productive

Back when I wrote about my wishlist for Drafts 5.0, I wanted to have a custom syntax for the editor in Drafts. At the time, this was based on my usage of other text editing apps, and I wanted a the…

I once asked Jerry Seinfeld about the Seinfeld Technique, the amazing productivity secret that supposedly explains his prolific joke-writing and consequent global success. It goes like this: every day that you manage to spend at least some time on your most important creative work, you mark a big red X on your calendar. The goal is not to break the chain of Xs. It turned out he'd suggested it, once, to some guy in a comedy club, then largely forgotten all about it. "It's so dumb it doesn't even seem to be worth talking about," he told me. "If you're a runner and you want to be a better runner, you say, well, I'll run every day, and mark an X on the calendar every day I run. I can't believe this was useful information to anybody! … Really? Are there people who think 'I'll just sit around and do absolutely nothing, and somehow the work will get done'?" I was struck by this exchange, because in productivity-world, the Seinfeld Technique has come to mean "work on what matters most to you, every single day, without fail." But to Seinfeld himself it mainly just seemed to mean that you have to put in effort, repeatedly, over the long haul. No wonder it didn't strike him as a particularly astounding system. In fact, I've come to believe that the every-single-day version of this advice (which novelists are especially guilty of dispensing) is actively terrible. You can guess why: an every-single-day rule is so rigid, so intolerant of the vagaries of life, that you'll inevitably soon fall off the wagon. And once that's happened, you lose all motivation to continue – so you end up doing less, in aggregate, than if you hadn't been quite so exacting in your demands. Instead, I'm a proponent of Dan Harris's excellent alternative, offered in the context of developing a meditation practice, but relevant to many other important goals in life: aim to do it dailyish. If you're prone to making yourself miserable by holding yourself to unmeetable standards, like me, "dailyish" probably sounds a bit self-indulgent. But it's the opposite – because it involves surrendering the thrilling fantasy of yet-to-be-achieved perfection in favour of the uncomfortable experience of making concrete progress, here and now. Besides, it isn't synonymous with "just do it as often as you can"; deep down, you know that if you never average more than a day or two per week on your novel/fitness plan/meditation practice/side business/whatever, then you won't acquire the momentum to move forward. "Dailyish" involves applying more pressure to yourself than that. But (crucial distinction coming up!) it's a matter of pressure rather than of forcing. The appeal behind much productivity advice, I think, is the bewitching idea that there might be a technique or set of techniques that would force accomplishment to occur, making it automatic and inevitable. But there isn't – and in any case the yearning for such techniques usually arises from some buried insecurity or other psychological agenda. Maybe you don't know how to do the work in question, and you're hoping relentless effort might serve as a substitute for that knowledge. Maybe you don't really want to do it at all, but just think you ought to want to do it, so you're using "productivity" to try to force the missing desire into being. Or perhaps you think you need a flawless record of achievement in order to justify your existence on the planet – and if the stakes are that high, clearly you can't afford to put a foot wrong. "Dailyish", on the other hand? I'm not sure I quite have the words for this, but something about "dailyish" shifts the focus away from your particular smorgasbord of psychological problems back to the thing itself – to the creation you're seeking to bring into existence, whether that's a piece of writing or work of art, a happy family, healthier body, meditation habit, or anything else. It's a reminder that in some fundamental way, real productivity – provided you're working on something worth producing to begin with – isn't about you. It's about what's being produced. What matters, in the end, is what gets created, not whether the person doing the creating has an impeccable record of red Xs. Did anyone ever really think Seinfeld owes his success to a productivity technique? Clearly, he owes it to talent, perhaps also to luck – and then, on top of that, to showing up and doing the work, more days than not. So, yes, holding yourself to a more flexible standard, such as "dailyish", is more forgiving than the alternative. But it's not solely a matter of being kinder to yourself. Crucially, it's also about getting you – with all your weird hang-ups and neuroses and ulterior agendas and other psychological nonsense – out of accomplishment's way. • For an entire philosophy of creativity based on the idea of getting yourself out of the way of the creative process, see Robert Fritz's book The Path of Least Resistance, which (I just realised!) partly inspired this post. • I'd love to hear from you – just hit reply. (I read all messages, and try to respond, but not always in a timely fashion: sorry!) If you enjoyed this email, you'd be doing me a big favour by forwarding it to someone else who might like it, or mentioning it wherever you emit opinions online; the "View in a browser" link above will take you to a web version. And if you got this from a friend and would like to subscribe yourself, please do so here. 540 President St, Brooklyn, NY 11215, United States

