23. 10 Productive Things to Do When You Don’t Feel Like Being Productive
Episode 23
Sometimes, despite our best intentions, we just don’t feel like doing diddly squat. Our to-do list is long and our time is short, but for whatever reason, we can’t bring ourselves to be productive.
In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I share 10 productive things to do when you don’t feel like being productive but also don’t feel like being completely useless.
So the next time you have work to do but you don’t feel like doing it, come back to this episode and choose any of these 10 non-productive-but-still-secretly productive ideas. Happy working!
🎙️Other Episodes + Resources Mentioned:
→ Episode 1: What’s an Admin Block and Why You Need One
→ Episode 15: 3 Email Management Strategies to Handle Your Inbox
→ Episode 16: How to Set up Your Ideal Work or Study Space
→ Episode 21: How to Plan Your Ideal Week
✏️Free Resources + Downloads
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23 10 Productive Things to Do When Your Don't Feel Like Being Productive
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them. :)
[00:00:00] Well, hello there. This is the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. We are going to talk about something that we are all familiar with, including myself. Now I am by trade and training and experience and education, a productivity expert, but even I sometimes don't feel like doing diddly squat.
I have strategies and tactics that I use myself and I teach you all about how to avoid the trap of doing or not doing things based on how we feel about it, okay?
But at the end of the day, sometimes we just find ourselves in a funk and despite all of the strategies in the world, we just don't want to do what we know we have to do.
Now my goal with this episode is to share some ideas about how to manage these moments.
I am not going to pretend that there is a way to avoid them entirely because we are all just human beings doing our best on this small planet for the short amount of time that we have, [00:01:00] that just went really deep. But with that, I do have some ideas for how to not let these non-productive moments go to total waste.
Specifically, I have 10 ideas of productive things that we can do when we don't feel like being productive.
If you want to print out this list or store it somewhere for future reference, head to learn and work smarter.com/podcast/ 23 for all the show notes and a transcript that puts everything into writing what we are learning here today.
I hope these ideas inspire you and help you get out of the next productivity rut that you find yourself in, because that is going to happen. So let's begin.
[00:02:00]
All right, so starting with idea number one of what to do when you don't feel like being productive, but you also don't feel like being a total sack of potatoes is to clean your physical space.
Now I love starting with this tip because it's something that we can do that's physical.
Now a lot of the resistance that comes up to being productive or to doing the thing that we're supposed to be doing is mental, like mental roadblocks.
And then one way that we can overcome these mental or mindset roadblocks is to do something physical.
Now there are a few different ways to approach cleaning your physical space.
And I'm going to share some with you obviously, and you can do one at a time. You can do them. You know, all at once, I guess that would really depend on how long you feel like avoiding the real work.
Now, when I say clean [00:03:00] your physical space, I'm referring to the area where you do the most work or the most, you know, studying.
That is probably a physical office in maybe an office building somewhere. It could be a home office. It could be a room, if you are a college student, like your dorm, or maybe a study space in your bedroom, if you are a student who lives at home, right.
My favorite way to begin this strategy is just to remove everything from the surface, take everything off your desk and put it on the floor.
Yeah. Even the things that you know, you're going to end up putting back.
And if you're doing this in an office space and there's people around do not worry about others looking at you funny, because I guarantee that anybody who is watching you do this, okay, this is going to have a domino effect. And over the next few days, you're going to start seeing people doing the exact same thing. Cleaning their spaces too.
So you'd be the trendsetter here. All right?
So obviously, you know, clean the surface with some kind of wipe and [00:04:00] then one by one, as you begin to put things back on your desk, I want you to ask yourself if that item is useful or if it is inspiring.
If you're holding something in your hand that is not useful or inspiring, it does not deserve to be in that prime real estate that is your work surface.
And this would also be the time to clean your screen, your mouse, your keyboard, take a cleaning wipe and like run it down those chords, like behind your desk that somehow collect more dust than is reasonable.
