Author: jnelson

For all but 3 months of my career, I’ve been a remote employee. As you can imagine, it’s taken many years to really refine and lock in a process that enables productivity. Today, I’m going to share a strategy that anyone can use and start training your brain to crave productivity!

It starts with 3 things you might have laying around the house or in a junk drawer!

• A journal, notebook, or even scrap pieces of paper!
• A pen
• A highlighter

If you have these 3 things, you can start training your brain today!

Preparing for Success

Start by creating an outline like the one below:

• Today’s Date
• Checkboxes
• Bonus: Add a Grateful list for added feels!

Here’s where the fun begins, the process and the productivity gains!

List out all activities currently on your plate for completing today. A great option for this is to do it at the end of your business day for the next workday, that way you can incorporate any left of action items from the day before. It’ll train your brain to let go of those not so fun bedtime thoughts about “all that’s due tomorrow”. The act of writing down your action items puts them into an actionable list, allowing your brain to ease the search for work things to worry about!

Show me the Productivity!

As with most things in life, this strategy will take time to work into your regular routine and start to feel the benefits. But I can promise you if you stick to it, you will see productivity improvements in your day to day!

The method to this strategy involves 2 steps that trick your brain into craving productivity!

Step 1: Check it off!

• As you work through your action items – check those checkboxes!
  • There is no action item too small for our list. If it’s an email, scheduling a meeting, sending someone positive words of encouragement – put it on the list!
• Why we do this is to train our brains to focus on the good feeling of completing action items! At the end of the day, you’ll look over at your notebook and see all you’ve accomplished! (It becomes addictive!)

Step 2: Bust out the Highlighter

• As you check off boxes, highlight those action items you’ve completed.
• Why we do this is to train our brains to see our productivity from afar. When you start working, you’re typically not staring at your notebook. By highlighting your completed action items – you’re adding another layer of training your brain to crave productivity. You can easily glance over and start to see your notebook filling up with completed action items! (Hint: it’s a good feeling!)

Rinse and Repeat

The last step is to rinse and repeat the above process. Over time you’ll start to feel the craving to check off your action items every day. When you inevitably don’t complete everything, just add those to your next day’s list!

Bonus!

If you’ve made it this far, thank you, and here’s a bonus for reaching the end. One of the greatest benefits of this process over time is that you’ll have a historical reference of all you’ve completed over the past days, months, and years. I’ve been doing this for 7 years and can look back at my younger self and the challenges I faced. How those challenges felt like impossible tasks and filled me with anxiety.

To this day, I often look back at past days in my work life and realize those problems/challenges were never as bad as I made them out to be in my mind. Then one day it hit me while working through my list, what if the challenges of today are the same ones of the past.