My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated
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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. Preliminarily, however, let me strike an extremely important distinction.
At work, you do different sorts of things. 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, 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.
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.