The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy

by Chris Bailey

The biggest reason your highest-impact tasks are so valuable is that they are often more intimidating; they almost always require more time, attention, and energy than your lower-impact tasks. They’re typically also more boring, frustrating, difficult, unstructured, and lacking in intrinsic rewards—which all act as triggers for procrastination.

“Everyone procrastinates.” Procrastination is simply human nature.

“across scores of surveys, about 95 percent of people admit to procrastinating.” (The other 5 percent are lying.)

the more aversive (unattractive) a task or project is to you, the more likely you are to put it off.

six main task attributes that make procrastination more likely. Those are whether a task is one or more of the following: • Boring • Frustrating • Difficult • Unstructured or ambiguous • Lacking in personal meaning • Lacking in intrinsic rewards (i.e., it’s not fun or engaging)

The more of these attributes a task has, and the more intense these attributes are, the less attractive a task will be to you, and the m...

The biggest reason your highest-impact tasks are so valuable is that they too are aversive; they almost always require more time, attention, and energy than your lower-impact tasks, and they’re usually more boring, frustrating, difficult, unstructured, and lacking in intrinsic rewards. They’re valuable and meaningful because they’re hard, and that’s why you get paid more than minimum wage to do them.

By the way, are you interested in gaining back 13.6 years of your life in an instant? Quit watching TV. According to Nielsen, the average American adult watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of television every single day. Assuming you live until eighty and start watching TV at ten, that adds up to 13.6 years of your life.

Your limbic system is the emotional, instinctual part of your brain that includes, among other things, your pleasure center.

Your prefrontal cortex is the logical part of your brain that’s fighting to get you to do your taxes.

This back-and-forth between your emotional limbic system and logical prefrontal cortex is what leads to the decisions you make throughout the day.

Our limbic system wins out when we go home with the cute girl at the bar, don’t resist ordering a donut with our morning coffee, or when we procrastinate.

Tim often refers to procrastination as “giving in to feel good,” and if you look at a brain scan of someone who is procrastinating, you’ll see that on a neurological level, that’s exactly what happens. The prefrontal cortex surrenders to the limbic system so that we can feel good in the short term.

And it is nearly impossible to become more productive without a strong prefrontal cortex.

Whenever we think about whether we should work on an ugly task, our limbic system and prefrontal cortex battle it out, and then we either procrastinate or we tackle the dreaded task.

Since the two systems are responsible for both logic and emotion, they’re jointly responsible for some of the most remarkable innovations known to humankind—including language, the printing press, the lightbulb, the wheel, and the internet.

While our limbic system is essential, much of productivity has to do with building up a strong prefrontal cortex, one that can show your limbic system who’s boss when it needs to and smack down impulses like checking your email or Facebook one more time in favor of working on higher-impact tasks.

While the interplay between our prefrontal cortex and limbic system is what makes us human, our prefrontal cortex is also much weaker than our limbic system. The limbic system has evolved over millions of years, while the prefrontal cortex has been around for thousands.

Igniting your prefrontal cortex is, conveniently, what you have to do to defeat your limbic system and work on your highest-impact tasks.

The moment you notice your mind having an internal debate about whether or not to work on a task, or you begin to notice yourself saying things like “I’ll do them later,” “I just don’t feel like it right now,” or worst of all, “I’ll do them when I have more time,” it’s a signal that the task before you is an aversive task, and that you need to make doing it much more attractive.*4

By seeing what triggers procrastination, and then making a plan to flip those triggers, doing your taxes becomes more attractive.

If you have a big, aversive task like cleaning your basement, simply get started on it. Try setting a timer for just fifteen minutes, after which you will stop cleaning and begin to work on something else. If you feel like going on after you get started, by all means do, but if you don’t, don’t worry

“The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing the task itself.”

If you want to become more productive, you simply have to work on your highest-impact tasks more often.

But when you do, you’re also going to procrastinate more often because the more aversive a task is to you, the more likely you’ll put it off.

we hardly ever think about our future selves.

That is why we set goals

This has a huge impact on your productivity: the more you see yourself like a stranger, the more likely you are to give your future self the same workload that you would give a stranger, and the more likely you are to put things off to tomorrow—for your future self to do.

Since you see yourself from the future as no different from a stranger, you also see her or him as less tired, busy, and more focused and disciplined than the version of you that’s reading this book.

“It’s so easy to commit your future self to things your current self wouldn’t want to do,”

“Evolutionarily speaking, when you could be eaten by a lion at any moment, saving for the future doesn’t make much sense,”

In the Rule of 3, your future self takes center stage. By mentally fast-forwarding to the end of the day and thinking about what you want to accomplish, you activate the planning centers in your prefrontal cortex, while you also step into the shoes of your future self.

While it’s important to not be unfair to your future self, one of the awesome things you can do is treat your future self—whether that means saving for the future, saying no to eating pizza tonight, working out, learning calculus, putting on sunscreen, flossing, reading more—or leaving some money in your coat pocket to find six months later. You’ll feel incredible later on.

When you put something off or waste time, you’re almost always being unfair to your future self.

The internet can destroy your productivity if you’re not careful. The best way I have found to prevent the internet from wasting my time has been to simply disconnect from it when working on a high-impact or ugly task, and to disconnect as much as possible throughout the day. After getting over the initial withdrawal, the calm and productivity you’ll experience will be unlike anything else.

because humans—and the newer parts of our brain, like the prefrontal cortex—have continued to evolve in a linear fashion alongside these technologies, at least as far as productivity is concerned, it’s made us unprepared to deal with how disruptive those technologies can be to our work.

The internet can absolutely obliterate your productivity if you’re not careful.

While the internet is fun and stimulating, it will almost always try to tempt you away from working on the highest-impact tasks

Compared to your high-impact tasks, the internet is drop-dead sexy: it’s one of the least boring, frustrating, and difficult things out there, and it’s also insanely rewarding, and in an immediate way—a deadly combination for fostering addiction and procrastination.

internet is basically the world’s largest candy store for your limbic system. With every tap and click, your limbic system receives a steady stream of stimulation.

“The net engages all of our senses,” and to make matters worse, “it engages them simultaneously.”

to become more productive, it’s important to see the internet as a nicety—not a necessity.

Today, in the knowledge economy, if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.

Even though humans have been around for two hundred thousand years, we have only been living by the clock for the last 175.

While time has been ticking on for billions of years, we only began measuring it down to the minute after the industrial revolution because we finally had a reason to: time was money, and there was a direct connection between how many minutes and hours we worked and how much we produced.

Most people who work nonfactory jobs trade some combination of their time, attention, energy, skills, knowledge, social intelligence, network, and ultimately their productivity, for a paycheck.

Today, time is no longer money. Productivity is money.

if you want to become more productive, managing your time should take a backseat to how you manage your energy and attention.

For as long as we can predict, time will continue to tick on at the same rate, but what actually fluctuates on a day-to-day basis is how much energy and attention you have.

Scheduling time for something is really just a way of creating attentional and energy boundaries around a task—and for that reason, your time, attention, and energy are inseparable.

Managing your time becomes important only after you understand how much energy and focus you will have throughout the day and define what you want to accomplish.