How to Use Your Time after Getting off Work to Improve Your Abilities in a Planned Way?
But if you want to improve your capabilities and maximize the value you create, these practices are far from enough. You must use your time off work and do things differently from your fixed habits to improve your abilities and obtain valuable returns.
What Do You Want to Learn?
Many people get headaches when they think about studying. The reason is that they don’t know what to learn and how to learn. I want to learn management skills, improve my eloquence, and even master English conversation to cope with challenges I may encounter in the future. Want to learn everything, but don’t know how to learn it? In the end, you can’t learn anything. This is what troubles most people. So before you start taking action, you must think clearly about which areas you most urgently want to improve. Then structure your study schedule with this in mind. Generally speaking, our learning goals are often built around two points:
Issues to be resolved
- In life or work, what problems have become “stumbling blocks” to your development? To make ourselves better, we must master the skills to solve these problems. For example, if you are in sales but don’t know how to communicate well with customers, then improving your communication skills is the most urgent thing you need to do at the moment. Or maybe you feel that you are useless now, so starting from the areas in which you are good and cultivating your abilities is the problem you have to solve.
What you long to become
- Sometimes our work and life don’t have big problems, and we can just muddle along, but such days always lack a little meaning. To make our lives more fulfilling, we have to find the way we want to live. For example, when I was studying, I was a good writer. However, after working in society, this skill was almost abandoned. When I was thinking about how to continue to bring out the value of this skill, I found many platforms where I could publish articles, so I used my time after getting off work to write and build corresponding action arrangements. So think about it, what do you want yourself to be, and what are your desires for it? With these two points as a guide, you can further develop your action plan.
Develop an Action Plan
The so-called “making an action plan” does not mean that you think of what you want to do and then just do it every day. A real action plan must be “specific”, “step-by-step”, “with indicators” and “quantifiable”, and must not be perfunctory. Psychological research shows that the brain’s triggering mechanism for procrastination is often due to unclear goals and no action guidance to follow.
For example, “Let you write a hundred words at will” and “Let you copy a hundred words at will”. These two goals have different cognitive levels for the brain. The former is left to the brain to feel and is more difficult to execute than the latter. Because we don’t have specific instructions on what to write, it’s difficult to take action. But for the goal of “copying a hundred words at will”, we can just pick up a book and copy a hundred words.
Therefore, formulating a plan with instructive and clear action steps can reduce the pressure on our brains, allowing us to get started and get things done faster. Based on this, the plan we formulate should preferably include the following three factors:
First, list your goals specifically and in detail.
- This method is to dismantle the goal. Many articles have already mentioned it, so I won’t go into details. To put it simply, when we set goals, we must not just write big and unreasonable statements such as “I want to read a book today” or “I want to do exercise today”. We must keep in mind the books we read, how many pages we read, and how long we read them. Just write it out. The reason for this is not to let you follow the plan rigidly without caring about anything but to have a clear purpose in your daily actions. As long as your actions have a clear purpose, what you do will be “rule-based” and will strengthen your willingness to act.
- For example, I have to write every day, that’s my goal. But I have a clear plan for what article I want to write today, when I can arrange to write it, and how long I need to sleep while writing. In this way, when I get home from work, I can check my schedule and get into the mood quickly while sitting in front of the computer.
Second, arrange the actions to achieve your goals.
- There can be different ways to achieve a goal. Only by choosing the appropriate way to act based on your current situation will you make better use of your time. When I write articles, I usually use a desktop computer when I’m at home because the screen is relatively large; if I’m out on a business trip, I usually use a surface to write.
- Similarly, when I’m at home, I usually read paper books, but when I’m on a business trip and staying in a hotel, I take my Kindle with me to read. But the books they read are not necessarily the same. Books read at home will be more systematic and formal, while books read on Kindle outside will be easier to understand and read.
- So if you want to improve your English, some of the time you can read aloud to practice speaking, and some of the time you can just study grammar, these considerations are part of your plan. You don’t have to be limited to one way to achieve your goals. Appropriate changes in the way of action based on the objective situation will allow us to better arrange our time. But again, no matter what you do, you must have a specific and detailed plan, don’t just think about it.
Third, arrange tasks according to their importance.
- There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and we only have so much time to use, so it is very necessary to allocate which things to do at which time. After all, if you want to do everything, you may end up accomplishing nothing. Deciding what to do every day based on the degree of importance is a compromise.
- For example, sometimes when I get busy, it’s difficult for me to write articles and read and study at the same time, let alone watch a movie and relax. In this case, I can only sacrifice reading books and watching movies. After all, writing is more important to me. In other words, in a week, the number of days I write maybe five, and the number of days I read may only be four. The time for the two to overlap and work together may only be two days.
- By arranging it this way, I can deal with writing first, and then complete the task of reading, instead of doing everything together and trying to finish everything quickly. After all, “you can’t eat hot tofu in a hurry”. Properly weighing the importance of tasks can allow us to continue to “move forward in an orderly manner.”
