A Productivity Routine for People Who Get Tired Easily
When beating yourself up about productivity makes you less productive.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying and modifying productivity routines — shuffling things here, shuffling things there, trying to pack daily habits into one block, spreading them around, rinse and repeat. There’s a million ways to try to keep your days fruitful, and I’ve spent years trying to find a good niche.
The reason why is simple: I get very tired all the time, and if I don’t nail my schedule, I won’t get anything done.
Anyone who deals with chronic fatigue — whether from mental illness, physical illness or (most recently) pandemic fatigue — has probably been in a situation where they have a multitude of tasks piling up and absolutely no drive to get to them. You know you’re going to be more tired if you leave it all for tomorrow… but right now it’s today, and getting to things is hard.
Usually, the key to overcoming this feeling is being patient with yourself and making sure your routine incorporates rest. Here is a gentle, forgiving routine that has worked for me throughout 2020, no matter how exhausted I was.
Part 1: Daily habits
This part is simple. Pick at most 5 tasks that you want to do every single day, regardless of what else is going on that day. It’s tempting to pick more, but trust me, 5 is enough. Roughly schedule the times when they fit into your day. For example, my tasks:
- I write immediately after waking up
- I journal and read in the middle of the day
- I draw in the evenings
- I set out some time for walking or working out in my Google Calendar, and move it around according to what I’m up to that day
Put these tasks somewhere easy to check and track. You can make a paper chart and pencil in the tasks you did each day, or you can use an app like Todoist or Habitica. I use Obsidian with a daily template that includes a checklist for these tasks.
Here’s the important part: don’t beat yourself up if you miss daily tasks. In fact, depending on how taxing you find them, find a day of the week where you intentionally don’t do some or all of the tasks. Just keep them at hand, somewhere visible and easy to remember.
Part 2: The 3–1 Day Rule
If you’ve struggled with focus, you may have already heard of the 3–1 rule: work for three times as long as your break time. It’s similar to the Pomodoro method, but with a slightly longer rest time for each block of concentration. The recommended time is often 45 minutes of work, 15 minutes of rest.
I apply this to my days as well. 3 days are serious work days, and the 4th day is a “rest” day. I do the bare minimum work tasks, and catch up on household chores I didn’t get to during my work days. Of course, depending on how flexible your schedule is, a “rest” day doesn’t have to be a day off (though it can be). The goal of a rest day isn’t to do nothing, but to work slowly and be forgiving if you run out of time for tasks that day.
I also tend to structure my journaling methods and task lists differently whether something is a work day or a rest day.
Work days
For work days, I hold myself to one key rule: I pick three core tasks. The tasks can be extremely specific (debug this specific code) or vague (look into this topic). I usually choose according to how I feel in the morning or how much needs to get done. If I can take my time, the tasks are usually small chunks: do just this one thing. If I feel energetic or I have a deadline, they get bigger: work on this project for an extended period of time, no matter how many tasks it entails.
The only hard rule is that if I’ve set out the task at the start of the day, I must work at least 10 minutes on it. If something urgent comes up, I will overwrite tasks with a new task, but normally I take each task I’ve decided on that day, set my timer for 10 minutes for each and start working.
Most of the time, no matter how grueling the task sounds, after 10 minutes, I continue working on it for hours. If not, that’s fine too. At least you’ve kept it at the forefront of your mind and you can get back to it when you’re more energized.
Picking tasks
Picking tasks can be in and of itself a hassle. I often find myself stalling for endless minutes, wondering what tasks I should get to, which projects need attention the soonest, which tasks I might be forgetting.
I solve this (sort of) by writing a monthly project overview. What projects am I working on? What tasks do they entail? Can I break those down into subtasks?
Again, using Obsidian, I usually put my project overview in one tab and my daily task list in another. You can do the same with any text editor. Then, side by side, I go through the list of possible tasks and pick which of them I feel up to or need to get to for that day. I often pick out my tasks for all three work days at once. Once I get to a given day, though, I may edit my previously chosen tasks.
The task list
Once I have my three tasks, I write them as headers in a document. I take notes about everything I did for those tasks, related information and any important links, articles, quotes, etc.
It can take a while to remember to do this (I’m still working on it) but once you get into the habit, you’ll be amazed how much mental load is relieved just by recording the steps you took and your thought process, and being able to look back on that in the evening or the next time you get back to that project.
Underneath them, I have a Notes section, where I put any thoughts about tasks I didn’t schedule in the morning but got to anyway, or just general thoughts and reminders. I don’t make a specific list for extra tasks, simply save any important information and a small tidbit about what I did.
Rest days
On rest days, I make a simple to-do list. I detail all the tiniest steps of every task so I don’t have to think too much about them. This includes my daily habit tasks. It also includes rest activities.
As I go through my day, I check off all the little sub-tasks, add anything else that occurs to me.
And then, most importantly, at the end of the day, I delete it. It doesn’t matter how many things I did or didn’t accomplish on the rest day. If anything important is left over, that’s for the work days. These days are first and foremost about emotionally letting yourself rest and not worry about how much you’re getting done.
Part 3: A Template
Finally, here’s a template for how my daily notes look. You can make this a template in your word processor of choice, and create them three at a time for a work block. (Usually I do it sometime during my rest day, but you can also do it in the morning of the first day of your work block. This also means you can cheat and make that a core task if you want to.)
Daily habit tasks
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