Replace the batteries in your keyboard, um, or in your mouse.
If you have a lot of random, you know, tech things floating around, get some kind of like shoe box or Tupperware that you can put all of your tech in.
In episode 16, all about how to set up your study space or your workspace, I call this a tech box. Because I am really creative. And witty.
Next your pens and your pencils. Keep [00:05:00] only that the ones that um, inspire you or that are useful.
Do you really need 97 pens? There is no judgment here because I am the one with 96 pens. But I am just encouraging you to ask yourself these questions.
Do you have stacks of papers that you removed from your desk, so you could clean the desk, right? But now you feel weird putting those stacks of paper back on that nice clean surface?
Then figure out a system to deal with papers so that you don't just keep making tiles. It depends on how deep you want to go here with your workspace.
But this whole cleaning process, whatever could take anywhere from, I don't know, 10 minutes to an hour. How long do you feel like procrastinating for? Choose a number.
If you know that this is something that you need to do, in fact, you've been, you know, putting off cleaning your workspace for some time now. And you're not even motivated to do this, let alone the actual work that you're procrastinating on, then set a timer for five minutes. [00:06:00] Five minutes. And see how much you can clear and clean in five minutes.
Alright, moving on from our physical space to our digital space.
Tip number two is to delete digital junk.
If you don't feel like doing your actual real work, get into your digital files and do some housekeeping.
Now for this step here, I am simply talking about deleting things. Okay. In the next step, I'm going to talk about digital organization just hint, hint, but we can't do that first without deleting the junk that's in there because it makes no sense to organize junk.
So we have to get rid of the junk first. Does that make sense?
So there are three places that tend to accumulate digital trash: our downloads folder, our desktop, and then our cloud storage that could be, you know, Google Drive or one Drive or some equivalent.
If you don't know where to start on this step, you're already overwhelmed,
just me even saying this. then I say, start with the [00:07:00] desktop. Okay.
One by one, go through the desktop icons and delete what's no longer useful, relevant or necessary.
For anything that you do need to keep. Okay. I am. I am not talking about moving those somewhere different yet. Okay, that is the next step.
I am just talking about deleting. Right? So the only decision that we are making here is do I keep it?
We're not making decisions about where to move things yet or what to name things. Okay. Just, am I keeping it or am I not?
From there, you can move on to your download folder.
I don't know about you, but my downloads folder can become the absolute wild, wild west so quickly.
And, you know, I have to go in maybe once a week and clean things up in there.
So go in there, delete things that are no longer useful, relevant, and necessary. All right. Be ruthless.
And then the final one, which for many of us can be the hardest, it depends, is to tackle the digital [00:08:00] storage. Again, that is now Google Drive or One Drive.
Listen to your gut here. Many of us intuitively know whether or not we need to keep something.
And our first instinct in this context is usually correct. But then we find ourselves creating these narratives about how we might need it in the future if this like one-off random situation occurs. If this happens, if, if our someday scenario brain is in overdrive and is overstepping the bounds of like rationality, Then we need to just delete the thing. Okay.
Delete it.
Next, tip three is to optimize your digital storage system.
So the 10 strategies that I'm sharing today are the 10 ideas rather, they're not sequential. You can do one, you can do all 10.
You don't have to do them in order.
But tip number three, which is to organize your digital space, should not come before you delete the things in your digital space. Okay.
But I'm not insinuating that if you do one and then two and then three [00:09:00] and four, that's not, that's not how this works.
But I wouldn't want you going into organize your stuff in this step right now that I'm going to walk you through until you've gone through the first process of just like cleaning up the trash.
Okay. This step is more complex than the previous tip, which is obviously just to delete things because now we have to make decisions.
All right now, assuming that we've, you know, deleted all the junk in these spaces, what allegedly remains is all of this stuff that you have deemed important and worth keeping for whatever reason. Only you are the judge of that.
But if something is worth keeping, it should also be worth finding.
