Is Productivity often limited to a to- do list?
- Himani Mohta
- Jul 22, 2021
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 12, 2021
( Disclaimer : This article is very subjective and is written purely from a personal perspective)
30 minutes workout…. check , 30 minutes Ukulele practice…. check, 90 minutes Internship work…. check, 15–20 minutes quilling……check, 1 hour Badminton…… check, 45 minutes reading….. check, Blah Blah blah, check check check.
Ticking all these boxes definitely make me feel satisfied at the end of the day because I finish all the tasks I have to get done. Though I don’t feel any sense of accomplishment after each day , I just do the same thing every single day consistently but somehow never really delirious even if I stick to everything I do.
Prior to scheduling time slots for activities, my day used to be in a quandary with no semblance of normalcy. ( But then again, what is normal anyway?) My sleep time used to literally start in the morning and span to the early hours of the afternoon and the remainder of the day used to be spent in ruminating about the future, countless re-runs of The Mindy Project and food binges.
Having a daily planner is definitely a progress and my life is much more orderly but am I really productive?
The times I feel productive is when I actually have been working on something I want to bring to life for a while and its done. Sure, it involves a lot of procrastination but when its done , the thrill and exhilaration is indescribable and it feels worth it.
I felt that with Badminton- a game I always played but was never good at but over the last few months I have been playing in my neighbors garden ( yes, they have a badminton court ) everyday. We normally play in the evenings and for months with every game I try to augment myself in whichever way possible- whether its strokes, running back and forth etc. and somedays I spend more time than I have to (according to my To-do list) just to get my stroke right and today I play 5x times better than I used to.
Another example would be when I started quilling something I liked off of the internet, I’m still not done and I did start a while back. I kept procrastinating until one night I sat down and quilled and quilled that thing down. It was done.

It wasn't that hard, but then again I’m a master Procrastinator
so…..

Period
So what I learn is that putting effort into something for a sustained period of time and seeing it come to life makes me happier than ticking things of my lists.
Another thing that I learnt is that comparing your idea of productivity to another person is absurd as it varies from a persons personality, to geography , financial status , and even professionally it differs.
A singers idea of productivity might entail recording a song or writing his/her song in a day while a doctors might be very disparate. It might be checking a certain number of patients and getting his/her surgeries done. Thus a singer comparing his/her day to a doctor is obviously going to be preposterous, since their professions are at 2 different ends of the spectrum and include different tasks to make it productive. So comparison is not rational.
Now let me address the elephant in the room- Imposter Syndrome! I’m sure this is like a major déjà vu for most of us students or anyone. I face it quite often. No matter how hard we work or even how qualified you are, you always think you are incompetent and you compare yourself to someone.
In my case, I always tend to compare myself to people who are more productive than me, even if what they are doing is completely unrelated or not inclined to my interests.
So I am interested in studying Marketing and I tried to do all the right stuff by doing courses , taking classes on it, reading books and articles and doing an internship but yet I didn’t find it enough.
I feel like I had a lot of free time and feel much less productive than my friend studying in Medical school. She’s always studying for longer hours and is busy doing something productive, every waking hour of hers. After speaking to her I used to wallow in self- pity and doubt and just end up overthinking about my life.

I also had this socially engineered perception that the STEM field and most quantitative fields had more lucrative jobs than what I was planning on taking. That’s when I started to do courses in CS ( coding and stuff) and I kid you not, I hated every minute. I mean sure it is a challenging and inventive craft but I never really looked forward to the next class. It was a drudgery.
Similar to when I took math courses in college. It was intellectually stimulating but I slept through most of it and never really enjoyed the process. And that’s when it hit me that I was channelizing my energy in the wrong direction, and did things I wasn’t happy doing.
So to get to the bottom of this, I stopped comparing myself to my friend because she was studying something completely different and did things not adjunct to my interests.
My level of productivity definitely ameliorated.
Thus, what I garnered is that whenever I set a goal and I work really hard towards and I achieve it, then the feeling is invigorating and it makes me feel really good and I constantly feel like feeling it.
But I do know that a To-do list is important to get things that have been hanging for a while.
Though according to me I think that it is necessary to have a To- do list but it shouldn’t just merely reduce us to it slaves and think that there is nothing more to life than to tick off everyday. Limiting ourselves to it, is like impeding ourselves to grow and explore new avenues for growth.

In conclusion, I’d say that neither comparing your productivity to others nor limiting it to a list will ever help , as I think you feel most productive when you do something you love, work hard towards it and make whatever you envisaged come to life. And incase you don’t know what it is- Just embrace the randomness!
Famous last words ! Hopefully always relevant :)

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