The Pentagon of Productivity

I have always felt like I was a productive person. I get up in the morning, and I have things to do, and I do them sometimes. Other days, I lie awake at 3 am and think about all the things that I haven’t done, all the things that I don’t think I will do, and somewhere in the middle, I wonder if I will really, truly make it through this month. Sound familiar? Congratulations, you are also a proud member of the crazy overachiever club!

Then this overachiever was asked to do Project 04 for the Amal Fellowship, and in that, I was asked to do something as easy as declutter my brain, which sounds exciting, right? Well, it isn’t as it seems. I was expected to write all my concerns, all the reminders, all the half-thought-out ideas, all the existential fear I don’t even want to acknowledge on a blank page. They called it Brain Dumping to sound less scary, just to let them know it didn’t help much.

I sat down with the template, and in the first 10 minutes, I was really passionate and professional. I wrote my thoughts as if I were writing an exam paper: “Need to complete journals. Need to finish project 04”. Extremely tidy and very organised. Then I felt frustrated and asked myself whether I am this calm in my brain? And then hell broke.

“Why am I awake at 3 a.m.? Will I die? What if Miss Sadia decides to take a viva? I have to spend Eid at home again because of exams. I really need an internship. Will I ever get an internship? What if I never get an internship? I hope my body doesn’t give up before me (it’s giving up).”

Then I take a deep breath and re-read, and only then does it seem like me. Unhinged.

That was Brain dumping in action. It’s not a to-do list. It’s a confession page for your mind, and after you stop filtering, you see all that mental baggage you’ve been carrying along with you, while giving your Oscar-winning acting of being completely fine.

Once the brain dumping was done, the sorting began. The template included the Eisenhower Matrix, which consisted of four boxes: Do Now, Schedule, Delegate, and Delete. The thought of sorting gave me a headache alone, but I continued.

When my brain dumping started sorting a hard reality hit me that all the mess that I had been carrying wasn’t equally important, and I had been taking everything too seriously. Collecting pharma material before my exam? Urgent. Worrying around and around whether I would have an internship? Also treated as urgent, at least by my anxious brain at 3 a.m.

I have never done such a therapeutic exercise in my life as the Delete quadrant. Will I die? Delete. Is everything getting so expensive? True, but deleted. Sir Kashif should have been serious while teaching, too! Delete (I stand by it).

The matrix just made me decide, that’s all. No pondering, no procrastination, no letting things linger in between, just allowed me to decide.

Then I was blessed with a magic wand, which is pouring my mess into a box. And it made it clear what I am even supposed to do, obviously, instead of panicking. Before making a to-do list, my tasks and my fears had all been in one big common room of my brain that I wasn’t paying attention to, at times jumping out and getting my attention at the very wrong times. Each of them was assigned their personal room by the end of the to-do list.

When the to-do list section was completed and statuses and estimated times were added, it felt like the tasks were real and manageable. “Need to prepare notes for pharma in 2 days by May 15. That is a plan. It is not a constant worry above my head: It is a job with a due date and a strategy.

The Scheduling part really took me to the limit. It seemed like a large commitment to myself to choose two highlights of the day and stick them on a calendar with a start and end time. And I realised that this wasn’t something that I often did. I do make lists, but quite rarely. It’s no wonder they are not being finished.

I selected Prepare my pharma Notes as my first highlighted task, set my timer for 25 minutes and started. I was twenty-two minutes in, and I was reading about pharmacokinetics, and I was really happy at what I learned; I would have been using the phone or panicking otherwise.

The Pomodoro Technique didn’t magically change everything for me; that will be a lie. I’ll say that I did take a couple of quick breaks that weren’t actually 15 minutes. The technique did help, though. It was not as intimidating to start because I knew it would only be 25 minutes. The hardest part of anything is always getting started, and when the timer was ticking, I wasn’t going to turn back.

The rewards were a help too. I told myself that I would have a good meal and a chocolate shake after finishing up my pharma notes. Minor bribery? Absolutely Effective.

Will I do that again? I’m not sure at first. I’m a person who doesn’t like systems because I think that I work better in chaos. This exercise did shake my belief a little bit.

I’m going to do the brain dumping regularly, not every week, but definitely when I feel a similar sense of overload, the one that says there is too much and I do not know where to start. I now know that I need to start writing on paper, and not overthink

I also would like to improve my skills in using the Delete quadrant in real time, not on a template. This means identifying the moment when a thought is a task as compared to when it is just anxiety pretending to be productivity.

If I’m being honest, the best thing I learned from this whole project was not about time management. It was all about honesty. The brain dumping is successful because it makes you confront what’s really occupying your brain. When it’s completely written on paper, looking back at you, you see that 50% of it is not worth paying the rent you’ve been asking.

Don’t believe me? Try Yourself!