Why do you have unfinished tasks at the end of the day?

What you need to know and what you can do to supercharge yourself

Every day, you wake up only to find a flurry of activities waiting for you to be completed. And remember, just to remind you incase you had forgotten, that yesterday, you didn't finish your work for no genuine reason yet you were at the workplace. In fact, I bet most of you have a load of work that you are planning to do, but you will not do. Why? I know you have not yet even figured out why you are stucked everyday's tasks because it also involves work to do so.

The only thing that you will succeed in doing is procrastination (but please don't postpone reading this article). You will defer tasks that you were supposed to do in the morning and convince yourself that you will accomplish them in the afternoon. However, afternoon will still pass, yet you haven't even started an inch of your work. Why? again, I know you can't explain. Obviously, this is an unendless cycle that you will find yourself trying to catch up with deadlines that you end up with unfinished work or shoddy work.

But, don't worry, you are not alone. I also sometimes postpone my tasks for no good reasons. Nonetheless, this does not grant you a bullet to judge me harshly. I am not a robot, please!

However, now that you and I have same problem, can we diagnose and identify what could be the problem of our unproductivity?

After extensive research and self-reflection, I realized that our major problem has not been time management, but mind management. While time management is concerned with working as per your deadlines, mind management involves optimizing you energy flow and aligning with your work.

Mind is the engine of our daily activities and its activeness or passivity is dependent on how we flow with its altering states.

While reading David Kadavy's book "Mind Management, not Time Management, " I gleaned some important must-understand mental states that you can implement both in your personal and professional life.

Generate, prioritize, research, explore, administrate, polish, and recover mental states.

In generative mental state, you are required to do work such as designing excel, doing financial calculations, or undertaking any specific task depending on the nature of your work. Explore mental state does not demand focus as it only involves brainstorming different ways of doing things. You are not aligned to any specific idea, but you are just looking for broad issues.

Similarly, in research mental states, you want to look for particular answers to specific questions. In line with this, you can analyse reports, determine facts and figures, or Google data.

Prioritize mental state assists you to organise and plan what you need to do today or tomorrow. This state of mind helps you to review your goals or revise your calendar depending on the nature of your work or interruptions you encountered during the day.

In polish state, you are revising your work to check what mistakes you committed or just to find out if everything is okay and adjust accordingly.

Lastly, rest mental state is a time to recharge yourself after you have accomplished your day's tasks. You can do something that is less strenuous and you are passionate about it.

However, to deeply ingrained these mental states into your habits, self-assess yourself and determine your day's activities. By aligning each part of your work with your respective mental states, you will remain productive throughout the day.