Brutal productivity advice I wish someone had told me earlier
#5 is painful. sorry in advance.
Over the past 12+ years building business, I've experienced periods of extreme focus & productivity. I've also experienced the complete opposite: times of distraction, procrastination, and minimal progress.
Here are 15 pieces of advice I wish someone had told me back when I was struggling.
#1: Without Skin in the Game, You'll Always Find Excuses
"You are your own worst enemy. You waste precious time dreaming of the future instead of engaging in the present. Since nothing seems urgent to you, you are only half involved in what you do. The only way to change is through action and outside pressure." —Robert Greene
The times I've been dialled in correspond to when I've had skin in the game. There were consequences if I didn't do the work. There were stakes—money on the line, partnerships, collaborations, or people I didn't want to disappoint. Or I'd made public commitments that I had to fulfill.
Conversely, the times where I've found myself stuck, complacent, and distracted have been when I lacked skin in the game. No pressure. Nothing on the line.
If you want to be fundamentally more productive, put yourself in a situation where you need to do the work. Figure out a way to raise the stakes and put some skin in the game.
#2: Deadlines Are Your Most Potent Tool for Focus
We all know deadlines are important, but we often make a few critical mistakes with them:
Forget to set them in the first place. It's easy to fall into the path of least resistance, operating on autopilot at a mediocre pace.
We set them far too leniently. When a deadline is too far out, it doesn't drive any urgency. You think to yourself, "This is easy enough to achieve." And then you coast.
Continually extend them. You get close to your deadline, realize you haven't done enough work, so you extend it again and again. You break your word to yourself and fall into the trap of never finishing anything while trying to perfect things. Deadlines are an antidote to perfectionism. But they only work if you actually stick to them.
A quick tip: set a deadline you think is reasonable, and then halve the length of it. This forces you to focus on the essential components of your goal or project rather than peripheral busy work. Don't knock it 'til you try it.
#3: Set 90-Day Goals, Not Yearly Goals
Yearly goals have two major problems:
You have no idea what's going to happen in a year. It's a long timeframe, and if you think you can plan everything out perfectly on a chessboard, you're in for a surprise. Things change—your life, your ideas, your circumstances.
A year is such a long timeframe that it doesn't create a sense of urgency or intensity.
By thinking of your year as a series of 90-day sprints, you get way more done. It's enough time to really push forward and complete a big project, but short enough to drive pressure and intense focus.
#4: The Best Way to Learn Is to Create Something
Many times, I've found myself stuck in "Learning Loop."
There's a devious trap knowing as The Learning Loop. If you're smart, and you like researching and reading, you're prone to it.
It's where you spend all your time "learning" about the thing in an abstract way (books, youtube videos, etc) without actually engaging in the activity.
This feels productive. It's not. It's a sophisticated form of procrastination. But you do it because it's comfortable. It doesn't require courage. And it doesn't expose you to failure, judgment or criticism.
But that is not how you actually learn. You don't gain skills, tacit knowledge, or contextual understanding that way. You gain those things by working on projects and creating things.
If you want to get better at sales or marketing, don't just read about it. Do things to improve those skills. Get on sales calls and talk to people. For marketing, build a project or product and try to sell it. Build campaigns.
The best lessons, and the ones you remember, come through taking real action in the world.
Watch: Most Learning is Procrastination... Here's How to Finally Take Action [28min]
#5: Stop Inventing Things to Do to Avoid the Important
"Am I being productive or just active? Am I inventing things to do to avoid the important?" —Tim Ferriss
Are you taking action on the necessary required actions that move you closer to accomplishing your goals?
Or are you just in motion?
The latter is seductive. It's akin to the learning loop we just discussed. If you want to write a book, it might feel productive to download and play with several different writing apps, or watch endless videos on how to write a book, but at the end of the day: none of that is THE WORK.
Do the uncomfortable, deep, focused work that actually moves things forward. Do it first. Don't invent a bunch of preconditions for real action. Don't engage in the periphery of the work instead of the center of it.
#6: Energy Is Everything—Guard It With All You Have
Tactical productivity—managing to-do lists, email, inbox zero, calendar management—is the tip of the pyramid. What's more important is everything underneath: your goals, how meaningful those goals are, your values, your vision...
...and at the bottom of it all, your energy.
Low energy kills productivity. You know this as well as I do. When you're ill (low energy) it's hard to do anything, including sitting down at your computer to work for even a few hours.
You want to be as high-energy as possible. You do that by taking care of yourself—exercising, sleeping well, getting sunlight, eating well. No point trying to optimize your productivity system if you lack the energy and intensity to do the work in the first place. Fix your energy first, then figure out how to direct it in the most effective way possible.
(I cover a bunch of strategies for maximizing energy during the first 20 mins of my video on The High Motivation Stack.)
#7: Don't Dismiss the "Cheesy" Personal Development Stuff
The whole values, vision, goals, breaking it down—all that personal development 101 stuff—it's kind of cheesy, and it's easy to dismiss it. But it actually works for the majority of people.
The times I've ignored this or thought I was above it have correlated with periods of low effort and aimlessness. I don't think that's a coincidence.
#8: You Don't Need Certainty to Have Direction
This is the one piece of advice I really needed to hear in my mid-20s. I built a business, was pretty comfortable, and then got lost. I spent a long time swimming around trying to find what the next thing was, and what I was really searching for was certainty. I wanted to be certain that any path I would take was the right path.
