You could say that productivity and trying to improve it has taken up a lot of room in my head.
And I think after a point, wondering and stressing about productivity doesn’t help at all. Recently, I’ve been preferring to keep things simple and do only the tasks that I actually need to do to make progress.
What I’ve found is best when distracted, counter-intuitively, is to just forget your work for a while, focus on other parts of your life and come back to your work refreshed and ready to keep going.
But how do you learn to do this?
The main step is to build up curiosity and interest in other areas of your life. Get a new hobby, play a sport, adventure across the world, become good at having deep conversations.
The most important factor is a growth and curiosity-based mindset, which will grow after trying this out and seeing that it works.
If you become genuinely interested in many things, then you can pass time investigating and learning. You’ll be less bored as you have all these avenues to take your interest down.
Stop putting yourself under pressure to spend more time on your work projects. It’s often not even that productive. What’s more effective is knowing exactly which direction you want to take things, and what tasks you need to do to get you there.
Then instead of just sitting down to work without knowing what’s going to move you forward, you can spend a shorter time working on the right tasks with the right intensity to create something of real quality.
And when you are working?
The number one feature of the best productivity systems…
You don’t notice they’re there.
They fade into the background. You don’t know they’re there but you trust that using them to head in the right direction.
After all, spending time thinking about your productivity and optimising it is time-consuming in itself — I had to learn this lesson myself many times over.
It’s not easy to make a system that fades into the background though…
For some people, working on their complex, bespoke productivity protocol is the substance of the work that they do every day. That’s why they can’t find something that feels useful. It’s because they rely on having a system that isn’t productive to feel productive.
If they built something that faded into the background they’d be confronted with having to actually come up with some goals and starting to create work of value to move towards them.
That’s much more difficult than rearranging your Notion workspace for the eleventh time that day. Ask me how I know.
This has been a bit more of a stream-of-consciousness piece of writing. I’m not as well-versed in productivity and making it work for you as I am with PKM but I’m working through some ideas similar to what I’ve shared in this piece.
If you like this more experimental style, leave a clap or two so that I know. I’ve got no shortage of ideas I find complicated that I’m trying to unravel, and I’d love to talk about more of them.
As always, thanks for reading!