How to be Productive as a Teenager
In this day and age, distractions are everywhere. Whether it’s social media, texts, random notifications, or any other interruptions, it feels like it’s getting harder and harder to be productive every day.
With constant distractions and mindless entertainment at our fingertips, it often feels impossible to study for school or complete other important tasks.
Although it may seem like a difficult problem to fix, there are many methods you can use to become productive and get important tasks done. In this post, I’ll be going over ways to stop procrastinating and be more productive as a teenager.
Goal Setting
Setting goals – both big and small – is a crucial part of productivity. I’ve found to-do lists and long-term goal setting to be the two most effective productivity tools.
At the beginning of the day, create a to-do list with anything you know you need to do that day. Throughout the day, add any new items to your list, and cross tasks off as you complete them.
I find this an extremely effective method for organizing my thoughts so that I know exactly what I need to do and don’t forget any important tasks.
Methods
Some people prefer handwritten lists, but personally, I find digital lists to be far more effective. I use a website called Habitica to manage my to-do lists and build long-term habits.
“Habitica is a video game to help you improve real life habits. It “gamifies” your life by turning all your tasks (Habits, Dailies, and To Do’s) into little monsters you have to conquer. The better you are at this, the more you progress in the game. If you slip up in life, your character starts backsliding in the game” – Habitica.
Essentially, when you are productive in real life, you are rewarded with XP, and items in-game. Although it may sound like a silly concept, it has a great interface, allowing you to easily create and manage daily tasks, to-do lists and build long-term habits.
Positive Reinforcement
Habitica also provides an easy way to take advantage of positive reinforcement:
“Positive reinforcement refers to the introduction of a desirable or pleasant stimulus after a behavior. The desirable stimulus reinforces the behavior, making it more likely that the behavior will reoccur” – Positive Psychology
When you complete a task and check it off on Habitica, you’ll immediately be rewarded with XP or items. This, in turn, makes you happy and incentivizes you to complete more tasks!
To learn more about Habitica, click here.
Long term goals
When your creating long-term goals, there a few things to keep in mind.
It’s crucial that the goals you set are clear and specific. Instead of the goal “Get better grades,” try and have a specific goal and a timeframe to complete it. For example, a better goal might be, “Increase my GPA by 0.5 this year.”
Another important factor to help you set the best goals possible is making sure they are achievable. Rather than setting a goal like “Run 10 miles every day,” realistically assess your capabilities and set a reasonable goal accordingly.
Even though your goals should be achievable, that doesn’t mean they should be trivial. Instead of setting a relatively unimportant goal like “make my bed,” your goal should be difficult enough that you have to push yourself out of your comfort zone. For example, you could switch the goal to “Clean my room every day.”
Eliminating distractions
Eliminating distractions is a critical part of productivity. Without distractions getting in your way, you can focus all your attention on the task at hand.
Clean workspace
Having a clean and organized workspace is critical to staying focused.
“Keeping your work area neat and orderly matters a lot: studies have reaffirmed the fact that if your place of work is cluttered, information-processing becomes difficult, let alone focusing on priorities, tasks, and projects” – Momentum.
Taking the time to clean your workspace will be very worthwhile because it will help you maintain a clear head and pay exclusive attention to the task at hand.
Quit any other applications
The first thing to do if you’re working on a computer is to close any other applications. With no other applications open besides the one you’re working in, you won’t be able to just switch tasks at the click of a mouse.
Close all tabs
You should also close any other tabs if you’re doing work in a browser. This will prevent you from switching tasks because you will have to look something up instead of just clicking a button deliberately. This puts yet another barrier between you and distractions.
Turn off your phone
Another way to reduce any distractions so you can stay hyper-focused is by powering off your phone. Most teenagers are constantly receiving notifications, not to mention the distracting pull of social media and the numerous apps on your phone. If you power off your phone, that puts just one more barrier between you and getting sidetracked.
Future thinking
Thinking about the future–more specifically, how your actions affect your future, will help you persevere even when you’re not motivated. Particularly as teenagers, we often have to do things we don’t necessarily want to in order to achieve larger goals.
For example, many students don’t feel motivated to do math homework just to receive a good grade in a class they don’t care about. But although it’s easy to look at a situation like this, the truth is that getting a good grade in this class may help you archive a larger goal.
Putting effort into a math class and getting a good grade will boost your GPA, potentially helping you to get into a good college and ultimately allowing you to have a job that you really enjoy.
Work in “time chunks”
Another strategy to help make an overwhelming task less intimidating is working in “time chunks”. The basic idea is that you can break a daunting task up into “time chunks” where you complete as much of the task as possible in a set period of time without feeling obligated to finish the whole task.
For example, if you need to write an essay that you know is going to take approximately 4 hours, break your work into four one-hour periods. Then, sit down, do 1 hour of work, and stop to take a break. Then, when your ready to get back to work, complete another hour of work. Keep doing this until your done with your task.
Breaking up large tasks like this will make doing them much more manageable.
Don’t over commit
Sometimes, it can be easy to get overwhelmed between school, homework, sports, clubs, and other extracurriculars. To be productive, you have to be realistic and not over-commit yourself. If you feel like you just have too much to do and not enough time to do it, consider dropping the activities that are least important to you.
This will give you more time to focus on what’s actually important to you.
Stop procrastinating
Procrastination is another problem most teenagers face.
Procrastination is:
“Trouble persuading yourself to do the things you should do or would like to do. When you procrastinate, instead of working on important, meaningful tasks, you find yourself performing trivial activities” – procrastination.com.
Instead of strategically completing tasks, procrastination causes tasks to pile up right before their deadlines. This creates unnecessary stress and often results in low-quality work.
Just about everyone procrastinates every once in a while, but chronic procrastination can be a big problem that can get in the way of your life.
“You can learn as much as you want about self-discipline, motivation, planning and time management, but unless you make what you learn part of your daily routine, your habits, your thinking patterns and your mental models, it will be only useless information stored in your memory without ever helping you” – procrastination.com.
To combat procrastination, having a clear plan is necessary. When you receive an assignment or task, immediately write it down on your to-do list to ensure you don’t forget it.
Then, come up with a plan for how you’re going to get it done. Decide on specific times to start tackling each task, and you can even motivate yourself with a reward, which I’ll talk more about later.
Just start!
Often, the hardest part of completing a task is starting. We often convince ourselves that a task is harder than it actually is, which makes us procrastinate even longer. But once we actually start working on it, the task suddenly seems much less daunting.
If there’s a particular task you don’t want to do, you can start by completing other, more manageable tasks to get the ball rolling. I find that once I’ve started working on other tasks, it becomes a lot easier to tackle the tasks I was previously dreading.
Keeping these skills and strategies in mind should help you mitigate the effects of procrastination on your life.
Reward yourself
Rewarding yourself after you do well on a test, get a good grade on an assignment, etc., can be an effective way to reinforce good habits.
Think of something you enjoy. It could be eating food, playing a video game, watching a show, etc. To reinforce your good behaviors, you can reward yourself by giving yourself something you enjoy. This will help you stay motivated because now you’ll have a clear reward to work towards.
The takeaways:
Learning how to manage procrastination, lack of motivation, and minimize distractions will maximize your productivity. Although it isn’t easy, build good habits that promote productivity is well worth the effort.
These are the steps you should follow to live a more productive life as a teenager:
- Set Goals and create to-do lists
- Eliminate all distractions
- Think about your future to stay motivated
- Work in “time chunks” to effectively make daunting tasks more manageable
- Don’t over commit and prioritize things that are important to you
- Stop procrastinating
- Reward yourself to reinforce positive behavior
