broken promises to yourself. Your personal goals shift to the next week and next week. You will realize after a few that your personal goal is the victim of constant changes in the priority at work and life. Then you start to doubt or self-criticize yourself for not able to finish the planned goals.

Example: Plan of Changing Career or Looking for Job While Employed

Looking for a changing career or a new job while employed as a temporary employee is a classic example. When you are not satisfied with your current job and personal goal is to change career or a new job, then you have to balance two very different objectives. One goal is to sustain and perform at the current job for the next six months and the other goal is to change your career within that time period.

You can start with a great plan to perform well at employment and look for a new job or career. It is important to maintain a level of productivity even if you are employed as a contractor or temp employees. The conflict will be between your professional commitment and personal goal. The current job will give the reward to your effort in real-time (short-term). At the same time, you are required to put extra effort to add new skills to achieve the personal goal of getting a new job or career. The effort for personal goals has the possibility to get a much greater reward(long-term).

But the reward of immediate return on the effort will influence you to give more priority to your current job at the expense of your personal goal. You will be more flexible to accept new work at the current job by reducing the time required for you to prepare for a new job. In a few months’ time, you will realize that you have ignored the need for the extra effort required for a rewarding career and lost precious time on short term objectives. This will result in an increase in stress, loss of morale, and confidence to look for a change in career. This is the quite opposite result of the intention of the plan. The intention of the plan was to reduce stress and increase productivity by balancing both objectives.

The problem is that you might have a great plan, but things come up during the week that can derail it. So why are you not able to balance all your activities and to execute it as per the plan?

The Foundation For A Good Plan

You have to ask the following question to yourselves:

How much can you accomplish realistically in a week, and how much can you promise to other people, personally and professionally?

You have to create a relationship with yourself and build trust in your ability to deliver your commitment to yourself. Trust in your ability to keep your promise is crucial to your confidence or avoid doubting yourself on your ability to keep your promises. This is the basic foundation to finish your tasks, reduce your stress, and increase productivity.

Planning And Executing The Plan

You have a beautiful and well-crafted plan, but if you are not able to implement them, then it is of no use. The objective of drafting your weekly-plan is to finish those tasks assigned as per the plan. If you are not able to focus on it or achieve the desired result, then you will end up putting extra hours or efforts to make it happen. This is counterproductive and not going to reduce your stress and increase productivity. The execution of the plan will depend upon the details plan.

You will observe that most of us make a general plan for the month or week or day. The task will look like this:

Monday:

Finish XYZ work

Initiate ABC Task

…..

Tuesday:

Call John Doe for discussion

Prepare a proposal for a bid

Prepare client presentation

….

The calendar can look like this also

Finish XYZ work

Initiate ABC Task

…..

Tuesday:

Call John Doe for discussion: 9:30 AM

Prepare a proposal for a bid

Prepare client presentation

This is good that you have mentioned the task to finish on a given day. But it has wide open for interpretation on the priority, complexity, or time allotted to complete the work.

You have to make a detailed plan, hours by hour work breakdown so that you can monitor scheduled work on an hourly basis.

Sticking To The Plan Is A Task In Itself

We have great intentions to follow through the plan but keeping up to plan itself is a task. When you look at the scheduled work and achievements of the week, then you realize that your scheduled task had some interference. So the next question that comes to mind is, why does your pre-scheduled work got sidetracked? What were the problems interfering with your intention to finished the pre-scheduled task?

The frequent interference diverts your attention from your scheduled work. Your work will fight for attention against the daily interference. The will to focus on your task-in-hand or temptation to attend to interference will decide your delivery timeline.

Here is one example. You are in the middle of drafting a time-sensitive e-mail, and you get an alert on breaking news on your mobile. You get an urge to look at the message on your phone. The next step is to look at the summary of that news and then scroll down the message to gather important information from the article. It may take a few seconds or a few minutes to realize that you have not finished your time-sensitive e-mail. Now your brain will take some time to gather your thought and start focusing on the unfinished e-mail.

Does it sound familiar?

Our attention was controlled by the brain and the curiosity to know more about the breaking news. Our instant gratification nature took over our attention and delayed the crucial work.

Why Do We Get Diverted From Our Objective

Our brain was build to avoid pain and inclined more towards seeking pleasure. All our tasks involve some work to execute, and it takes time and effort to finish those activities. Our human brains look for a simple thing to do or find a shortcut to finish work. It also looks for something comfortable to do. If you are comfortable doing something and finding a shortcut to finish work, then you are avoiding pain.

The attention of the brain is more on the immediate cause and effect. Our human brain will reward its attention to the task that has short -term cause and effect outcome. If the short term outcome of not doing work will result in more immediate pain and less pleasure, then our brain will focus on executing the task to avoid pain.

