how to trick yourself into being productive 🍵 at home, school, + work

[Music] hey guys in today's video I'm going to be sharing five ways you can trick yourself into being productive this can be helpful for when one half of your brain really aligns with your goals and the other half is just being unproductive and telling you not to do anything these tricks can help you shut down that procrastinating unproductive half of your brain and instead listen to the part of yourself that is actually telling you to do the things that you need to do whether that be studying or exercising or working on something on your to-do list so let's get started with method number one [Music] you can motivate yourself to get things done by looking back and reminding yourself of everything else you've accomplished so far a while ago I listened to this podcast and I remember this study about coffee shop reward cards in one case they gave their participants a coffee shop reward card where for every six drinks you buy you get one free drink so you start with one stamp and need five more to get that free drink in the other scenario they give the participants the carve that required eleven drinks to get the free drink but the first time you went out and got a drink with a new card they give you six stamps in advance which basically left you with two seemingly identical coffee shop cards in which you need to buy five more drinks to get another free one but in the group that required eleven stamps it seemed like you were already halfway there whereas in the group that required 6 stamps total it felt like you had just barely gotten started and in the group where they started already being halfway there even though the literal quantity of 5 drinks was the thing that group was more likely to follow through and get 5 more drinks for the free drink basically what this whole study illustrates is is helpful to view your work as already being mostly done or at least partially done instead of just thinking of it as completely unfinished and to do this you can just look back at all of the progress you've made so far for instance maybe I have an assignment due for AP stats technically that assignment is zero percent done but if you look back instead at the entire progress bar of learning the subject of Statistics I'm already 90% there it's really empowering to look at it in perspective and realize that you're basically almost done you've made so much progress already and therefore it shouldn't be too hard to just finish off the last remaining bit [Music] method number two is the kick in the butt I couldn't count with a less weird sounding name but it will make sense as I explained hopefully keep in mind though that this tip is kind of a two types of person thing and if you don't think this would work for the way you tend to interpret the world maybe don't do it because it might just discourage you I tend to get lazy with studying or learning new things when I feel overconfident and complacent like I might avoid studying for a test because I think I already know the material super well so what's the point in studying and this clearly is not the best mindset to be in because obviously I do not know everything and I do need to study in order to actually succeed on the test so when I'm starting to feel this particular type of laziness I usually like to do a really really difficult version of the task or problem in order to kick myself in the butt and make myself realize that in fact I do not know everything and I do need to study and work hard for me getting that shock into my system makes me feel B oh crap I'm doing badly I need to work harder in order to become actually good now this only works if you're in the complacency category of procrastinating and you know that you're the type of person who will rise to face a challenge instead of feeling defeated by the way don't feel like this is a judgment on your character if you don't think you're the type of person this would work well for because some people tend to respond positively to something difficult viewing it as a challenge whereas some people are just more disposed to view it as a threat and feel like they would rather ease into a difficult topic by starting with something easy and building it up neither one is the correct method it's just different types of people so do what will work best for you [Music] method number three is the two-minute rule and for me to explain this one properly let's go into some of the psychology behind why people procrastinate the main reason is because your brain is anticipating pain to come from doing the particular task whether that be running for 30 minutes or working on a difficult problem set and because your brain thinks doing the thing will hurt it's going to stop you from doing it because you know your brain just doesn't want to feel pain it's just a normal human instinct nothing wrong with that when this kind of resistance builds up sure you could just use route force self-control to make yourself do the thing but it might be a little bit easier to just reduce the resistance level that your brain is automatically feeding you to circumvent this you can just reduce the anticipated pain level by telling yourself to do an easier or shorter version of the task and that's where the 2-minute part of the two-minute rule comes in basically you can promise yourself I'm only going to work on this for two minutes I'm gonna go outside and jog for two minutes or work on my math problems for two minutes your brain doesn't have that much pain response because it's just two minutes it's not that much but once you've overcome that initial speed bump of your brains natural resistance to getting started you'll often end up in a flow state and realize hey it's not that painful and to you actually enjoy it and want to keep going now of course if you don't feel yourself going into that flow state do take a break and then come back for another two minutes because you don't want your brain to start being like you always tell me that I only have to do two minutes of work and then I can stop but then you make me keep going so I'm gonna start ignoring the two minute rule because no no that is not a good idea either but I don't anticipate you having that problem very often because at least in my experience and through the experiences of others I've talked to the two-minute rule is pretty useful in getting you into the flow of doing work you back to my show you what I was method number four is outside accountability and kind of like the kick in the butt method it does only work for specific types of people although I think this would work for at least 50% of people this will really work for you if you're the kind of person who responds well to outside accountability that means pressure from others to show up for a meeting or go to practice or get an assignment done on its due date I first learned about this from Gretchen Rubens the four tendency and there's a lot more resources about outside accountability on her blog and podcast as well so I definitely recommend you check that out I also found her resources really helpful in realizing that being responsive to outer accountability while not having as much responsiveness to inner accountability which is trying to get yourself to do work is not necessarily a moral failing or a weakness and self-control if you respond better to outside accountability that's just the type of person you are and that can be a feature that you can use to your advantage not just a weakness and the main way you can use this feature to your advantage is to set up appointments and accountability with other people for instance before this whole quarantine experience I found it really easy to show up for practice every day and go run at 3:20 because my team was expecting me to be there but now that's just me at home I do find it pretty difficult to make myself go outside to run even though I do like running you might want to call or meet up with friends to study or a group of like-minded people to go on a safe socially distance bike ride getting that commitment with other people is a good way to make yourself actually show up and get it done [Music] last minute for this video is taking just one step it's often said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step and this is definitely true for any large projects that you're working on or even smaller tasks sometimes these big often amorphous tasks like start a business or write to my paper can just feel so big and directionless so it really helps to break them down into smaller concrete steps this is especially helpful if you're avoiding something because it seems overwhelming and difficult and your brain is kind of just going what's the point I'll never get it done or succeed anyways because know you can and you will as long as you break it down into simple steps as the name implies what you want to do for this method is break down that gigantic task into little teeny tiny tasks bits and bobs microscopic fragments if you will so maybe that's ten page research paper you have to write starts with step one annotate the prompt step two write a draft thesis etc etc until you've broken down the entire thing into exact tiny items of every single thing you have to do especially if you're avoiding something because you think it's difficult you might want to have your first couple of steps be something super basic and easy that way you can build your confidence before you start tackling the bigger parts of the task and then once everything seems bite-sized and manageable it's pretty easy to get started and those are the five methods that I wanted to talk about today if you have any other tips and tricks that you want to recommend please do leave them in the comments for all of us to benefit from I hope you found this helpful and I upload new videos every week I also post photos of my notes and bullet journal on my Instagram which is at study club see you next time I should be the last [Music]

Channel: studyquill

Views: 337,071

Rating: 4.9892406 out of 5

Keywords: studying, college, school, productivity tips, productivity tricks, productivity hacks, how to be more productive, how to be more productive in quarantine, how to be productive at work, how to be productive at school, how to be productive at home, tricks to be more productive, how to stop procrastinating, productivity, productivity apps, habits to increase productivity, productivity tips for students, productive tips for college students, productivity tips for online school, studyquill

Id: 9eh8N8Eby-U

Length: 10min 2sec (602 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 01 2020