I'm stuck at home, in Ireland I'm not allowed to go more than 5km from my house, and I'm starting to become demotivated.<p>I hate this so it causes anxiety, i can't focus because of the anxiety. So i work late and do all my work in the evenings, which ruins any hope of me having a normal life outside work.<p>How do you maintain focus or productivity levels?
I think in the long run, maintaining a productivity pace is more about habits and space and less about specific tricks.<p>For me, I do almost the same things every day: waking at the same hour most of the time (around 06:00 or 06:30), drinking a cup of coffee while planning the day.<p>I also do my work mostly in the same space in the house, at my desk: when I sit in the chair, I immediately start working. It helps a lot to have an excellent and curated todo list, action-oriented so that I can start working directly without too much time to think about other things.<p>Some other small things I do:<p>1. I use one account on my Mac for work and another one for personal/leisure.<p>2. I mostly use the computer for work. I don't play games on it, and I almost don't use social media on the computer (for this and for other things like reading books or posts, I mostly use an iPad).<p>3. I use a Pomodoro app to start working. I just open it when I sit on the chair and add the first task I want to focus on. But after 1/2 pomodoros, I drift off it and continue focusing.<p>4. It also helps me put on my headphones even if sometimes I don't listen to the music. But I think this is a habit of focusing from when I was working years ago in an open-space or in coffee shops.<p>5. I use multiple keyboards some days: I have three external keyboards on my desk, and when I feel I am losing focus and I need to maintain it, I change the keyboard. It gives me a similar feeling like using a good pen to draw something or to write a good text on a piece of paper and just want to continue using it :)
For me part of motivation is reducing how much is required by certain activities. Making a routine and developing habits is a good way to do this.<p>Big items to automate:<p>- Food: I have roughly the same meals a couple of days in a row. This makes cooking easier and takes the overhead of figuring out what to eat when I get hungry.<p>- Exercise: I got for a run in the middle of the day before my meeting. Having it in the middle of the day means there is not a lot of time to second guess. It creates time limit in my morning cause I want to be at a good stopping point before I run. Also, it’s a nice break from sitting at a screen.<p>-Sleep: I get in bed 1h before I actually sleep. I sit there and read. Before that I brush my teeth. Before that I do the dishes and clean the kitchen. It’s a routine that helps me get in the right mindset for rest.
I think a better question is do you have to be productive and focused all the time?<p>I'm in my late 30s and I've found you need to embrace the non-productive periods of time as part of life. It's impossible to maintain the same pace forever. The energy you have will rise and fall with how life is going.<p>It's ok not to be ok right now.