Productivity

Productivity is a word that means a lot of things for many people.

Why do you want to be productive?

This question sounds dumb. But think about it.

Do you want to be productive to prove yourself to others? Are you trying to impress someone? Are you seeking someone’s validation? Do you want to be productive to prove your value to yourself? Do you want to look busy to others?

The answer to these questions reveals a lot about your identity, needs, fears and focuses.

These questions are fundamental. Often, we do things without clearly knowing why. We do them by inertia, unconsciously, by default.

If the work does not move you closer to the life you actually want, you’re bullshitting yourself. Real productivity is not looking busy. It is not jumping between apps, filling calendars with random meetings, closing tickets in Jira, or performing discipline for other people.

Productivity is getting the results you want, as soon as you can, with the least amount of effort. Productivity is about working smart, not working hard.

If you’re starting your journey, you don’t know what working smart means. You don’t know what it looks like. So you must work hard first. Volume precedes quality.

No vanity metrics. No worship of exhaustion. No approval-seeking through busyness.

Just results. Show me the numbers.

Efficiency vs Effectiveness

The most efficient use of your time is to do what you do best and what no one else can do.

We need to distinguish between efficiency and effectiveness:

• Effectiveness – doing the right things, getting the result you intend.
• Efficiency – doing things right, working with minimal waste of time and effort.

To achieve more, you must be both effective and efficient, but effectiveness should come first.

In the long-run, prioritization beats efficiency.

Systems for productivity

I personally use two tools for my productivity:

Calendar

Your calendar is the most honest autobiography you’ll ever write.

It doesn’t matter what you say your priorities are. Your calendar reveals the truth. Each block is a decision about what matters, stripped of pretense and rationalization.

Don’t tell me your priorities; show me your calendar. — Shane Parrish

Your calendar isn’t just recording your time – it’s exposing your lies.

I save event reminders and lock blocks of time for deep, focused work.

Recording the events I go to in my calendar is useful for monthly and annual reviews.

Obsidian

I apply the Second Brain method from Tiago Forte, with some tweaks.

It’s so powerful to have all your knowledge and notes centralized in one place. Specially since it can be used as contect for AI.

Capture, remember, and benefit from the vast quantities of information around us by building a personal system for knowledge management.

I use the PARA system to organize my Obsidian folders:

• Inbox: the place where you put everything you capture along the day to synthesize and sort later. This sorting task can be automated with AI.
• Projects: short-term efforts you’re working on – anything with a clear end in your personal or professional life. Examples: 2024 taxes, website redesign, quarterly team meeting, etc.
• Areas: everything you’re trying to actively improve or maintain. Current roles and responsibilities. Long-term and open-ended. Examples: finances, philosophy, engineering, etc.
• Resources: topics you’re interested in. Your personal library of references, facts, and inspiration for future projects. Example: “YouTube video thumbnails” notebook with cool thumbnails you can reference later.
• Archive: inactive items from other categories. Information you don’t want to forget but doesn’t advance current goals

CODE process

• Capture: keep the ideas and insights that resonate, those you think are truly noteworthy and actionable.
• Organize: save for actionability, according to the active projects you’re working on right now.
• Distill: find the essence, turn the ideas you capture and organize into your own message.
• Express: draw on the material you distill and use it to express your own point of view. Highlight the main points of each note, then highlight the main points of those highlights.

The common trait of people who supposedl have vision is that they spend a lot of time reading and gathering information, and then synthesize it until they come up with an idea. – Fred Smith

Minimize attention residue

Dr. Leroy defines attention residue as “the persistence of cognitive activity about a task A even though one stopped working on a task A and currently performs a task B.”

There’s a cognitive switching cost to shifting your attention. When your attention is shifted, there’s a “residue” that remains with the prior task and impairs your cognitive performance on the new task.

Multitasking is a lie. Multitasking is doing many things poorly.

If a task takes less than 2 minutes to complete, do it right away.

Eat the frog: tackle your most challenging task first thing in the morning.

Backward goal-setting

Preparation always beats planning. Planning is based on the expectation of order. Preparation is based on the expectation of chaos.

1. Visualize the end goal in detail.
2. Set milestones working backward.
3. Identify steps for each milestone.
4. Allocate necessary resources.
5. Assign timeframes based on the end goal.
6. Start with the nearest step.
7. Be flexible and adjust when needed.
8. Regularly review the plan for alignment.

When reviewing, ask yourself:

• What do I do that I think is productive but isn’t?
• What do I do that I don’t think is productive but actually is?
• What am I not achieving simply because I haven’t asked?
• What can you do today that wasn’t possible six months ago?

Techniques

The mind must be given relaxation. It will rise improved and sharper after a good break.

People with high levels of self-control are good at avoiding temptation – not resisting it.

Strategy is the prioritization of limited resources versus unlimited options.

The Cult of Done

Stop your addiction on knowledge acquisition. Action over perfection.

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

How can we translate this manifesto into actionable insights?

• Define “done” from the start: what are the core features that constitute a complete project? Write them down and resist the urge to expand this list as you go.
• Aim for “good enough”: “perfect” is the enemy of done.
• Break larger projects into smaller, time-boxed phases to maintain a sense of progress.
• Separate ideation from implementation: keep a separate idea log. When new features or project ideas pop up during implementation, jot them down for future consideration instead of immediately acting on them.