Productivity advice that's worked for me

"It is later than you think"

Jun 09, 2024

I've written this as a brain-dump of advice I'd give to someone trying to be more productive, so I've erred on the side of sharing more detail rather than less. Raising your productivity can make your life drastically better and it’s worth thinking about a lot. I’ve been lucky to have a lot of people around me and authors I follow who have thought about this a lot and have some clear takeaways. I’m much more productive than I used to be and hope this advice can be useful to you too!

Working from a nice office with great people

I have the option to work remotely or from an office, and choosing the office is the most productivity enhancing thing I do. After experimenting with working from home it became obvious that I'm much more productive and feel better about work when I'm around other people and in a different physical space than home. My brain is very social and feels a push to focus much more on work when I'm around people who are also focused and working. I also feel noticeably different when I've left my house, like the day has started. Working with friends is a great plus.

I used to be a teacher, and when I left teaching working from home felt like an insane privilege that I just needed to work out how to do better. I realized later that my entire concept of "Going into work" didn’t match what an office would be like at all. I associated going into work with getting physically tired throughout the day implementing what you'd worked on on your computer, and only being able to do focused computer work in a cramped teachers lounge for 45 minutes at a time. The only time I was able to do real long focused work on my computer was when I got home, so I learned to think of home as where more serious distraction-free work could happen. I hadn't considered how nice an office could be in comparison. I used to think of work as where you go to give your energy away, but working in a nice office gives me a lot of energy.

Getting Things Done-style checklist and inbox

Getting Things Done is the obvious choice for the one book you should read about improving your productivity. You should read the book cover to cover. The main idea of the book is that nagging thoughts about other stuff you should be doing hold back your productivity while you work, so you should dump literally all your possible tasks into a well-organized but simple system so that you can always focus on the task at hand, and have ways to catch new tasks and ideas quickly as they come to you. I've started to think that a lot of productivity is just allowing yourself to work without getting bothered by what you should be doing instead. You can turn your to-do list into a kind of boss where you just defer to it for most of the week without thinking much about meta work you need to do, and then do a weekly review at the beginning or end of the week to think about bigger picture stuff.

Keep your-to do system simple. Designing and redesigning more complex systems is often just a way to feel productive while actually avoiding work. I use a Notion database for all my tasks and have a shortcut to update it with new tasks on my phone so it's easy to catch new stuff.

This is a summary of the book.

Increasing baseline energy levels

Having higher energy throughout the day makes focus much easier and makes you feel much better as you work. This is what I do to keep my energy levels up:

Good sleep is probably the most important thing for maintaining a high energy baseline.

Consider not drinking coffee, or at least very little.
- I hate that this is probably good advice. Coffee seems to work for a little while but then you hit a new normal where you need an x amount of caffeine to get back to base level, and it always has the risk of disrupting your sleep.
Get up early and get sun in your eyes quickly. Go for a short walk first thing in the morning. Maybe give yourself a little task or goal outside.
Go to bed at a reasonable time and avoid screen time for at least an hour before bed.
- Have some books on hand.
- Consider listening to a light and relaxing audiobook to fall asleep rather than scrolling on your phone.
- Get creative with the lighting in your room to lower the brightness before bed. Consider using just a desk lamp for an hour before bed.

Make sure you're eating a balanced diet and getting all essential vitamins.

As a vegan I need to be especially careful about this. It might be worth getting a blood test to see if you have any significant deficiencies making you tired. It’s likely that your diet isn’t as great as it could be and you should think about how to make it better. Meal prep more and eat out less.

Get consistent exercise

Cardio: I'm much less antsy and fidgety when my cardio health's good. If you feel uncomfortable sitting still for a while and suspect you might have bad cardio health, try doing cardio exercises for a few weeks and see if you're able to do focused work for longer after.
Weightlifting: If I've been consistently weightlifting for a month I feel much much more comfortable in my body. This doesn't have anything to do with a sense of looking physically better. Being comfy just means feeling like I am my body rather than a mind floating above it. This feeling is reinforced by doing a lot of strenuous activity like weight lifting. Sitting doing focused work is much more pleasant when I'm feeling like this.
Here’s my post on my exercise routine.

I enjoyed this blog post with more advice on improving energy.

A nice comfy work station

The average American buys a car for around $30,000, which I think is a crazy mistake. In comparison to that, spending $1000-$2000 on the main area you spend most of your time seems pretty reasonable. A big monitor, a nice mouse and keyboard, comfy chair, decent computer, and some decorations to make the space nice are more than enough to make doing work much more comfortable. A height adjustable desk is a huge plus.

A nice workstation can also hack your personal sense of status, like "I'm the type of person to do serious work because I have this nice setup." This is dumb, but we play a lot of games like this with ourselves. It feels good to come into work and sit down at a nice desk setup. If hacking your brain by making the space you spend 8 hours/day in a little nicer makes you more productive, that seems worth it.

Subreddits like /r/workspaces or /r/battlestations are fun places to get ideas for making your workspace nicer.

Time blocking

Scheduling tasks from your to-do list on your calendar and committing to only working on them during that block of time. This helps you notice which tasks are taking a lot longer and shorter than you would expect, and reduces the nagging feeling that you should be working on something else instead. At the start of each week I’ll fill my Google Calendar with longer tasks in the morning and early afternoon (I leave late afternoons free for less focused one-off tasks) and commit to not working on other stuff until those are finished.

Peer coaching and goal setting

Meeting up once a week with a friend or colleague to review how your weekly plan is going and being very honest about what’s working and not working. This makes it harder to lie to yourself about times you’re just being lazy. It can give you some social pressure to cut down on distractions. It’s also useful to get a second opinion on projects that you do think are important, it might be that there’s a lot that you’re missing.

