How to be productive after work: Easy method

Getting things done in your own life and reaching goals is something everyone strives for. And if you're like me, you have lots of things you want to get done. Some of them are personal projects, they could be fitness goals, or virtually anything else. Many times each goal or project is a multi-step endeavor - not something you can do on a Saturday afternoon. Accomplishing meaningful things that are rewarding require persistence over time.

Big goals can often feel overwhelming, but the key to achieving them lies in breaking them down into small, manageable steps. Each task you complete—no matter how minor it may seem—builds momentum and brings you closer to completion. Incremental actions create a sense of progress, help maintain motivation, and reduce the paralysis that can come from trying to tackle everything at once. Just like laying one brick at a time eventually builds a house, consistently completing small tasks is what turns ambitious visions into real, tangible accomplishments.

Working a full time job drastically cuts down on the time you can dedicate to personal productivity. Many people work their job all day, they are tired afterward, and just want to sit on the couch and do nothing until it's time for bed. Let's say you get off work at 5:00, and you go to bed at 11pm. That's six hours that you could do something. Sure, you have to eat dinner, but that sure won't take the whole six hours.

You may not have the energy to work on your personal project for six hours after work, and you shouldn't feel like you have to. You can take thirty minutes to an hour and a half and put it towards your project. I've found this to work extremely well, and I've been able to get lots of stuff done in just a few short minutes after work.

The goal here is to tackle a small task that you can complete in thirty minutes to an hour and a half. Try doing this and after work and see how easy it is. You might even start looking forward to it. You don't even have to do it every day - you could do it 3 out of 5 work days. The point is to do something consistently in furtherance of your goal and let that effort stack up over time. You will be astounded at how much you've been able to accomplish in six weeks. 

I have a rather interesting example of this working - I'm building a motorcycle. It's actually more of a mini bike that's designed for off road use. It's like an ATV cut in half if that analogy makes sense. I'm building it completely from scratch - I have a tube bender, welder, notcher, and grinders. It's a really ambitious project, and almost nobody builds motorcycles completely from scratch. I have to design and build the frame, suspension, hubs - everything.

I have found that doing something small after work like bending a couple of frame rails, cutting and notching a single tube, or welding two tube together is a great way to get a huge amount of work done. Even if I had the whole day, I often don't feel like working on one thing after another for a full work day. I like to do a certain task for the day, and then begin on another small task the next day.

My strategy of doing a small thing here and a small thing here helps prevent burnout and keeps me from dreading the work I'm going to do after work.

By doing a small task after work, you can make measurable progress. It doesn't matter so much how fast your progress is - what's important is that you are making progress. The velocity of stuff you're getting done doesn't have to be high - it just has to me moving. Contrast this approach with thinking everyday about accomplishing this huge goal that seems really daunting and hard to start. You don't really know where to start so you don't start, and you spend time thinking about how to start instead of starting.

If you have ever worked on a team at your job and had a project - management wants to see progress. They often don't care as much about the pace of progress - they can hire more people, change working agreements, etc. They have a whole host of things they can do to increase velocity on a project, but that velocity has to exist. The team has to be getting things done. Once something is done, they can measure it - how long it took, the effort involved, how many people worked on it, etc. But if the teams doesn't seem to be making headway, and they can't see that things are getting done, then you have a problem.

The main takeaway from this blog post is that you must make time after work to do something in furtherance of your goal or project. However small it might be, it's helping. The next day, do another small item before you eat dinner. Keep doing that and you will be happy with the results.