220: Productivity Judo

Last week I asked y'all what topic you most wanted me to cover and here it is!

Metastrategy

• Keep changing up your tactics. Most things work at least once, nothing works forever. And that's ok. Your brain likes novelty but like a movie or song you've experienced many times, it can wear thin. Be prepared to change and take a break from even the most effective tactics.

People-related tactics

• Body double with someone—having another person who is also doing productive things makes it easier to do productive things. You can do it in real life with a friend or partner—you can use something like Cuckoo or do it virtually with a community product like Flow Club. There are also study with me livestreams on Youtube.
• Explicitly partner with others—make your project or work relate to someone you know / like / respect. Interview someone or partner with them, or create something specifically for their use case.
• Create an accountability group—assemble a buddy or a group of people who are all trying to adopt new habits or behaviors to check in daily on their progress via a group chat. I've done this myself on several occassions.
• Make a bet—similar to accountability, making a bet creates consequences for not following through—I've used this with clients. Donation to an unsavory charity or posting an ugly selfie work as decent punishments.

Environment-related tactics

• Change your location—Instead of working from home or the office, try a coffee shop, a friend's place, in a different part of your house. Go from sitting to standing if you have the means.
• Use a different tool—I wrote Weirdly Brilliant on Canva, not Google Docs. Try using a different program, or using a different device (some writers swear by digital typewriters) or a different modality like voice dictation (ChatGPT or Superwhisper)
• Pick the right playlist—I can't write to music with words but others love that. I prefer electronic beats-heavy music (Brain Food, Electronic for Productivity, Pop Goes Classical) and also Brain.fm for binaural beats)
• Document / record / publicly share what you're doing—I made public vlogs almost every day during my 30 day book writing challenge and it def helped me stay accountable / motivated.

Task management tactics

• Write your tasks in different places—I have NEVER been able to stick to a single task management system (see the Metastrategy) so I just rotate: a notebook, Apple reminders, a post-it note, a whiteboard, index cards. Just keep rotating through things and rewrite tasks / drop them when they no longer matter.
  • Finish stuff then write it down / cross it out—sometimes seeing a list of things to do is overwhelming. It can feel better to do the thing, then write it down so you're building a pile of crushed enemies in your wake.
• Don't do it, just prepare to do it—some tasks require opening emails / reviewing documents to understand the task and since you don't know how long it will take it can be hard to prioritize. Try just doing the review part, or just re-reading what you've written, and then, only if you truly feel like it, do the thing.
• Shitty Zero Draft—somewhat writing specific but just do a brain dump / bulleted list of what the project needs and don't try to make it decent at all. I learned this from Ben Putano.
• When you feel like doing it, drop everything—David Allen's Getting Things Done has a 2 minute rule—if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it now. That said, sometimes there are tasks I'm putting off for one reason or another, but when I suddenly feel called to do it, switching to it right then and there can be the only way to "catch the inspiration".
  • When you are on a roll, stick with it a little longer—this is the corollary to the previous tactic and the reason why I am sometimes late to things. Those last 10 minutes were the most productive part of my morning!
• Plan to do something fun even if you haven't done all your work—there was a great book on procrastination that I am forgetting the name of now but it explained that sometimes we procrastinate because we are afraid we will never have fun again. So the solution is planning fun things to do even when you don't feel like your work is going well. Because otherwise your brain can rebel and just refuse to do stuff because it feels like once we start working it's an endless grind forever. So many plans to see friends or do fun things.