Psychology of Productivity

The modern world is quickly dividing us into two groups: those who control their own attention well and those whose attention is controlled by someone else, especially technology.

To put it bluntly, you can’t expect to be productive if you don’t control your own attention.

And here’s the thing: developing a system of getting things done is a constant work in progress. It takes experimentation, constant trial and error. Something might work for you for a few weeks—or months or years—and then all of sudden, it stops working for you. Life happens, priorities change, v...

• If you schedule your work ahead of time—every week or day or whatever works best for you—you gain more control of the attention you’re giving to work.
• There is nothing wrong with a little relaxing or binge watching Netflix as long as you're being intentional about it and scheduling i...

Productivity is a tricky balance. On the one hand, if you treat yourself like a slave, flagellating yourself, locking yourself into a quiet room and not allowing yourself to have any fun, ever, then you’re going to get burnt out and things will slowly come apart.

On the other hand if your a...

There’s nothing wrong with learning new systems of efficiency. But at the end of the day, productivity is a very personal thing. What works for me—or Jeff Bezos, for that matter—probably won’t work for you. And even if it does, it will probably change one day.

The goal is to uncover your ow...

There’s this puritanical ideal of “more work is always better” that permeates the modern culture of work to an almost psychotic degree (especially in the United States).

Studies have shown that just about everyone only has 3-4 hours of truly productive work in them per day. So you should op...