The human brain is wired to focus on the short term outcome of pain and pleasure. In order to change your approach to work, you have to change your mindset to focus on long term cause and effect relationships. You have to focus on the future outcome of the long-term plan. This means you have to align your work to achieve the long term objectives.

This is easier said than done. Just think about our New Year’s resolutions of losing weight. This is a resolution which motivates us to join a gym on annual membership. Even gym companies introduce all the gimmicks for the new members. They will reduce the joining fees and few months free on yearly membership. They will also give you the flexibility to unsubscribe based on a few conditions. That is the reason the gym gets 12% of its new member in January of each year. Those new members are so committed that they are ready to pay $600 for one year or $1200 for two years of a gym membership.

But the excitement of getting a new super-fit body also evaporates in a very short time. Around 4% of new members quit by the end of January (Source: CouponCabin). Another 80% of the new member quit within five months (Source: CouponCabin).

This is a classic example of long term cause and effect relationships. Your pain of doing exercise is associated with the long term benefit of reducing your weight and getting a lean body. The immediate pleasure of sleeping extra hours or having a beer with a friend is more powerful than putting yourself the pain of exercise to achieve a long term goal. That’s what happens to 80% of the new members, and they quit the gym within five months.

How successful are we depend upon how good we are in sacrificing the comfort of the regular activities for long term benefits. Once you build trust by following your daily works irrespective of the pain associated with it, then you will start building confidence in your ability to execute the scheduled task.

When And How To Plan

If possible, find some time to plan for the week on Monday morning or Sunday evening, The way the plan work is to make a do list of all the thing that you want to do in the next week. You can make the office and personal tasks list. Take some time to find how much time is needed to finish those tasks. Once you assign some estimate on each of those planned tasks, then you will realize that some of the work may take substantially more time than the others. Or, you do not have sufficient time to finish all the tasks. If you come across this kind of risk factor, then break those tasks into sub-task. Be mindful of the need for you to take care of yourself personally and professionally. You need some time to socialize with friends or colleagues. There is a need for family and your physical well beings. The system of adhering to your hourly schedule can be sustainable if you can give adequate time for your professional and personal well beings. The ability to follow through the hourly work will depend upon your personal and professional well beings.

After you noted down the time allotted to execute the work, then you have to prioritize the work. What are the tasks that are needed to achieve long term goals, and what are the activities to complete for short term goals? How much of the work that you have to do this week and how much to do next week.

Once you have a plan and put it on the weekly list, then that will be your reference list for the whole week. You have already divided your work for the week into hourly activities. Now your job is to follow the calendar as it is and execute the tasks as per the schedule.

The weekly plan at the beginning of the week will prevent us from second-guessing our work each day.

Now the question is what will happen if you are flexible to schedule my work on the go and how to add new tasks during the week. It is a normal tendency to be reactive and flexible to reprioritize our plan. When you plan your weekly work at the beginning of the week and to stick to it, then you may think that you have given the ownership of day to day activities to the weekly plan. It is a feeling of not being flexible and dynamic according to the events played out on each day.

When you are planning for a week, then you are looking at the big picture for the whole week. What part of long term plan did you want to achieve this week so that you can progress towards your long term goal? Or, how much time to give to a task, and what would be the priority to finish that task?

But when you are planning daily, then you are worried about the result by the end of the day. You are running a sprint each day to plan, prioritize, and planning the execution of the task at hand. The cumulative time spent and stresses on these activities are much more than you need to spend on weekly planning. Apart from that, daily planning will be to complete short term objectives at the cost of long term objectives.

By planning daily and not on a weekly basis can give you a false sense of ownership of your day. This is similar to going with the flow and not planning it at all. You are reacting to the events taking shapes during the day and planning based on events influenced by others. In reality, you are being owned by the activities of others and not in control of your own time.

Reconsidering The Priority

It is quite natural to question the priority list during that week. You can look at the calendar and see a difficult task. Your natural inclination to avoid pain and to seek pleasure will kick in. You may think of delaying the activities or substituting the activities with something else.

In the initial stages of these planning activities, you will come across a situation where you will look at the priority list during the week and then question if that is the right priority. The brain will look at the tasks and focus on the present pain and pleasure condition to evaluate the priority list. It will motivate you to work on something less painful or more pleasant. You need to stick to the original priority to win the battle of controlling the schedule. This conflict will be there for the initial few weeks until you develop the habit of following the tasks as planned.

