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Productivity.page
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# Introduction
The field of productivity has a lot of advice that is too vague, too specific, or introduces too many silly acronyms. Causality errors abound.
I'd like to approach productivity as applying design, which has established principles (see other topic), to ones own life. Here's a quote: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." - Antoinè De Saint-Exupéry. So simplifying things is the ultimate goal. You see this idea often being called zen, e.g. Zen Habits. Whatever.
It's tempting to go to the other extreme and say all technology is bad, but I don't think that is the case. E.g. SRS makes managing memory easier because that task is well-suited for computational work.
Other than design principles, which encapsulate psychology, there are ideas like minimum effective dose, the 80-20 principle, etc. And some areas of psychology that don't typically show up all that much in design, particularly
# Goals and planning
* Goal-making and having "vision" are important, probably.
* Kaizen - A well-established idea in psychology is that doing a small task for someone will make one more likely to then to larger tasks. That works for oneself as well. The Kaizen strategy then is to take your big goal and define a first, tiny step that will get you in that direction. Make it so slow that it is impossible not to do. Flossing one tooth is an example.
# Macro strategy
When you have a lot going on, it becomes necessary to economize time. Making it more efficient gives you more freedom.
* Timeblocking - Schedule several-hour blocks. No work goes on outside of those blocks. This helped keep me from worrying that I had stuff to do because I was either doing it or knew it was scheduled to get done. Designating my room as a no-work-zone recently has kept me from even attempting work during blocks of unstructured time and those blocks are more enjoyable now, even if they are a bit harder to obtain (have to walk back to my room).
# Micro strategy
* Actionable items - The big lesson of Getting Things Done. A lot of what I'd like my energy to go into involves abstract idea processing and generating, but I don't think that is really controllable, other than by giving myself more freedom. Actionable items are usually easy to come up with "read some pages", "write some words" -- just don't give yourself tasks that have ambiguous actions (e.g. "do research paper").
* Timeboxing - The benefit here is focus, energy, and fighting perfectionism. See the AJATT series:http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/timeboxing-trilogy-part-1-what...
* Tracking - [Tracking](Persnal Informatics) helps you establish good planning. It can even be a strategy for "automatic" results (i.e. results from unconscious actions). For example, in 4-Hour Body, Ferriss tells the story of a guy who loses weight with zero conscious effort other than tracking his daily progress (and occasionally gorging when he starts to lose weight too quickly).
## Domain-specific enhancements
* Reading
* Managing ideas
* Computers
...coming soon?
# Training and mastery
This is arguably getting outside the domain of productivity. I've posted some links about mastery in the learning thread.
One way to think about it is that the above techniques are all ways to get a fixed amount of work done in an efficient way. Training is about doing work more effectively or faster. The main analogy is to strength training: you have to incrementally break past your ability level, then have intervals of rest. I'm currently reading about this in the book The Power of Full Engagement http://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226747
The argument in the book Flow (seriously I see it cited in every other book I read though it's not the most engaging) is that this approach to doing stuff is highly enjoyable, perhaps the only way of attaining enjoyment (as opposed to pleasure): http://www.amazon.com/Flow-Psychology-Experience-Mihaly-Csikszentmihalyi/dp/0061339202/
# References
Yes, personal development books come across as hokey, usually. But they are generally written by people who have learned some important stuff and are occasionally well-written. There's a whole "productivity of reading productivity books" for extracting maximum value, see here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/why-the-way-we-read-sucks-and-how-to-fix-it-part-4-why-srs-personal-development-books
Generally good books:
* [Getting Things Done](http://www.amazon.com/Getting-Things-Done-Stress-Free-Productivity/dp/0142000280/)
* [The Power of Full Engagement](http://www.amazon.com/Power-Full-Engagement-Managing-Performance/dp/0743226747)
* [The War of Art](http://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/0446691437/)
* [Eat That Frog](http://www.amazon.com/Eat-That-Frog-Great-Procrastinating/dp/1576754227/)
* [One Small Step Can Change Your Life](http://www.amazon.com/Small-Step-Change-Your-Life/dp/0761129235/)
Blogs that are frequently worthwhile:
* [All Japanese All the Time](http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/)
* [Steve Pavlina](http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/)