I am someone who procrastinates a lot, and It has become an obstacle to me, I have seen people who have such a productive life and I always wonder how they are able to bypass procrastination and become productive, sometimes I wonder if I am missing anything that these people have.
YouTube has been one of the platforms where people can show their lives to anyone willing to watch, you find a lot of vlogs, and a lot of tips. Since I am a fan of YouTube, I watched a lot of productivity vlogs, just to learn from them and also overcome procrastination.
I would watch “a productive day in my life”, “a productive week in my life” etc, we are all familiar with vlogs like that. In all of this, I found out that they always have a morning and night routine to follow every day.
Most of their morning routine goes thus; wake up by 4 am, 5 am, or whatever time chosen by the YouTuber, set their beds, do skin care, go to the gym or exercise, make breakfast, shower, etc.
Every single time I tried to follow their routine, I woke up at a certain time mostly 6:00 am, after waking up, I did my Bible reading(since I am Christian), did some exercise, and continued with the rest of my routine, planned accordingly to a certain time. This didn’t help me at all, because soon I’d fall back to the usual me (the unproductive me).
After a week of struggling and stressing myself to keep up with these routines, when I miss doing some exercise in the morning maybe for two days, it is almost like I missed it all, I hated the feeling; like I have broken the rules, the protocol to be productive and to have a better life.
I wanted to stick to it, to stick to the planned routine, regardless of my mental health. I stressed myself beyond compare just to fit into the autopilot life, but I couldn’t, it was almost like fate didn’t want me there. But I wasn’t aware enough to quit, when I broke the routine, I beat myself about it and tried again but I only kept running in circles.
Recently, I have noticed that the autopilot lifestyle doesn’t work for me, it only stresses me out. We are humans, unseen circumstances can occur, life doesn’t just go on smoothly as one predicts, life doesn’t go on a repeated cycle, things happen, and one needs to be flexible enough to flow along and not so rigid as a life of an autopilot.
Spontaneity is my lifestyle and I have come to love and understand it. Ever since I have started to live my life spontaneously, I have seen changes, most especially in my mental health, it often feels like I am free from some chains and boundaries. This has surprisingly led me to productivity more than when I used to live in the autopilot lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a routine but it is not so rigid but flexible enough for me to bend whenever life throws unseen circumstances at me. What I do now is; write everything I know I need to do in a day, it doesn’t have to follow a pattern but it has to be done.
Allow me to give an example; I stayed up late at night to complete a project, and I slept around 2-3 am if I was living an autopilot lifestyle that tells me to wake up by 6 am every day, when my alarm goes off, regardless of how my head is pounding due to the last night’s stress, I would still to get by 6 am neglecting my mental health. But with my spontaneous lifestyle, I set my alarm to 7-8 am knowing fully when that I had spent my night working.
Now, I don’t have to do everything in order, I have everything I need on my list but it is not in a rigid order. if I feel like I am too stressed to work out in the morning, I do it in the evening. If I wake up in the morning and immediately I feel like cleaning, I do it and check it out on my list.
I act according to how I am feeling, we are humans, if anything catches my interest, I would love to try it before the motivation and zeal fade. I am not controlled by what is being laid down, I’m rather controlled by my feelings and mental state with what I am trying to achieve.
Now I understand that auto-piloting is not a way for me to be productive or even happy. It just stresses me out and makes me feel like I am not doing it the right way.
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