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

by Chris Bailey

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.

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

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.

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

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.

the most productive people learn to use their prefrontal cortexes more than their limbic systems.

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

My method of choice for making my tax task less ugly is to hire someone to do them for me. Every year I hire a business to do my taxes, and for a couple hundred bucks I basically buy back hours of my time and attention so I can level up and focus on higher-impact tasks and projects.

set a timer on my phone to limit myself to working on my taxes for thirty minutes—and only work for longer if I’m on a roll and feel like going on.

For every fifteen minutes I spend on my taxes, I set aside $2.50 to treat myself or reward myself in some meaningful way for reaching milestones.

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

more impulsive you are, the more you procrastinate, because your limbic system is that much stronger than your prefrontal cortex.

up until 1883 the railroads themselves had fifty-three different time zones they used to track their trains.

Thirty-five years later, in 1918, the United States officially went from using hundreds of time zones to using just four, and time zones were codified into federal law.

when we schedule time for something, what we’re actually doing is simply deciding when we will invest our attention and energy into the task.

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.

When I invested more time in my work during my insane weeks, my work became a lot less urgent; on a minute-by-minute basis, I invested less energy and focus into everything I intended to get done. But when I had a limited amount of time in my twenty-hour weeks, I forced myself to expend significantly more energy and focus over that shorter period of time so I could get everything done I had to do.

set an hourly chime on your phone, and observe how your energy levels fluctuate over the day.

saying: during your BPT, you bring at least double the energy and focus to whatever it is you’re working on.

Yet some days the stars would align and I found myself writing thousands of words and reading hundreds of pages, while on others I would sit at my desk staring at a blank screen, with no energy or will or focus to do either.

But beyond accounting for your prime time, intentions, and nature of your job, any additional structure will tend to make your day more rigid and will make you feel less in control of your day.

my time as little as possible, and strategically work on tasks when I have the most energy and focus—both of which roughly rise and fall in tandem with each other over the course of the day.

Block off your BPT in your calendar so no one books you during that time, to remind yourself when it’s time to hunker down, and to keep that time open for the high-impact tasks and projects that will come your way.

Call someone or Skype someone so you can have a meaningful conversation while doing the tasks.

When I found it hard to make a response shorter than five sentences, I discovered it was a cue that a phone call was usually a more productive way to handle the matter, anyway.

understanding. When I absolutely have to attend a meeting, I’ll often also suggest shortening the meeting a little—which motivates everyone to expend more energy and focus over that shorter time to move through the meeting’s agenda quicker.

stressed the importance of rewarding yourself as you form new habits. According to Charles, “[when a habit] and a reward become neurologically intertwined, what’s actually happening is a neural pathway is developing that links those [things] together in our head.”

I paid her $25/hour USD—substantially more than my first assistant—but she was easily worth it. It felt great to work on a project all day, hand it off to her in the evening, and have her work on it while I slept so I could be further ahead the next morning.

I also think it’s more fruitful, easier, and enjoyable if you find someone that you can personally connect with—this is why I always talk with a potential client beforehand, to see if our working styles match. That way, in the end, everyone is happier.

Fancy Hands (FancyHands.com) for hiring virtual assistants • Zirtual (Zirtual.com) for hiring virtual assistants • eaHelp (Eahelp.com) for hiring virtual assistants • Freelancer (Freelancer.com) for per-task hiring • Upwork (Upwork.com) for per-task hiring • Job postings at local colleges and universities to hire an intern • “Help wanted” posts on Craigslist and Twitter for assistants

The 90 percent rule is simple: when you look at a new opportunity, rank it on a scale of 1-100 on how valuable or meaningful you think it is. If it isn’t a 90 or above, don’t do it.

Yo-Yo Ma didn’t become the greatest cellist in the world by juggling cello lessons with soccer practice, salsa classes, and a couple of part-time jobs. He became a great cellist by investing as much of his time and attention in practicing the cello as he could, and it shows.

Long before the printing press was invented, Socrates was averse to writing, arguing that it would destroy our memories and weaken our minds, even going so far as to argue that it was “inhuman.”

To summarize decades’ worth of complex neurological research in one sentence, our brains are built for solving problems, connecting dots, and forming new ideas—not for holding on to information that we can simply externalize.

getting tasks, appointments, and information out of your head won’t make your mind empty. It actually does the opposite by giving you more mental bandwidth. It frees up space so your brain can do what it’s built for: forming new thoughts, ideas, and connections, and once you capture them all, snowballing them forward.

The more you get out of your head, the more clearly you’ll think.

how powerful getting unresolved open loops outside of your head can be.

As David Allen told me, “Your head is not for holding ideas—it’s for having ideas.”

“The first thing to do is to capture what’s got your attention, then decide if it’s actionable or not, and if it is, decide what the next action on it is, and do the action right then if you can.”

The feeling I had after was, to put it very mildly, liberating: I felt as though a weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

“any ‘would, could, should’ commitment held only in the psyche creates irrational and unresolvable pressure, 24-7.”

incomplete or interrupted tasks weigh on our mind much more than completed tasks.

how important it was to constantly capture tasks as they came up, especially if I wanted to maintain a clear mind.

I noticed even the smallest item weighing on my psyche, I would externalize it to create more attentional space for bigger and better things. If that sounds obsessive, that’s because it is.

except for meditation, nothing has helped me think more clearly.

Ten years later, almost every thought I have is new, because I make a note of anything important right away so I can ...

every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, after I check my email, I go through the notes I’ve compiled and add them to my to-do list or calendar.

I also often revert back to using paper.

a “Waiting For” list and “Projects” notes—and

list of everything you’re waiting on,