Productivity With a Short Attention Span

Despite what gets said, we millennials do not have shorter attention spans than the generations before us . Or at least, we don’t all have shorter attention spans. Me? I do. I am not a person who can sit down to a task and work as it for even an hour straight. So over the years I’ve figured out the little tricks that keep me able to be quite productive despite lacking the ability to focus on a single task for a long time. And because I figure that I’m not alone in this, I thought I’d share them here.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash

Tiny to-do lists

The first (and perhaps most important) thing that I do is write out to-do lists with my tasks broken down into seemingly unreasonably small steps. An example from a recent cosplay project of mine: the task was “create the two-tone wig” but on my to-do list it was:

• Cut up the two wigs
• Sew the halves together
• Trim to right length
• Style the wig
• Bedazzle the shit out of it.

I get a great deal of pleasure out of ticking items off my to-do list, and breaking everything into smaller steps means I gets that burst of satisfaction regularly, and the task itself seems a lot less daunting. After all, I've already put the thought into it and know what I need to do, so now it just needs to be done…