Have fun to be productive

Lately I've been waking up at around 9 or 10 in the morning, ready to eat something, drink my coffee and then work. Sadly, that doesn't always happen. I have days when I can spend most of my time creating and taking care of projects that need to be finished, but I also have days when I spent hours thinking about what to do.

One of the reasons I am not always really productive is that I often spend my time thinking how I can finish everything fast enough so I have enough time at the end of the day to relax. Since I love playing video games, and that takes a lot of time, I want to make sure I find the perfect balance between work and relaxing.

But how can you find such balance when your work requires you to be creative, and you don't always have inspiration? I mean, it's easy to write and to come up with ideas for your articles, but after a while you feel like you need to work on something different because you start to repeat yourself. So how can you make sure you're always motivated to work but also have enough time to relax as much as you need?

Well, the way I do it is pretty simple. I love to write and I love to work. The only times I feel like not doing anything productive is when I don't have enough inspiration and I don't feel like I'm capable of creating something decent. When that happens I can spend hours searching for something to give me an idea so I can finally start working.

One way I found to not waste my time searching for inspiration is to work on something completely different, or even relax. If I don't have an idea for an article and that's the only thing left to do for today, instead of spending 2 or 3 hours trying to get an idea, I'll just play some video games or watch a movie.

In that time there's no way I don't see or hear something that will give me enough inspiration to write. This way I also relax and do what I like while exposing myself to enough content to maybe get an idea.

This is one of the main ways I solved problems when I was young, especially related to homework. Whenever I had to do something that required me to think, and whenever I couldn't find the answer, I just spent a few minutes looking at the problem, thinking about it and then started playing some games.

While I was playing I was focusing all my conscious attention on what I was doing, this way letting my subconscious take care of solving the problem. A few hours of racing or killing monsters on a screen was enough for me to have an "AHA!" moment and come up with a solution for whatever I was doing.

I'm still using this strategy and it works surprisingly well. Of course that doesn't mean you should play games whenever you need an idea. What I mean is that you can do something you like while letting your brain take care of solving certain problems.

If you're trying to find a topic to approach today in your article and you can't come up with anything decent, go out for a walk, watch a movie or a TV show and see if you get any idea after that. However, you should be aware that wasting all your time and never coming back to work isn't what's gonna help you finish your tasks.

This method is only meant to relax you and this way let you focus on your task. If you're just looking to waste your time and not be productive at all, then it's not gonna work. The best way to control how much time you focus on relaxing is to put a limit to it. If you're playing games hoping to get an idea for an article, don't do it for more than an hour. Let your brain and body relax, consume enough content inside that game and after an hour see if you can come up with anything.

Relaxing for 8 hours a day and saying you don't have enough inspiration to be productive as an excuse to not do anything won't get you far. You'll just waste your time. But knowing how to find a balance between relaxing and working and knowing how to give your brain enough content to help him find solutions to your problems, that can be a way to improve productivity.