And to make something easy to find, we have to name it and store in a way that makes sense to the least motivated versions of ourselves.
What do I mean by this? It is really important. Okay. So if you use zoned out while you're listening to this, come back to me right now. This is important.
Sometimes when we [00:10:00] create systems, in this case, organization systems, we create them for some idealistic version of ourselves that does not exist in most likely, never will.
Those systems when we create it for that version of ourselves that does not exist,
those systems almost always fail.
I'm going to tell you about a client of mine. He is a working professional who I started meeting with in 2020. High functioning, highly successful, but always stressed out and overwhelmed.
Now, one of the first things I did when I started to work with him was to ask him to show me his systems.
This was over Zoom so he shared his screen and took me inside his one drive his company used Microsoft, whatever.
You know what I saw in there? You know what I saw inside his one drive? At first glance. Perfection. Color-coded folders that when opened, led to more color coded folders.
And he did this for each year that he was at his company. So we had a whole set of folders and then sub [00:11:00] folders for like 20-eight. I think it was 2018, 19, and we were in 2020 at that point. All of the folders were labeled. They were nested. They were
it was gorgeous.
So what was the problem? The problem was that he created his digital system for a version of himself that he wanted to be, but wasn't.
He wasn't a guy who liked to open folders and then another folder, and then another folder to access a single file. That was honestly too complex and too frictiony. Okay.
And that's okay. He was okay being that way.
But his system, despite being beautiful was not okay. Right. So what do we do?
We simplified it. We created a folder hierarchy that was only one folder deep for him. We got rid of the separation by years because honestly that was, it didn't make sense for the way that he was using his, you know, one drive.
We created a naming convention that was super simple, easy to remember [00:12:00] and easy to apply to all the future files that he accumulated or created.
Why am I sharing this story?
Because what I did with this person is what I mean, when I say optimize your storage system for you, for the current version of yourself that exists now.
Is it too complex or is there too much friction in the way that you're operating?
Do we even have a storage system? Do you have a naming convention that works for all types of files that you deal with on a daily basis?
Are all your files in the right place?
Remember in the previous step, we were just deleting things. Right now we need to make sure that what's left has a sensible place to go, a place where you will know to go and look for that file when you need it in the future.
Now, if this task seems overwhelming and you're just like, oh my gosh, Katie, I don't want to be that productive. Then just start by renaming files that don't [00:13:00] have appropriate names.
Just like do that for 10 minutes.
My guess is that in 10 minutes you could probably hit like, 50 files that have, um, no names or weird names and you'll feel good about like that effort and that improvement to your system.
And there's a chance that maybe that 10 minutes will lead into another 10 minutes of you taking it one step further, or maybe after that 10 minutes, if you're just renaming some files, you start to feel a little good about yourself and you know what, like I can do this.
And then you return to the task that you were supposed to be doing that you've been avoiding by actually cleaning out your system.
And you never know where 10 minutes of low-stakes productivity will lead you. So don't underestimate just 10 minutes of diving in and doing something.
Now sneaky nonproductive, but still kind of productive tip number four is to clean out your inbox.
Now, I have an entire episode, episode 15, where I go over some really important email [00:14:00] management strategies.
So this tip is obviously not as extensive as that full episode. These are just some tactical things that you can do. And again, I don't know, in like 10 minutes.
If you have a good email strategy or system, then you're likely already doing these things regularly.
But if your email management system isn't quite there yet, and it's likely you have an inbox that could use some attention. So, I don't know why I'm so obsessed with this 10-minute thing, but we're going to go 10 minutes, so set a timer for 10 minutes or so, and I want you to start with one goal. Delete.
Whatever email client you're using Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, whatever you have the functionality to mass delete emails from a particular sender.
You do this by entering in a word in the search bar and then mass deleting the results.
So for example, many of my students get these updates from Google Classroom any time a teacher updates the platform.
So if you have like seven classes and the [00:15:00] teacher is making, I don't know, like three or four posts, that ends up being. Math and a lot of, a lot of emails, maybe 50 or 60 emails a week.
