Before the last couple of weeks I’d never experienced what you might call a true ‘productivity rut’. But recently my days were plagued with rock bottom motivation, low self-esteem indecision, spending more time procrastinating than creating impactful work. Now feel like my mental health and work ethic are on the rise again and because I know that this could happen to anybody, I wanted to outline what I noticed about myself during this down period that was threatening my wellbeing. I am then going to talk about how I went about breaking the downwards spiral and getting back to creating work, giving tips that I hope can inform and inspire those who might be experiencing the same thing that I did.
My productivity rut experience
Before the rut set in, I felt high on the relative success of my recent YouTube video about my wildlife filmmaking journey (watch it here if you want). I was watching the view count rocket to levels I’d never seen before on any of my content. That’s where I believe part of the problem started — I was watching rather than doing. I became complacent, and thought that I didn’t have to work hard, that I could take a break, because my most recent work was getting such good exposure.
I started experiencing some days where I found that the will to work had somewhat decreased, but I wasn’t mindful enough to link this to complacency or any of my bad habits. I went out for a few nights at university, became mildly ill from a virus that I caught because of the reduction in function that my immune system experienced from a few days of regular drinking. I started taking time off to rest and recover, and I found that once my health did improve, it was much harder to get back to producing work at the same rate that I was at the start of the year and before the start of the year.
It took almost a week of trying to figure out what was going on, then forming a plan and putting it into action to improve my focus and drive and restore it to levels I felt were back to normal. Here are the most important things that I learned from the process that I think other people could take away and apply to their own experience.
1. Be honest with yourself about your current productivity
The first step to breaking out a productivity rut is to recognise that you’re actually experiencing one. As I said, this didn’t happen for a while for me. To solve this, when you are experiencing a lack of motivation, or similar, productivity-related symptom, you should analyse your last couple of days, checking how you think you felt then, running through all the work you’ve completed. If you’re in a productivity rut you will likely realise that you’ve been coasting for the last couple of days, perhaps putting off tasks, perhaps finding it hard to get up and get straight to work in the morning. It can be hard to admit to ourselves that we are perhaps stuck in a rut, but the sooner you can recognise this and take steps to improve yourself, the sooner you can get back to working at your best.
2. Stop waiting for the right moment to get started
A mistake that I made during this time was waiting that if I was feeling down on one day, I would simply decide to put everything off until tomorrow hoping that I would wake up feeling better about sitting down to do work. This tactic never worked, and I want to explain why it didn’t. Most of the time when people fall into a rut in their work, it’s because of the accumulation of bad habits and unfortunate events or lack of discipline that chip away at your productivity, like a death by one thousand cuts. It’s unreasonable, if this was the way you were knocked down, to think that you will be struck by an inspiration bolt from the blue, resetting your ability to concentrate and produce meaningful work.
Instead, you have to start small, building yourself back up in the same way you were reduced. This starts by setting yourself small goals, and working relentlessly to achieve them. For now you need to disregard your feelings and motivations, knowing that they’ve been skewed by the lower standard you’ve held yourself to recently. Work on achieving one thing to the best of your ability, and once you’ve done that pick something else and work non-stop to get this next thing done. Review your progress regularly, and once you start checking off tasks and completing your work again, it’s an easier matter to keep the ball rolling. The hardest thing to do when exiting the productivity rut is executing these first two points — simply spend a little time reviewing your recent productivity, then start executing increasingly harder tasks.
3. Re-evaluate your purpose
This step can be helpful if feelings of aimlessness accompany the productive rut that you’re experiencing. Sometimes people know exactly what they should be doing although struggle to execute, whereas sometimes people can’t get back off the ground because they don’t really know how they should be directing their attention and focus. This is when you should take some time to review the direction you want your life to be taking. Finding your purpose is as easy as taking some time in an empty room, with zero distraction, and considering where you want to be in life and how you want to spend your time in the future. Your purpose should become clear to you as something your mind ruminates on more than anything else during this time.
For me this meant taking some time to reconcile myself with my time wasting at university, my complacency and my poor habit choices in recent times. My indecision was heavy, and I spent a good two hours in silence journaling to figure out where my true intentions lie. Ultimately I decided that, whilst considering the importance of sport, my health and my relationships with my family, other people and my social skills, that my purpose currently lies with creating content and making a business out of my photography, videography and writing skills.
Once you have discovered what your current purpose is, the best thing you can do is try your hardest to align as much of your life as possible to achieving this purpose. The next two points outline how this works, and how you can make your recovered work ethic sustainable for success in the long run.
4. Remove bad influences
This is something that you should be striving to do at all points in your life, regardless of whether you are in a productivity rut or not, but is absolutely essential if you want to regain better control over your life. When you are ‘down in the dumps’ your self-esteem is lower, meaning that you are more easily swayed by bad habits such as sleeping in, scrolling on social media and other forms of procrastination.
Because of this you need to introduce a greater level of strictness to your working life. This could include things such as leaving your phone in the other room while you work, deleting Instagram and TikTok (or whatever your social media vice might be) from your phone, or even only allowing yourself to listen to music whilst you are cooking and eating your meals.
The reason we are doing this is so that you have more headspace and attention to devote to achieving tasks that push you closer to fulfilling your purpose. Aligning yourself to purpose means aligning your whole environment to being able to better do work that nears you to this fulfilment. In my example, I factory reset my phone; when it restarted I only installed the apps that were going to explicitly help me complete my tasks and longer-term goals, so that I didn’t have additional factors clawing for my attention. It’s important to note that if you do allow some distraction back into your life after returning to improved productivity, you do so in a controlled way, never allowing yourself to become dependent on things that aren’t going to close the distance between you and your goals.
5. Improve your mental health
This is to do with the sustainability of your productivity rather than leaving the rut itself. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s easier for distractions to pull you down when you are at a low point, resembling a positive feedback system that spirals you even lower. Improvement to your mental health helps your self-esteem, assures you that you are on the right track when you are working hard. When your self-image is good, you find it easier to reject distractions and laziness, working harder towards fulfilling your purpose because you believe that this is what is best for your life, and that you have what it takes to reach this achievement.
So how do you improve your mental health in the context of improving your productivity? My preferred methods during my own experience were working harder at the gym, and a lot more journaling which allowed me to take my thoughts out of my own head and analyse them better, making more sense of my motivations, some of which were hard for me to recognise at first. Other things that improve your mental health and self-esteem are meditation, reading, spending time away from your normal environment, challenging yourself and spending time with people who are a good influence on your behaviour.
Conclusion
If you are intentional about your actions to escape it, a productivity rut will never last for very long. In the same way the bad habits compound to pull you down, every achievement you make to break this cycle and improve yourself compounds in the other direction — upwards to bigger and better achievements. This reinforces the idea that the hardest part to breaking the cycle is just getting started on improving yourself. Once you are over the hump of initiating your change, everything gets easier the more days of focus and effort that you chain together.
I hope that this article helps you understand a little more about purpose and productivity. If you are experiencing something similar to what I did, I hope that this article makes a difference when it comes to you aligning your life to what you really want to achieve, and helps you focus on doing what needs to be done.
Thank you for reading. Follow for more work on productivity, health and lots of other topics.