The Productivity Project: Proven Ways to Become More Awesome

by Chris Bailey

productivity has nothing to do with how much you do, and everything to do with how much you accomplish.

every lesson I learned fell into better management of one of three categories: my time, my attention, and my energy.

When we waste time, we’re procrastinating. When we can’t manage our attention well, we’re distracted. And when we don’t cultivate our energy levels, we’re tired, or “burned out.”

I was too curious not to do it.

Did I get done what I intended to?

If you intend to relax for a day, and you have the most relaxing day you’ve had all year, you were perfectly productive.

Just because you know something to be true, doesn’t mean you’ll act on it

The rule is simple: at the beginning of each day, before you start working, decide what three things you want to accomplish by the end of the day. Do the same at the start of every week.

since the rule focuses on the goals you want to accomplish instead of how much you get done, it’s much more in line with what productivity is all about.

I see drinking alcohol as a way of borrowing energy from tomorrow; and because you invariably crash after a caffeine high, drinking caffeine is a way of borrowing energy from later on in the day.

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.

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)

I like this. It put great answer for why, that is hiddden under the global goals and why it iss frustrating to work toward them, and advice design a process instead of keeping them as a goal (for example, not to run a marathon, but run at least 3 times a week, for at least 1 h

I think it’s also helpful to give yourself a choice between working on only two tasks: the task that you’re tempted to procrastinate on, and another task that’s high return.

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.

when you tap your smartphone a very specific way, a pizza man shows up at your door twenty minutes later.

))))))

It’s not that I dislike the internet—just the opposite, the internet is one of my favorite things on the planet. I simply value my productivity too much to stay connected all the time, especially when I’m working on something important.

Piers Steel, who wrote The Procrastination Equation, calls impulsiveness the “cornerstone of procrastination” and mentions that “without impulsiveness, there wouldn’t be such a thing as chronic procrastination.”)

When time was “created” by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, the universe had a past, present, and future for the first time.

In the Malay language, there is even the phrase pisan zapra, which roughly translates to “about the time it takes to eat a banana.”

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

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.

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.

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.

during my experiment to work ninety-hour workweeks, I found I accomplished only a bit more than when I worked twenty-hour workweeks.

When you feel like your to-do list is expanding faster than the universe is,

learn to invest more energy and attention into your work, so you can get the same amount done in a fraction of the time.

shrinking how long you’ll work on the task is also a great way to warm up to difficult tasks that you are more likely to procrastinate on.

Can I work out for an hour? Naw, I feel a lot of resistance to that. Thirty minutes? Better, but still too much. How about twenty minutes? Perfect, I’ll work out for twenty minutes!

the more I adapt what I’m working on to mesh with my energy levels, the more productive I become.

My Maintenance Day ritual is incredibly simple, and incredibly powerful: throughout the week, I simply collect all of my low-return maintenance tasks on a list—everything from going grocery shopping to cutting my nails—and instead of doing them throughout the week, I do them all at once.

I name it "Day of small tasks"

time management simply isn’t as important in the knowledge economy as it was in the time economy.

cost to spending too much time on low-return tasks: they’re much easier to work on. They’re the “watching Netflixes” of the work world;

Remember those sixteen-piece, four-by-four sliding puzzles you played with as a kid, where one square was empty and you slid the other pieces around to unscramble the puzzle? That’s what your time is like. The more open space you have in your schedule, the more flexibility you have for when you work on tasks, and since your focus and energy fluctuate so much over the day, the more productive you can become.

By simplifying how much you take on, you create more attentional space around your high-return activities, so you can focus on them much more deeply.

The reason we tend to come up with a lot more great ideas in the shower compared to when we’re on a smartphone is simple: when we’re taking a shower, we create enough attentional space for our mind to wander and for new ideas and thoughts to bubble up to the surface.

Even though I felt productive because I was so busy working on them, they didn’t lead me to accomplish anything meaningful.

When you successfully shrink your low-return support tasks, don’t be afraid to treat yourself with something you find genuinely rewarding to make the challenge more fun. It will probably help you out in the long run.

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.”

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

This is a result of what Bluma Zeigarnik named the “Zeigarnik effect” in the late 1920s: incomplete or interrupted tasks weigh on our mind much more than completed tasks.

To reclaim more attentional space, I made a list of everything I was worrying about—most of which I was blowing out of proportion, of course—and scheduled an hour every day to think through everything on the list.

Since being inspired by Getting Things Done a decade ago, I’ve found that there is a line that’s relatively easy to cross, after which you begin to spend too much time managing and planning what you have to do instead of getting real work done.

Research shows that the simple act of making a to-do list makes you less likely to get work done, because creating a task list simulates getting actual work done, even though it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.

Just because you feel productive doesn’t mean you actually are

What separates the most productive people from everyone else is that they make course corrections every week to gradually get better at everything they do.

One of the reasons we make so many resolutions around New Year’s is that during the holidays we can step back from our work and lives to think and reflect about other things.

When you’re on your deathbed, you’re going to look back with satisfaction at all the cool and meaningful things you’ve accomplished, not that you stayed on top of your email.

Busyness is no different from laziness when it doesn’t lead you to accomplish anything.

Productivity isn’t about how busy or efficient you are—it’s about how much you accomplish. Just because you feel productive doesn’t mean you are—and the opposite is often true.