My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated, for Your Most Important Tasks
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I want to give you my best recommendations for increased productivity and decreased procrastination—first, as a concise list and second, as the same list but annotated and explained in greater detail. The kind of strategies I recommend do not focus on utilizing conscious will power (our weakest organ!) but rather on “fostering automaticity” via setting up habits and engineering the environmental stimuli of our workspace. It’s a synthesis of Atomic Habits by James Clear, Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, Deep Work by Cal Newport, and my own research into dual-process psychology like System 1/ System 2 paradigm of Daniel Kahneman in his Thinking Fast and Slow.
Preliminarily, however, let me strike an extremely important distinction between two kinds of work we do.
At work, you do different sorts of things, right? There are different kinds of tasks you perform. You reply to emails to confirm meeting times and you also write the memo that will change the strategic direction of the company for the next five years. The email to confirm a meeting time is something a personal assistant could do for you. Even if you don’t have a personal assistant, it is still the kind of thing a personal assistant could do for you. However, only you could write the memo that will change the company’s strategic direction. Some work you do is idiosyncratic to you. Only you could do it. Or, at the very least, it’s the work that you will be recognized and rewarded for producing. I’m going to call this your “sui generis work.”
If you are able to make a distinction between the important, deep, sui generis work you do and the less important, superficial, busy-work you do, then you should absolutely apply the following recommendations to your important, deep, sui generis work.
Writers, lawyers, software developers, desk jockeys, and “knowledge workers” in general will find the following recommendations helpful for increasing productivity and decreasing procrastination. Anybody who has sui generis work can apply these recommendations with excellent results.
Do your sui generis work at the same time and place every day.
In the workspace you’ve set aside for your sui generis work, do only your sui generis work. No Facebooking there.
To block potential media and technological distractions, turn off Notifications, use Airplane Mode and the Freedom app or turn off your Wi-Fi.
Establish “deferral policies” for colleagues who might interrupt your sui generis work.
Do not multitask; when it comes to your sui generis work, monotask, i.e., work on one thing at a time, perhaps with a timer.
Tip #1: Do your "sui generis" work at the same time and place every day
Set aside a time and a place so you do your sui generis work at the same place every day and at the same time. For example, a writer should set up a habit to write at the same time of day every day. Protect this time ferociously. Do not book any meetings or phone calls at this time. Say “I’m busy; I have a meeting at that time,” if you have to. We want to foster automaticity so that our non-conscious activation system sets us to work. Writing at the same time every day (or doing ...
Tip #2: In the workspace you’ve set aside for your "sui generis" work, do only your "sui generis" work there. No Facebooking in that workspace.
It is not a space dedicated to your sui generis work if you do other kinds of work there, and especially not if you Facebook there. The environment in which you do your sui generis work needs to be distinct from your other space in which you do your other tasks. Because it is the environmental cues that will play the role of the “conditioned stimulus” at the outset. Once the conditioning is established, you will be inclined to set to work simply by exposing ...
Tip #3: Go Dark while Working on your Sui Generis Tasks
The science shows that interruptions of sophisticated work cause quality of performance to decrease. When you are interrupted in your sui generis work, your work results in inferior quality product. In lab settings, interruptions of trivial tasks cause there to be a certain measurable time before resumption of work on the task takes place. Interruptions in the lab setting of complicated work—which can stand in for what we’ve been calling
Tip #4: Establish Deferral Policies for Colleagues who might Interrupt your "Sui Generis" Work
Studies show that distractions at work come from the same small number of places over and over again. There are three main kinds of distractions. The very tools we work with such as our email client, our phones, and our web browsers can stop working for us and start working against us. Media or technological interruption is one kind of distraction from ...
Tip #5: Do Not Multitask
Job seekers used to brag on their resumes about their ability to multitask. They had better not do that anymore. The latest scientific work suggests that multitasking is a myth. When you think you are multitasking, what you are actually doing is simply attempting to work while being distracted with worse results. You never really do multiple things at the same time. Instead, you work on one thing and then another and back to the first one and, studies show, the quality of your work on each goes ...
