Atomic Activities a.k.a Surviving the Workday

Do you sometimes get the feeling you haven’t accomplished anything in the past hour? I sometimes do.

Disclaimer: I don’t think we need to do more things in a day. If anything, we should do fewer of them. We should be free to live smooth&chill, which is the exact opposite of hustle&grind. We should be free to accomplish enough, live a good life and keep our stress level in check.

Next time you feel you have wasted an hour, count how many little things you actually did. Responded to a Slack/Teams/whatever message? That is one thing. Made a cup of coffee? Boom — that’s another. You’ll be surprised — you did at least 10 things, most of which were necessary at the moment! Seriously, try this out — let me know how it goes (I am curious to find out other people’s thoughts on this).

“Feeling wasteful” comes from context switching. There are many nice and complex way to avoid this — and one very simple and helps me a lot.

Atomic activities

Decide on your next small activity and:

• do it for some preset amount of time
• or, do it as long as it makes sense

Example for option number one: I have decided to write this post for 15 minutes, because this is my break from work.

Example for option number two: If I were not at work, I’d be writing as long as I have inspiration, or until I finish writing.

During writing, I am not responding to any notifications and I am not doing anything else. The world can survive without my attention for the whole 15 minutes!

This is like Pomodoro technique, but more relaxed and granular.

Decisions, decisions…

How do I decide what to do? Each day I choose items that I keep in my mental to-do list (although honestly it would probably be better to write it down — but I like being in my head). There are 2 extremely important things here:

• Work day is SHORT. Whole day is short. And long story short, if you get 5 hours of productive time during work day, you are doing great. 6 hours? You are killing it.
• Do at least one long-term item every day. Reacting to whatever the day brings is not a good long term solution. What are long term items? Scheduling a doctor’s appointment. Exercising. Learning foreign language for 30 minutes. These things pay off in the long run, as long as you stick with them.

Applying atomic activities approach allows me to truly focus and get things done without the overhead of exceedingly complex organisational techniques. Another reason I use it is because atomic activities approach shine in a super dynamic environments when things change twice a day. They create a little time bubble where nothing and (almost) no one interrupts my workflow.

If you like this idea — follow me for more stuff like this, because I whole-heartedly appreciate every single person who joins my network.

As a matter of fact, I wrote&published this post mostly due to the motivation I got by getting my 4th follower (yay!).