14 Things My Highly Productive Friends Have Given Up

Deadlines make you superhuman.

Without a deadline, you’ll dream about your productive future and doing the task you’ve been putting off until “tomorrow.” Tony Robbins says it best: “When would now be a good time?”

Use deadlines to give yourself a sense of urgency about your work.

Jump on a trampoline while you’re on the phone. Walk if you don’t own a trampoline. Movement is life. When you move, you feel good. You can make time to move (exercise) or you can exercise while doing tasks that must be done, like chatting to other humans.

They can find a problem with everything. “The world is coming to an end.” We’ve heard it all before, pal.

Preachers of chaos take up your time because they haven’t dealt with their negative thoughts. 

Consuming chaos is anti-motivation.

A process beats focusing on an outcome.

An outcome requires finite willpower. A process is a proven strategy you can follow that puts most of the tasks on auto-pilot for you. Writer, Nicolas Cole, has a writing process he has used to become one of the most-read writers on the internet. I used parts of his process to do the same.

Leave blank space in your calendar to think.

The goal isn’t to have a full calendar. The goal is to have a calendar that lets you read, learn, and speak to new people when you want.

The grandiose moments you think about in your dreams, that will shape your destiny, rarely happen. One-off, big time, one-hit wonders are a fantasy. Chase small moments. Chase small actions, taken daily.

It’s the little actions you take every day that ends up changing your life.

• What do you eat today?
• What do you wear today?
• How will you get to the office today?
• What route will you take to the supermarket?

These decisions take away energy from you. Decisions are energy leaks. Productivity that fuels a rock-solid process requires energy.

You won’t get lucky and find time. The holidays are not the answer to your unfinished dreams. Retirement isn’t either.

Productive people don’t get lucky. No, they get intentionally lucky by doing the tasks that matter each day to them and what they want to achieve in life.

Delete a message or archive it if you think you’ll need it later — you probably won’t. A full email inbox is a distraction. The joy you get looking at an empty inbox is worth every second of ruthless prioritization of emails

If you feel like you’re achieving nothing in your life, experiment with having less goals. Your heroes who achieve seemingly impossible goals focus on doing one thing when you look closely.

Ever used Microsoft OneNote? Kill me now.

Some of the best Productivity apps out there are:

• Trello
• Notion
• Roam Research
• Keep Notes (by Google)
• Pocket
• Deepstash (see what I did there ;) )

Delete the drama from your life, and you’ll have more time to do cool shit.

Evil plans are exhausting. Revenge takes the focus off your goals, and onto meaningless goals. You can’t right every wrong. You can’t fix every broken person. You can fix yourself, though.

These are a few of the things my productive friends have taught me over the years through giving up. I don’t follow all of them and you probably won’t either. But these thoughts act as the potential for future thoughts you might have. Being productive towards a goal you care about helps you find meaning in your life.

Finding meaning in the work you do is the ultimate productivity hack.