Tips To Avoid Procrastination

Procrastination is the single biggest culprit in preventing you from achieving your desired objectives. Our normal brain will try to escape to avoid the pain of stress. We force ourselves to note down work to do and assigned time to work on those tasks. Then we prioritize the work to achieve our short-term and long-term goals. In the beginning, those activities stressful, and we sacrifice our pleasure for a few hours on the weekend to plan things out for the week ahead. We are aware that these stresses on the weekend will reduce our cumulative pressure over the week and make us more productive.

We feel the power of procrastination or thought to avoid these stress while trying to focus our attention on plans for the week. Some of us can succumb to procrastination and delay the planning for later part of the day or week. This is the first trap to stop you from achieving your goal.

You can avoid this trap by working on a weekly plan when you feel more energetic. Some people feel more energy on Sunday morning. After a good night’s sleep on Saturday, you can feel fresher to focus on your planning. Once you are done with your planning, then you will be more relaxed for the rest of the day.

You will again face the power of procrastination while trying to assign an hourly task to execute during the week. Some of the tasks can feel more complex, and you may not feel confident work on the activity. The fear of failure is also a reason for procrastination. During that time, you will be inclined to delay initiating the task and replace them with some easier task. But remind yourself that you are judging yourself, and no one cares. You have to execute those tasks in the next few weeks to achieve your objectives.

The pain of working on that task will remain the same irrespective of when you are planning to execute it. If you get pain early, then you will also get the reward soon.

The solution to the complex task is to divide them into multiple sub-tasks. The division of work into sub-task will make it simple and achievable.

The third and most dangerous phase of procrastination is during the time of task execution. The procrastination at this stage is the most lethal blow on your productivity. The chance of avoiding the task is more when you are working on a long term objective, and you are not getting immediate gratification or reward. Your brain will try to influence you to go for less painful work to avoid the pain and get more pleasure. Your procrastination at this stage will prevent you from executing your task and put you behind your schedule or hamper your productivity.

The solution to this problem is to trick your mind to look for pleasure and reduce pain. You can promise yourself to treat yourself by executing the task as per the schedule and timeline. This will trick your brain on the immediate pleasure of reward by finishing the work. The other approach is to tell yourself that you will work on the difficult task for a few minutes only and then push yourself for a few more minutes until you finished the work. This will trick your brain that you are reducing the pain by working part of the task at a time.

Avoid Distraction to Reduce Stress and Increase Productivity

Your hourly schedule will get distraction during the week. There will be unforeseen demand from your family or a new request from your colleague or your boss. It will be tempting to accommodate those requests and reschedule your work. You will be tempted to attend short term objectives to satisfy the demand from others and please them. At that time, you have to be mindful of the long term consequence of your change in plan. The temptation of short term pleasure will always try to take over long term pleasure. Your responsibility is to judiciously accommodate necessary requests.

Sometimes you have to reprioritize your work. The priority of those requests can depend upon the followings:

Are you accepting the demand just to please others?

Do you think that those requests have a crucial outcome and take precedence over other scheduled tasks?

Are you accepting the request because the absence of your effort will result in a loss?

Are you accepting this request because it is less painful than my scheduled task?

Do you have options to say no to the task or delegate it to someone else?

What is the consequence of saying no to the request? The reward of accepting the demand is more far-reaching than my schedule task or vice versa?

Are you accepting this request with full knowledge of less reward and want to avoid conflict in the workplace?

The above questions will give you an idea on request which genuinely needed your attention and add value to your productivity for the week. You have to protect and take ownership of your time.

The quality of the new request will demand your attention to change the priority. By avoiding unnecessary work, you can reduce the distraction and be in more control of your time and productivity.

The other approach to balance the hourly task and daily distraction is by allocating a few hours in a day to accommodate the change in the priority. In this plan, you can keep a few hours in the afternoon from 1–3 PM as flexible hours. This approach will give more control to execute the unplanned work and finishing your hourly task as planned. You can attend a qualified request by rescheduling the hourly task to the flexible time in the afternoon.

Best Time To Evaluate and Plan Your Week

Keep some time on the weekend to evaluate and go through the achievements. You will realize your achievement after crossing the task completed as schedule and looking at the unfinished task. You have to go through your week’s activities during this evaluation to find out what works for you and what did not work for you. What could you have done differently to get the pending works done or reduced the time taken to finish some tasks?

Learning from the evaluation of the week’s work will prepare you to be more efficient in the coming weeks. It will also give you an idea about the best time to execute a task with less distraction or budget the time to take to complete a task. Next time you will have more information to schedule the work or assign the appropriate time to finish the tasks. In a few weeks' time, you will have more clear visibility and understanding to budget the time and schedule the work for more efficient execution.

A more efficient implementation of your hourly plan will help you to complete the maximum number of hourly activities. The regular practice of planning and execution of hourly tasks will keep you on track to achieve both short and long-term objectives.

Originally published at https://jhbuddy.com.

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