Productivity

Just some notes. Eventually I'd like to turn this into a longish article to shortish book.

Intro

Most Writing is Crap

The internet is full of "# tricks for being more productive". They're mostly crap filled with things like "Make lists" and "don't procrastinate". These won't help.

One of the longest standing works is "Getting Things Done" not necessarily because it's great, but because it goes into depth. I don't even use the techniques in the book and I still read it every few years because it helps me think through what I should be doing.

Why I'm writing this

I've had issues with productivity through my whole life. I'm forgetful, I struggle with procrastination and distraction. I've struggled with these as a student, through internships and jobs and now as a small business owner.

My Approach

We're going to build up. I'm used to programming where the problem is broken down, then solved in pieces.

• Defining the problem
• Measuring the data
• Body
• Psychology
• Habits
• Systems
• Accounting
• Bringing it together

Defining the Problem

The first major challenge is that "Productivity" is a big, fuzzy, ill defined problem. And it means different things for different people.

We will break it into three components

• Efficiency
• Utilization
• Confidence

Before we dig into these too much there one thing to keep in mind. This break down is a model. It is a useful way to think about the problem, but like all models, it is not a perfect representation. It leaves out details and will occasionally break. It's a tool, and like all tools, it's not always the right tool. So use it as a starting point and with discretion.

Efficiency

Efficiency is how long it takes you to do something. The tricky thing with defining and measuring efficiency is that it's really hard to get a benchmark. I try to spend 30 minutes each morning taking care of emails. Sometimes that's plenty of time, sometimes it's not. The number of emails and their complexity changes and that has no impact on my efficiency. But sometimes I'm distracted or I spend too much time trying to craft the perfect response instead of being satisfied with "good enough".

And changes in efficiency don't always mean the same thing. If you're not getting faster at something it may be that you've fallen into a rut or it may be that you've achieved the maximum efficiency you're going to for that task. We always want to look for ways to measure and improve efficiency, but not too much - the cost of additional efficiency can quickly outweigh the gains and turn into "yak shaving".

Utilization

This is "how many hour you spent wisely". Utilization can be tricky because you don't want to fill every minute of your day with tasks. And I would argue that spending time doing things you enjoy can still be good utilization. Which means utilization isn't "how many hours did I work" but "how did I do balancing how I spent my hours".

Confidence

I use this term more in the sense of statistics "confidence interval" that high-school-guidance-councilor "be confident in yourself". This how much confidence you have that you will have the information you need, when you need, a clear picture of what you should be doing, are capable of doing and will do something that is a good use of the time.

So rather than confidence in yourself, this is confidence in your system. And it shouldn't be 100%. Every system fail sometimes. You should have a reasonable confidence that your system will achieve good efficiency and utilization most of the time.

Body

I'll start here because the research on this topic is the clearest and it can have the greatest impact at the lowest cost.

Sleep

There are so many myths and bad beliefs around sleep. And almost everyone has bad habits. Fortunately, sleep is simple. That's not to say it isn't hard, it's just not complex.

The first thing is that you probably need 8 hours of sleep. The 8 hours is not a hard and fast rule, but it's a safe bet. If you ever have the opportunity (a week or two where you don't need to "get up"), a great experiment is to let your schedule drift and see how many hours of sleep you tend towards. Take note that your schedule may drift, but after a few days you'll find you're sleeping a consistent number of hours.

Another approach is to get your schedule stable at 8 hours (or more) and try cutting back by 15 minutes once every week. You'll find a time that works for you. However, for the rest of this section, I will refer to 8-hours as definitive because it's simpler.

The important thing here is to break any screwed up notion that getting by on less sleep or waking up earlier is somehow impressive or shows character. I cannot say how stupid this is. In particular, there is overwhelming research that diminished sleep can have enormous detrimental effects on decision making and critical thinking. And the best part of that is it impairs the individuals ability to recognize their own reduced capacity.

Falling Asleep

I have the great fortune of finding it easy to get to sleep. And I recognize that some people seriously struggle with insomnia. But there are a few things that can help.

I have done some research into this, both out of curiosity as well as to help my wife who often has trouble falling asleep. What I've found has helped her and even made it a bit easier for me to get to sleep. The first, most important thing - falling asleep can be a slow process. That doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. For some people, reaching stage 1 sleep can take half an hour and during stage 1 you will still be semi conscious, and that can last 10 minutes. So when going to sleep, commit to laying down, closing your eyes and waiting there for what will probably seem like hours.

