🔑My Productivity Rules

There are a zillion productivity systems out there, and a whole industry trying to sell productivity hacks. I can’t deny I’m addicted to all that content, but the rules that actually work for me are pretty simple:

Eat, sleep, exercise, take vacation.

Basically, take care of my body and my mind first and have faith results will follow. When I feel stressed or too busy, my instinct is always to work harder and skip workouts or healthy meals to power through the problem, but when I give into that impulse it always makes things worse.

On the other hand, if I force myself to walk away, take care of myself, and come back later, the results I get are always better. (And bonus, I enjoy my life more and my motivation doesn’t burn out.)

Related: After the first cup of coffee in the morning, reach for water first when I’m feeling sluggish and craving caffeine.

Get organized and set up my environment first.

Some people can work in chaos. I’m not one of them. I’m sensitive to my surroundings so I need to straighten up my environment first. (Both my physical environment, and my digital environment when I’m drafting documents or writing code.)

Related: If I’m feeling blocked or unmotivated, change the scenery. Especially when I’m working remotely it helps to start the day in a common room in my building or a coffee shop.

Bias for action.

Don’t spend too much time ruminating on the work in front of me — that tends to lead to overwhelm. Get started on something, even if it’s small, even it’s just decomposing the task or outlining the problem and options on paper.

Write things down.

I will not remember details, ideas, or resources if I don’t write them down. Very often I also find that writing out a problem and possible options helps me think more clearly about what I’m working on.

Related: Sketching out systems, processes, and models helps me understand them. I’m very good at understanding complex systems once I give myself a visual, but if I just try to absorb things abstractly I’ll get lost.

Related: Restating things I’ve learned in my own words helps me integrate new information into the knowledge schemas in my head, which in turn allows me to not only memorize facts but actually put them to work more easily. It helps to revisit these notes over time to continue adapting them as I learn. (This is part of the idea behind 🪴Digital Gardens and the reason I keep these notes.)

Set up a system for tracking goals and progress.

I’m very goal-oriented. I feel adrift and unhappy when I don’t have a clear goal in front of me and a way to track my progress. I’ve tried a few different ways to track my todos and wins (and sometimes I think just changing the system up helps my brain refresh), but there are a few key components to every system:

• Keep one place to visualize tasks on my agenda and their deadlines
• Limit how many tasks I commit to per day so I don’t get overwhelmed
• Make done todos visible somewhere so I can visualize my progress
• Keep a “brag doc” (especially for work) that puts done todos in context — what was the big picture impact? Why did it matter?