If you have a regular subscription to some software that sends frequent emails, then search for that. Personally, I get frequent emails from my community, including my town library, the town government. Each of my kids' schools because they're currently at different schools.
These emails add up. So I actually do a search for the name of my town. And all of these emails appear in the search results. And then I usually delete them all at once. I try to delete them as they come in, but sometimes it's like a once-a-week thing that I do during an admin block.
Now something else that won't have an immediate impact on your inbox, but long-term it can be significant is to unsubscribe from companies that have like promotional emails that you're just Not interested in anymore.
Usually, these are retail stores and in these cases, it's okay to unsubscribe from the promotional email, [00:16:00] because any emails that are related to like orders your account, those are on sort of like a separate chain or whatever, and they're still going to arrive to you just fine.
Now there is one exception to this rule. You would obviously never, ever unsubscribe from ReportCard, which is my weekly newsletter that I send out every Thursday with tips, tricks, strategies, and resources for productivity organization, studying and learning and working smarter. If you are not receiving that newsletter already join the thousands who are on my list by clicking the link that I will put in the description box and in the show notes of this podcast.
I promise you I am not spammy. It's just me on the other end of it. And I love to communicate with my community that way.
Now one final thing that you can do inside your inbox. This isn't going to apply to everybody, but you can create email templates for any emails that you send out regularly.
Like I said, this tip does not apply to everyone, but if it helps even just a few of you, then it's worth [00:17:00] sharing.
You can obviously just do a Google search for how to create an email template in Google or how to create an email template, you know, in Yahoo, for step-by-step instructions, cause I'm sure they change all the time.
But the reason you would even create some kind of email template in the first place is it can save you precious time if there is a particular type of email that you send out regularly, regularly, I'm going to say at least like twice a week.
I have a few of these in my business. And whenever I need to send this type of email, I just open up the template. And then I customize certain sections, obviously based on who it's going to and what the details are, but the framework is already there. I started doing this. I don't know. Maybe like. Maybe like a year ago and I find it really helpful.
Okay. And so do many of my adult clients that I help set up these email templates.
All right. The next idea, tip five that you can do when you don't feel like being productive is to do a brain dump.
Brain dumps have a double benefit of helping us [00:18:00] visualize our tasks and things like that, and also helping us clear our mind and feel less overwhelmed about all of the things that are buzzing around our head.
Now we don't need anything fancy at all, to do a brain dump. We can grab a piece of paper.
I like to suggest setting a timer for seven minutes cause I think that's the magic number. I've been doing this for about 18 years; that seems to be enough time to fully excavate everything from your head.
But not too long that you're getting bored. Right?
You excavate every single thing out of your head with no judgment. Ideas, tasks worries, to do things, random whatevers that pop into your head, write it all down.
Even if some inner voice is telling you that it's weird.
Okay now, this is where I take the brain dump strategy in a little bit different direction than others. I think the brain dump strategy can be much more helpful if you take it one extra step.
So when the timer goes off and you [00:19:00] have nothing left in your head, look at everything that you wrote down and you're going to sort them into three categories. Ideas worries and tasks.
All right, we're going to look over the worries and we're going to discard them. Because there is a good chance that they just needed to be acknowledged, but what are you going to do about worry?
There's no action connected to it.
Next look at the ideas you wrote down. And any ideas that you think are worth keeping, move them to a more permanent storage system. I'd like to recommend Google keep for this.
And then the last category is tasks or actions. These are the things that need doing.
And so we put them on our task management system. Quick reminder that is either a, a physical planner, a to-do list, something digital.
But it's a permanent place where you keep your tasks.
Now, if there is just one thing in this whole list of 10 productive things to do, when you don't feel like being productive, that you are willing to try the next time you are [00:20:00] feeling like unmotivated to do the real work, let it be the brain dump strategy.
Okay, moving onto idea number six, when you don't feel like being productive is to plan your week.
