I’m taking a break from my regularly scheduled content, which I filmed before Coronavirus really came to Australia, to talk about what crisis times mean for our productivity.
I’ve seen this awful quote that’s doing the rounds, which says something along the lines of, “If you don’t come out of this time with a new skill, then you never lacked the time you lacked the discipline.” And that’s just awful. And totally untrue. Not achieving a new skill in a time of crisis is not a discipline issue.
It’s perfectly normal for you to have more demands than usual on your mental resources right now. If just getting through the day is requiring more than usual, then that’s to be expected.
And so on the one hand, I 100% don’t want to add to any productivity pressure that you are feeling right now to perform at a normal level. On the other hand, I do still want to keep showing up and talking about productivity skills.
Because the productivity skills that I talk about, I learned them at a time in my life when I was really, really low on mental resources. I had such limited energy, and I needed to find ways to get through the day and still function as a human being. Learning about productivity really helped me get through the day.
So I’m going to keep showing up. I’m going to keep talking about the fact that to be at your best, you need to take breaks, you need to get a full night’s sleep, you need to go easy on yourself. You need to make plans so that you’re not requiring your poor brain to decide what to do every minute of the day, and you can just rest easy in the plans that you’ve already made.
I’m going to keep talking about all the things that I always talk about. About productivity skills that make life better, instead of faster.
And I would love it if you would just take the parts you need, leave the rest, and go easy on yourself right now.