What I didn't understand back then was that any direction worth going in is going to be filled with uncertainty. And that's fine.
It's better to learn how to operate in uncertainty than to try and force certainty. It's better to be adaptable, to be the kind of person who looks uncertainty in the face and pushes forward anyway.
#9: Stop Jumping From One App to Another
I'm a recovering productivity junkie. For many years, I downloaded tons of note-taking apps, task management apps, and other tools searching for the "one piece of software" that would fix all my productivity issues.
Lol.
The "one thing" doesn't exist. When you think it does, you end up jumping from app to app, from tool to tool, from method to method, and you always get disappointed.
You're operating by a fallacy that there's a perfect tool or method that's going to fix all your problems. But productivity problems, especially procrastination, are multifaceted. They're usually downstream of other factors like energy, goals, or just having an off day. If you think that's due to your note-taking app, you're wrong.
This is another form of sophisticated procrastination. Just stick with something. The simpler it is, the better.
Watch: Stop Searching For The Perfect Productivity System [19min]
#10: Be Ruthless About Eliminating Distractions
It's easy to compare yourself to a young person who scrolls for hours on their phone and think, "I'm so glad that's not me." But you're probably more distracted than you should be.
Many of the issues I had around clarity and direction were actually the result of being distracted—not spending hours on my phone scrolling, but just five minutes here and there checking Twitter or Instagram. Seeing something would pull me out of a focused state or influence me in ways I didn't want, like "Hey, here's a cool business idea" or "Look at this person who's doing this."
One of the problems with this constant distraction is not just the time you lose or how it makes you procrastinate more—it's also how it muddies your mind and confuses you.
The more ruthless you can be about eliminating distractions, the better.
Two practical interventions have helped me:
Delete social media apps and email from your phone, if feasible. There's nothing fun to do on your phone once you've deleted social media, games, and email. The phone becomes a utility, a tool, which is what it should be.
Use something like Self-Control for Mac or Cold Turkey Blocker to block distracting websites during work hours. If you find it hard, start with just a two-hour block here and there, then work your way up to four, five, or even eight hours depending on your workday.
#11: Hustle Culture Is Stupid, But Hustling Is Not
Hard work is not all there is. Many people work harder than they need to because they're not taking the path of leverage. They're not being effective, they're just brute-forcing it.
The key phrase is "more than they need to." Anything worth doing requires a lot of work. Some hustle is necessary. Probably a lot.
You can only really work smart once you've done a lot of hard work to figure out what working smart looks like. So you do need to hustle, but do so intentionally, not just work long hours for the sake of it.
#12: Use Pen and Paper More Often
Efficiency is good—it's a lot easier to write a blog post on a keyboard than by hand.
But there are times where you actually want friction and inefficiency because it helps you slow down and think. What I've noticed over the past few years as I've forced myself to use pen and paper more is that I come away with a clarity of mind that I don't get from working at the computer.
#13: The Cure to Overthinking Is Not More Thinking
I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck in overthinking loops and tried to think my way out of them.
"I need to go for a walk and just think through it all."
This rarely works.
When you're in these states—when you start spiraling into your own mind and ruminating—what you actually need to do is take action on something. Anything.
What you don't want to do is try to do the best possible thing, because then you'll start thinking about what the best possible thing is, and you'll continue to overthink. Just do what's in front of you—wash the dishes, clean your office, respond to emails. Just get into the mode of action, get into doing things, and the next step will become clear.
My take is that overthinking is more of a state problem—a physical or mental state problem—than a condition that needs to be solved through more thinking. If you change your physical and mental state by forcing your body into action, overthinking will often resolve itself.
#14: Taking On Too Many Projects Is a Subtle Form of Cowardice
Taking on too many goals and projects is a subtle form of cowardice where you don't trust yourself to courageously go all-in on what scares you. When you work on a lot of things at once, you get this convenient excuse where if something fails, you can say, "Well, I was working on these other things too, and maybe I should have been more focused." You don't really have that excuse when you focus on just one thing or reduce your scope and narrow your vision.
Almost always (with some exceptions), narrowing your vision is exactly what you need to do. It's just very uncomfortable and requires courage, because you're not going to narrow your vision on something easy. It's going to be something hard, demanding, and worthwhile.
If you've got a lot on your plate, the first question to ask yourself is: "Did I add this stuff to my plate so I could avoid working on what I know I should be working on—that big project, that big business idea, that product?"
#15: Just Because It's Difficult Doesn't Mean It's Wrong
Just because your goal or project is difficult right now doesn't mean it's the wrong thing to work on.
There are many times where I've abandoned projects and goals because I told myself that it didn't feel right. Sometimes this was true—there were goals and projects that I'm glad I didn't push forward with because another opportunity made more sense.
But more often than not, I was simply going through the dip phase.
Every project and goal has a dip phase. You start off really excited, and then that excitement starts to wane. You're faced with the reality of the situation and how hard it is, and you enter this valley of despair. In that valley, it's very easy to start coming up with all kinds of rationalizations for why you should quit.
You should be extremely skeptical of that inner voice that's telling you to quit. Sometimes it's legitimate, but rarely. Most failures are commitment failures, and there's a huge amount of edge to be gained in work and life by simply finishing what you start (because the vast majority of people don't).
Thanks for reading!