You can either do this for the week that you're currently in, if it's, you know, early enough in the week, or you could do it for the upcoming week, if you're already sort of at the end of the week.
Does that make sense?
Episode 21 is all about how to plan your ideal week. If you haven't listened to that one already and this idea appeals to you, then I want you to listen to episode 21.
You can find it by going to learn and work smarter.com/podcast/ 21. Or of course, I'm going to leave the link. In the show notes and in the description box if you're watching on YouTube.
Now, I'm not going to give you a step-by-step for how to plan your week in this episode, because I go fully deep, like all the way, in episode 21 about how to do that.
But [00:21:00] just to reduce some of your potential resistance to the idea, if that's what you're sort of feeling right now: A quick heads up..
This does not have to take more than 10 minutes. And it can give you massive clarity and motivation.
Next, idea number seven is to process your notes.
Now this concept might be new to some of you, but whether you're a student or a working professional, you're probably taking some kind of notes somewhat regularly. I teach this in many of my tutorials on schoolhabits.com and in the schoolhabits YouTube channel, but note-taking is a two-step process.
Everyone forgets the second step. So first we capture the notes in, in our notebook or wherever we're taking them, that is step one.
But step two is what most people skip because they don't know about it. This is the step that top performers never skip. And it's to process your notes.
So hear me out. When we're writing down notes in a class or a meeting, we often struggle to [00:22:00] write down everything quickly enough, and thoroughly enough that we sometimes write down too much or not enough, or we miss hear something and we write something down in a way that we don't even understand what we wrote down.
And when we do this, our notes become essentially pointless. Because, let me remind you that the entire point of notes, whether it's for work or for school is to increase your understanding of something that you're learning or working on.
The notes are also supposed to help function as a resource that can be helpful when you need the information again, in the future. Okay. So incomplete, messy or overstuffed notes are essentially pointless.
So the next time you find yourself wanting to avoid the real work of whatever it is that you're supposed to be doing, how about you go into the last set of notes that you took and clean them up?
Rewrite them. Fill in the gaps, rephrase things to be simpler, put things into visuals. If that's helpful.
Make sure you understand when you actually wrote [00:23:00] down.
Now a tip that is specifically for working professionals is if you're taking notes in the meeting, these notes often contain a mixture of like information like knowledge and then action items that you are going to need to, you know, do.
So go to your notes and you want to separate the two. Like extract the action items from the information and put the action items in your task management system.
Now nonproductive, but still a little bit productive, idea number eight is to plan an admin block.
In my very first episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast- episode one seems so long ago -is about an admin block, and what it is and why you need one.
Students and working professionals can benefit from an admin block and you can use your non-productive, productive time to either plan out your next one, or actually complete an admin block, like in itself.
Now, as I said, you're going to want to listen to episode one to learn more about this strategy, like how [00:24:00] exactly to do it.
But the idea is that once a week or so, for some people it's more than that and some people it's less than that, whatever, but once a week or so you create a chunk of time in your day.
This could be anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, obviously depending, where you tackle all of those, the nagging administration tasks that clutter, the rest of our work week or school week.
These are things like answering, answering emails, cleaning out your inbox, sorting through the piles of paper on your desk, cleaning out your bag, returning phone calls, updating your calendar, following up with people.
These are things that are tasks, but we, we, for some reason, don't think of them that way. But the problem is when we don't think of them that way we don't recognize how much time they actually take up in our calendar.
So if you're not feeling productive, but you still want to do something to feel productive, look at the next five days.
Find a chunk of time. I don't know, maybe like 30 [00:25:00] minutes. Uh, where you can schedule yourself in admin block and then, okay. This is important. Pinpoint exactly what you're going to do during that admin block.
I'm not saying do it. I'm just saying plan for it, because if you don't identify how you're going to spend that time, let's say that 30 minutes, then you're going to waste it.
Now one idea would be to consult your brain dump.