Being very careful with social media/phone use

Don't check social media first thing in the morning.

You are likely checking social media more than you realize. Install a free website blocker like Cold Turkey and keep your phone out of reach for long periods.

The Cal Newport deep work story is basically true. Context switching is actually insanely costly if you consider the compounding effects of focus. I sometimes think of myself as only having a few real context switches available to me before I lose the ability to do deep focused work for the whole day, and phones provide multiple possible significant context switches.

Being around people who value working hard on important things

"You're the average of the 5 people you're closest to" is pretty true. A lot of people will put down hard work as either lame, a zero-sum status game that's evil to play, or a way of being tricked by powerful people into doing free work. If you want to work hard consistently you need to make sure to balance these people with at least one friend who's excited about working hard on important things. I'm extremely lucky to have many strong friend groups from very different backgrounds who are excited about acting in the world and trying to work hard on big problems.

Avoiding addictive hobbies

Maybe the best thing I’ve ever done for my productivity was quitting video games when I was 18. I have a strong tendency toward fixating on/getting addicted to stuff and if I hadn’t quit video games it’s likely that I would’ve sunk a crazy amount of time into them, and they wouldn’t have actually made me happier, a better person, or more productive at work. My hobbies of choice are spending time with friends, reading, movies, music, and exercise. I mostly don’t drink and don’t do any other drugs. Life is incredibly short and sinking time into stuff that isn’t actually making it better is a profound loss.

Mindset stuff

A lot of getting more productive can also involve playing better mental games with yourself. These are some ideas for how to think about work that have been good for me:

Not being afraid of success

I sometimes suspect that a lot of people secretly enjoy their productivity problems because they don't want to complete their tasks and take on new unknown stuff. It's nice to have something to complain about. Problems give us structure, and it can feel intimidating to think about yourself being free to act in new ways and having more expectations on you as a result. Try to ask yourself if you actually kind of enjoy having problems with productivity, and whether that enjoyment may be a big part of what's holding you back.

Being more successful also makes your past failures and wasted time more apparent and makes you think about ways you could have been much better. Not always pleasant!

A way to test if you have this problem is to imagine having a button that would immediately complete all tasks and projects that you have to do, from your email inbox to your huge work tasks, leaving you completely free to do other things. Does pressing this button this feel good or scary? If it’s scary you might be avoiding completing some stuff to maintain the structure the problems provide.

Excitement about your work

It's convenient that I'm doing work that I'm actually excited about, so I feel a lot of intrinsic motivation to do more.

Focus on the depths of what's possible

The compound interest of hard work is real. When you get a little older you really notice who's been working hard on big projects and/or understanding the world for long periods of time. It's important to remember that doubling your effort or focus on something can 100x your output/understanding in that thing if you keep at it. A quote from Richard Hamming I think about a lot:

Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode’s office and said, “How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?” He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, “You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.” I simply slunk out of the office!
What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity – it is very much like compound interest. I don’t want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode’s remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done.
-Richard Hamming

Understanding that a lot of people's output is low. It can be motivating to notice that any additional work is a huge value add.

The average knowledge worker's only really productive for about 3 hours a day. If you can get your productivity higher than this you're already beating a lot of people. This article has a lot of interesting info on an average person's productive hours. If you're struggling to solidly focus for a full 8 hours per day consider that few people can, but don't allow yourself to get comfortable if you think you could get more out of yourself. It’s possible to stand out a lot by getting more out of yourself, or finding more ways to fill your time productively.

I’ve come around to thinking that the average person with a computer job might just have very low output and be moderately bad at it, and you noticing your own bad/low output is the first step of waking up to the idea that you could be doing much more, and a lot of people just never take this first step.

Chipperness and gratitude

I've been in a lot of work environments where people get mopey about the system they're working in. There are times when that's legit, but I think that if you're making a good salary (compare your salary to the median American income of $59,384/year, and the median global income $12,235/year), aren't being asked to do anything ridiculous, and aren't being bullied by your superiors, you should try to find ways to make the most of your situation instead of dwelling on what you can’t control about it. Being upbeat about work is a self-reinforcing cycle that gives back a lot of unexpected rewards over time if you can maintain it.

Zero-sum vs positive-sum thinking

I sometimes meet people who have an extremely zero-sum view of the world. There's this idea that when you're working you're either having value stolen from you by a boss or you yourself are moving up some status hierarchy at the expense of someone else. I think this story is pretty straightforwardly wrong and understanding the idea of positive-sum trade-offs can actually noticeably improve your mindset around work and make acting in the world feel better and more exciting.

Getting good at abyss staring

I really liked this blog post about looking at difficult facts. There are times when you need to acknowledge unpleasant facts related to work, like:

Your nice fancy productivity system isn't working mainly because you're being a big baby and are avoiding work because it's unpleasant.
You might be in the wrong career or working on the wrong thing.
Your project might need a big overhaul.

A lot of procrastination might happen as a result of avoiding difficult ideas like this. Setting aside time to review your work/life as a whole might help.

Not overthinking things and accepting that you’re sometimes just being silly

It’s very easy to get drawn into long periods of introspection about productivity. If you’re comfortable gently roasting yourself, it might be helpful to tell yourself that the reason you’re not getting something done isn’t because of some small complex issue with your work setup, it’s because you’re being lazy/a big baby. If I’m taking a while on sending an email, it’s often much more helpful for me to step back and say “This is a dumb problem. You’re an adult. Just write the email.” than it is to try to unpack how I’m feeling.

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