These three points are very important factors in formulating an action plan. The lack of these factors does not mean that you cannot take action, but you may need to spend a lot of energy to push yourself to take the first step before taking action. But if your action plan includes these factors, it will be easier for you to take the first step. Of course, no matter what, people will often procrastinate habitually. To alleviate our procrastination, we must take some measures to deal with it.
Minimize Your “Procrastination”
Have you ever tried to do something but your mind is somewhere else and it’s hard to focus on it? Occasionally stop because of difficulties, and never want to return to the current task. Would you rather do trivial things to pass the time? The more difficult the task, the easier it is for us to procrastinate; the less positive feedback the task provides, the more eager we are to avoid doing it.
After all, we need to spend more “psychological energy” to maintain operations than playing games, watching TV, or browsing the web to complete the things at hand. Therefore, to alleviate our procrastination and better allocate our limited “mental capacity”, we must take some beneficial measures to let the brain win this procrastination war.
The following six points are used as “small measures” to combat procrastination. As long as you apply them consciously when taking action, your “symptoms” will be alleviated.
Add some fun to boring tasks.
- Doing exercise is a very monotonous thing for many people. But if you know how to do it more interestingly, your persistence will become easier.
- For example, you can listen to music with headphones while running, learn English, or go to the gym and exercise on a treadmill if possible. Of course, those who have money can buy a treadmill at home and exercise while watching TV, which will be more fun.
Adjust your emotions to face the task.
- Have you ever tried to resist or have a negative attitude when someone asked you to do something you didn’t want to do? When we do things with such an attitude, the limbic system is naturally able to overcome the prefrontal cortex. After all, at this time, you are falling into negative emotions, which affects your rationality in decision-making.
- So, when you realize that something you want to do makes you have bad emotions, you have to find out the reasons behind it and ask yourself three questions: Why does this thing make me have these emotions? Will doing this have any real impact on me? Can I put these emotions aside for a moment?
- If completing this matter does not have any bad impact on you, then you should adjust your mentality and adopt a more positive attitude towards it. As American psychologist William James said: How you view things determines the emotions you will have. Sometimes changing your view on things will naturally change your mood.
Try to stay away from temptations around you.
- When you are doing something and your attention is easily distracted, you have to think about what is tempting you. Sometimes when I am writing an article, I pick up my phone to check Moments and watch videos, which takes more than half an hour. At this time, if I want to continue to be involved in the task, my brain will be more resistant.
- So later I decided that when writing articles or reading books, I would isolate myself from anything that could tempt me. I will not care about any messages, inquiries, or questions from readers. After I finished writing the article, I responded to them one by one. Otherwise, if you don’t know how to control these temptations, you won’t be able to accomplish anything.
Set clear action goals.
- Clear goals play a very important role in guiding our actions. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can turn your “macro goals” into “micro goals.”
- For example, “reading books is a good habit to improve yourself”. Everyone knows what it means, but it is difficult for people to start taking action. At this time, you need to transform this “macro goal” into a more specific “micro goal.” You can think about, “self-improvement”, where should you start?
- According to your own needs, formulate some specific book lists to read, such as whether it is to improve your eloquence skills or update your cognitive thinking. With such a clear direction, you can then look for relevant books and start learning knowledge.
Give things some positive meaning.
- We can get exercise from anything, as long as it is not a natural disaster or a violation of law or discipline. It’s like your parents ask you to help buy groceries. If you think you can’t cook at all, why do you do these things? Then the more I thought about it, the more unhappy I became.
- But when you actually try to do these things, your understanding of this field will be updated. You will know how much a pound of cabbage costs, when the price of pork will increase, where the fruits are more delicious, etc. This knowledge will increase your life skills.
- Entering a new field requires you to go through a period of discomfort. As long as you can persist through it, your thinking and cognition will immediately become broader. This is one of the things that makes you more mature and powerful. Learn to find some positive meanings in what you do, and your actions will have corresponding “reasons”.
Create some incentives for yourself to take action.
- There are intrinsic and extrinsic rewards for accomplishing something. The former is to accumulate a sense of success and self-identity in doing things, while the latter may receive praise or material rewards from the boss.
- Not everything pays off like this. But if you can take the initiative to make some motivation plans for yourself, such as completing a small goal, you can play a few games; or after a day’s work, invite friends to watch a movie, or even give yourself a short vacation. At any time, you need to know how to motivate yourself. Find a place where you can reward yourself, and then earn that reward through disciplined actions, and you will slowly develop the willpower to persevere.
Conclusion
If you want to get a result in anything you do, you need to be tough on yourself. And this “ruthlessness” means persistence. Although sometimes you want to improve your abilities, you can’t persist in anything. In the end, you have nothing but lamenting the changes in others every year and envying their progress every day.
So when you feel that you are already living a life of “doing nothing” and “boring”, muster up your energy, make good use of your free time after getting off work or other free time, and make a good plan for your problems, and then take action to change it.
Only in this way will your life be full of meaning; and only in this way will your life leave no regrets.