Brain dumps, often reveal many of those administration tasks that have been floating around our head as things that our brain is like, don't forget to do this. Don't forget to do this, but. We didn't technically add them to our task management system because we don't recognize them as tasks.
Put them in your admin block so they get done.
Moving on to tip number nine, or idea number nine, it's our second to last one: update your resume and your LinkedIn profile.
When was the last time you updated your LinkedIn profile or your resume?
I'm not talking about posting to LinkedIn. But updating your picture, updating your bio, updating your job [00:26:00] experience, making sure that whatever updates you put on LinkedIn are also updated on your actual resume.
Even though we live in a digital world, resumes are still critical to have starting in high school.
So if you're in high school or college, you know, student listening to this, and you don't have a resume, create one.
If you're a working professional and you're not looking for a new job anytime soon, you still want to have an updated LinkedIn profile and resume to be prepared for the unexpected.
I have seen it happen way too many times when someone has felt secure in their employment for years and therefore has a super outdated resume.
And then a layoff happens. And in the middle of all those, you know, emotional turmoil that comes from that and from finding a new job, they have to do all the technical and cognitive work of updating a resume. That is not ideal. So do that now.
And then finally the 10th and final idea of something productive to do when you don't feel like [00:27:00] being productive is to go for a darn walk. I know that if you're listening to this podcast, you're already in a good mental space where you're looking for ways, you know, to grow and to develop, which means you probably already know the benefits of moving your body.
Okay. And as much as I want to deliver a Ted talk right now, On what those biological benefits are, I am going to restrain myself and instead we're going to focus on the mental benefits.
We spend most of our days sitting and looking at screens. Whether you are sitting at a desk, um looking at a desktop computer screen and you're actually really thinking and doing work, you're still sitting.
Or, you're slouched on the couch, watching TV or laying in bed, scrolling through your phone, or even sitting down, reading a book. That's still thinking and mental work. But you're still sitting. When we do this, the very nature of, of screens is that it's usually throwing [00:28:00] information at us.
This is especially true in the case of, you know, mindless scrolling.
Because the very nature of social media, where we're just sort of just like scrolling or any scrolling app, is that our eyeballs are just being flooded by whatever the heck that app wants to show us. Okay. It's non-selective, we're not selecting it.
And I know that can sometimes feel good to zone out.
But that's actually not zoning out because your brain is still somewhat trying to process what it's seeing, even if it's dumb stuff, it still has to process it.
So when you get up from your desk, you get up off the couch, get out of bed and you go for a walk with no screen in front of you.
It's like our brains can finally exhale and take a pause from all of the stimulation.
What we often forget is that we're learning and taking things in all day long, but that process, that learning process is not complete until our brains have downtime to work their magic and process through the things that we're learning in its own [00:29:00] way.
Hear me out.
Have you ever been in the shower and had an awesome idea out of nowhere?
Have you ever been driving and then suddenly, you know, you think of a solution to a problem that you've been dealing with?
Have you ever been running and then suddenly you figure something out that you forgot was an issue and then suddenly me like, oh my gosh, that thing, I know how to answer.
I know the answer. I know the solution.
This isn't a coincidence. This is the magic stuff that happens when we stop shoving things down our brain's throat. That's weird. Oh, well, and give it time to actually chew on what we've been feeding it. Oh, I think that analogy worked okay.
I sound really passionate explaining this.
And that's probably because I am, but also because it is true and I have a sneaking suspicion that you also know that it's true, but maybe you just need permission to view stepping away from work as being productive in itself.
So here it is. [00:30:00]
I am officially telling you that stepping away from your desk to go for a walk is productive. I give you permission.
Now we covered a lot today. And as I said at the top of this episode, if you want all these ideas in one place, you can go to learn and work smarter.com/podcast/ 23. That is the website where all of this information is laid out, including a transcript of everything we talked about today, as well as links to the other resources I alluded to. I hope this was helpful and inspiring.
And as always, I want to remind you to never stop learning.