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Editor: When software developer Brad Isaac told us he had productivity advice from Jerry Seinfeld, we couldn't turn down the chance to hear more. Read on for the whole story from Brad.

The personal website of author Neal Stephenson, unless it's been hacked.

By Duncan Anderson. To see all blogs click here . Reading time:  10 mins Summary: Creating strategies is the ultimate metaskill to know for the unknowable future. IMO ‘intelligence’ is not fixed. IMO in almost any area ‘intelligence’ can be levelled up.  IMO one can s

Tiny interview with Julian Lehr from Stripe.

Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters

Have you ever wondered how Elon Musk is running two billion-dollar companies at once? Musk is an interesting example of someone who manages his time so well that he can work 100 hours a week and still manage to take time out for his hobbies, family, and even Twitter! So, how does he do it?

A free, downloadable calendar to help you practice.

After the response to this recent LifeHacker piece, I thought I would explain the system I use to take notes, research books and keep track of anecdotes, stories and info I come across in my work. This isn’t the perfect system. It might not work for you. All I can say is that since learning it about 7 years ago, it has totally transformed my process and drastically increased my creative output. It’s responsible for helping me publish three books in three years, (along with other books I’ve had the privilege of contributing to), write countless articles published in newspapers and websites, ...

How to efficiently get what you need out of reading, multiple books at a time

One day in your early school years, a teacher probably told you to “take notes” for the first time. Looking around at your fellow classmates, this seemed to involve writing down what the teacher said, word for word, on lined pieces of paper. For most of us, this is how our experience of note-taking started: ... Read more

The full story about why procrastinators routinely ruin their own lives.

How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to.

This interview was recorded earlier this year and originally appeared on The Observer Effect; it has only been lightly edited for formatting here. TABLE OF CONTENTS On productivity Let’s get into it. Over a decade ago, you wrote a …

Marc Andreessen on how he spends his time, learns, the 'build' essay and much more.

Read this article to discover the strategy Warren Buffett uses to simplify his priorities and focus on the right things.

What I've learned about how to be productive and make the most of my time.

I started fasting more frequently, using the Zero App (intermittent, typically the 16/18 hours). Our bodies don't need to constantly be fed. It can slow us down when it's overdone: Here's a good primer thread: This sluggishness I was unconscious about when I was younger. As a teen, and into college I would eat whatever, whenever, thinking that it was normal and not paying any attention to the feeling of being full, the energy drain, and the other side effects like brain fog.

Health, happiness, connection, community, the most important things in life do not happen behind a laptop.

We do all sorts of activities at our desks that affect our ability to produce our best work.

Good news: if you have $17.9 million available, John Steinbeck’s 1.8 acre waterfront retreat is now for sale. It’s tucked onto a grassy peninsula in Upper Sag Harbor Cove, and features a pool, a long pier, and two cozy guest cottages. Arguably most important is the hexagonal, 100-square-foot “writer’s house” overlooking the water. Encountering this […]

Writing in 1801, at the age of 30, Ludwig van Beethoven complained about his diminishing hearing: “from a distance I do not hear the high notes of the instruments and the singers’ voices.” As Arthur C. Brooks recounts in a 2019 op-ed, published in the Washington Post, Beethoven “raged” against his decline, insisting on performing, […]

Plus Minus Next is a simple journaling method. At the top of each column, write + for what worked, – for what didn’t, and → for what you plan to do next.

YouTuber Ali Abdaal shares how he makes the productivity videos that have netted him 1M subscribers