Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/Productivity and routines

Productivity and routines:
How can establishing routines improve productivity?

Overview

Figure 1. gaining control of your time 2020. COVID is running rapid in society. Anxious to leave the house you are forced to work from home. All this stress is making it difficult to stay on top of daily tasks, you procrastinate. Productivity levels are diminishing, and you feel as though daily tasks are more of a chore than a necessity. You confide in a friend in which they suggest an easy way to break things down to feel less overwhelmed in an overwhelming world. A well-established routine; to do lists, daily reminders, increasing productivity (see figure 1

Productivity

Productivity is the state of quality of being productive (producing, or able to produce large amount of goods or commodities). It is measured based on the effectiveness of productive effort, usually in terms of the rate of output per unit of input, typically over a specific period of time.

Often productivity is inhibited when individuals fall in to the tendency to procrastinate. From an academic perspective, many students are highly vulnerable to negative consequences of poor performance that coincide with procrastination. Decreased subjective wellbeing, negative affect and reduced life achievements are common implications associated with procrastination towards academic performance. Anxiety, fear of failure, negative perceptions, lack of motivation, low efficacy, and poor organisational skills can contribute to the increase in procrastination in students.

By establishing and maintaining a routine, it decreases the likelihood of procrastination when faced with a plethora of tasks. It acts as a self driven reward system where every task that is completed increases the intrinsic motivation to go on and complete the next. the feeling of accomplishment after completion of a task can be enough to increase motivation substantially.

Focus questions: What are the potential downsides of rigid routines, and how can one adapt them to avoid burnout or monotony? How can routines help in reducing decision fatigue, and why is this important for maintaining high productivity? What are some common challenges people face when trying to establish productive routines, and how can they overcome them?

Key points

Psychological Theories

Psychological theories are essential for explaining certain phenomena as they provide a structured framework for understanding the underlying mechanisms and principles that drive human behaviour, enabling us to predict, influence, and optimise outcomes in various contexts.

Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue refers to the depletion of energy required to make decisions on a daily basis. Regarding decision fatigue and the impact it has on productivity can be explained as routines minimising the number of decisions that need to be made each day, limiting mental energy expenditure, saving energy for more important decision making processes which can in turn improve productivity.

Self Determination Theory

Self determination theory focuses on intrinsic motivation, an individuals drive to improve personal performance or increase productivity for personal gain or reward. Using SDT, an understanding around establishing a routine and the intrinsic motivation to maintain that routine can be explored.

Cognitive Load Theory

Cognitive Load theory suggests that human's working memory has a limited capacity, the basic idea is to reduce such external load in order to make available more capacity for actual learning so that better learning and transfer performance is achieved.

Hierarchy of Needs

Abram Maslow's hierarchy of needs attempts to break down motivation and base it on a hierarchy of basic human needs.

1 Establishing and maintaining a routine can help reduce procrastination by creating a self-driven reward system that increases intrinsic motivation after completing tasks:

	True
	False

2 Self-Determination Theory suggests that external rewards and pressures are the primary drivers of maintaining routines and increasing productivity:

	True
	False

See also

• Intrinsic Motivation (Wikiversity)
• Procrastination (Wikiversity)
• Productivity (Wikipedia)

References

Bannert, M. (2002). Managing cognitive load—recent trends in cognitive load theory. Learning and Instruction, 12(1), 139–146. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0959-4752(01)00021-4

Hooda, Madhuri;Devi, Rani. (2014). Procrastination: A serious problem prevalent among adolescents. ZENITH International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, 7(9), 107–113. https://www.indianjournals.com/ijor.aspx?target=ijor:zijmr&volume=7&issue=9&article=011

Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0054346

Pignatiello, G. A., Martin, R. J., & Hickman, R. L. (2018). Decision fatigue: A conceptual analysis. Journal of Health Psychology, 25(1), 123–135. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359105318763510.

Szulawski, M., Kaźmierczak, I., & Prusik, M. (2021). Is self-determination good for your effectiveness? A study of factors which influence performance within self-determination theory. PLOS ONE, 16(9). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0256558

Yasmin, N., Taslim, M., Ishak, N., & Abdullah, A. (2018). The Relationship between Needs Accomplishment and Motivation. Journal of Administrative Science, 15, 91–98. https://ir.uitm.edu.my/id/eprint/42551/1/42551.pdf

External links

The most productive people follow routines, here's why. (Leaders.com)

How routines can make you more productive (Neuroscienceschool.com)