But that's only half the battle. The other problem is that being locked in your own mind can be rough. It's easy to start worrying, start planning or anything else that will keep you awake. There's no silver bullet for this, but there are a lot of techniques. Try a few and one should work, if you exhaust my list, there are others, try those.

• Word Games: These don't work for me, but they work for my wife. There are lots of variations, but one example is "find a category and a word that belongs to that category so the last letter of the category is the first letter of the word", an answer would be "Food:Date".
• Counting breaths: this works best for me, I focus on slowing my breath down as much as is still comfortable and my breaths down from 100. I almost never make it down to 1.
• Clear your mind: this is difficult but can actually be a lot of fun. Try to clear your mind of any thought. When I do this I start by focusing on the concept of nothing, then on nothing at all.

Psychology

Let's start here - when trying to be productive, pretend that there is no such thing as "will". If you try to will yourself to procrastinate less, you will fail. If you're going to will yourself out of bed, you're going to oversleep.

What we will treat as very real is "ego depletion" or "cognitive energy". It's kind of like will-power in that more cognitive energy will let you take on scarier tasks. But where it's different is that you can't summon cognitive energy. At any point in time, you have some amount and you need to decide how to invest it. Also, you can invest in future cognitive energy.

Correlation and Causation

The biggest weapon in our arsenal is correlation. Try something, see if there's a correlation to increased productivity. It's often said that correlation is not causation, but we'll take a Bayesian approach and say correlation is enough to assume causation, until we have stronger data that contradicts that.

Want-to-do vs Want-to-have-done vs Want-to-have-not-done

English has a Sapir-Whorf trap, we muddle together present and future tense. So when I say "I want to clean the garage", it's not really clear if I want to go do that now, or if it's something I'll eventually do, maybe years from now. I will use the terms want-to-do and want-to-have-done for things I want to do now and things I want to do someday respectively.

What saps cognitive energy are the thing we want-to-have-done but don't want-to-do.

Systems

System Overload

This is a principle that is true of almost all systems, not just productivity. If a system is working well, it's load tends to increase. If there's nothing to balance that load, it will increase until the system breaks, or reaches the average of the other systems it competes with. That's a little abstract, so let's look at a concrete example.

Let's say Bob is disorganized. He wants to make an improvement. So he starts a simple To-Do list. For a few days, it works wonderfully. He's on top of things, he finishes one task picks another off the list and gets back to work. As his confidence in the list grows, he adds more things to it. Bigger things (repaint garage), abstract things (plan retirement) and things with low immediate priority (plan a vacation). The list gets long and scary. It's no longer a source of flow, but a nightmarish hellscape of personal shortcomings. So Bob stops using it.

This problem can show up in many systems. There are also many solutions. In general they all follow a few patterns. Most systems have a capacity. For a to-do list, it's how many things you can quickly scan (probably 15-20). When designing a system, figure out what it's capacity is. Of course the obvious problem with that is everyone has way more than 15-20 things "to-do". This is generally resolved with layering. Continuing with to-do lists, you may have one list for today, one list for this week and a backlog list. Some systems have even more layers (see 43 Folders). The backlog list may be big and cumbersome, but you'll only need to scan it once a week. And the weekly list would still be too long to be usable, but you'd only be scanning that once a day. Now the daily list is usable.

The other issue with capacity is you always want some to spare. Systems tend to start lagging when they get near capacity. For example, a heuristic for organizing storage is "always maintain 30% available storage". It's a heuristic not a rule, so when you notice you're getting close to (or have dropped below) 30% free space, schedule some time to either clear out some space or expand. This should be true of all systems. Figure out not just the maximum capacity, but the "preferred operating capacity". A to-do list may work fine with 20 items, but it may work much better with 10.

To be clear, this is only an example. You need to find what works for you. But when designing system components (to-do lists, calendars, archives) consider their maximum capacity, operating capacity and layering.

Accounting

Once you have a system in mind, make sure you have a way of accounting.

Units

The most important key here is to have some "units" of productivity. For me, I assign every task a point value. One point is equal to ten minutes, if it's something I enjoy, I may assign 2 points to a 30 minute task, and if it's something I strongly dislike, I may assign 6 points to a 40 minute task.

How you actually do this is unimportant. What is important is that you can use the units for projection and comparison. Being able to look at the next few days and project what you can and cannot accomplish is vital not only to being productive but avoiding unnecessary stress. Being able to compare two weeks and spot an increase or decrease in productivity is crucial.

Bringing it Together

I've tried to avoid advocating for a particular system. Instead, I've attempted to get you thinking about what you need

Balance

Find the right balance for you. Figure out what you will be happy to do and be happy to have done.