How Do I Overcome Productivity Pr0n?

00:00:05.000 | Our next question comes from LifehackerAddict928.

00:00:11.000 | LifehackerAddict asks, "How do I overcome productivity prong?"

00:00:17.000 | He elaborates here, and I think this is useful to hear about his relationship with this.

00:00:21.000 | He says, "Do you have any thoughts and suggestions on how I could overcome productivity prong for good?

00:00:27.000 | I have practiced time blocking fairly successfully for quite some time now.

00:00:31.000 | I use a straightforward set of tools to do it to avoid productivity prong distractions.

00:00:37.000 | I do not want to be about which tool to use, but I still struggle with a persistent,

00:00:43.000 | nagging feeling that I might be missing out big time by not using various apps or keyboard shortcuts, etc."

00:00:52.000 | Alright, this is a good question because there is a subset of people who really do struggle with this.

00:00:58.000 | The core claim of productivity prong, which by the way, if you want to find out more about,

00:01:05.000 | I wrote an article called "The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done."

00:01:10.000 | It came out last summer in The New Yorker.

00:01:12.000 | My editor and I were excited to get the term "productivity prong" into the hallowed pages of The New Yorker after 100 years.

00:01:19.000 | So I don't know if that's a high point or a low point, but read that article for the whole history of this movement.

00:01:23.000 | But the core message, if I'm just going to summarize it, is that with the right tools,

00:01:28.000 | with the right configuration, with the right software, you can make work easy.

00:01:34.000 | You can make producing very high impact, high value results, something that is a walk in the park.

00:01:41.000 | The tool can somehow take off of your plate the cognitive strain of producing really good output.

00:01:49.000 | I call shenanigans on that notion. It's not going to do it.

00:01:54.000 | Here is what you get with better tools, better configurations, better software.

00:01:58.000 | You can get at max a 20% improvement in the difficulty of getting your work done.

00:02:03.000 | That 20% matters. It's nice.

00:02:06.000 | I like that when I use Scrivener to write an article instead of Word, I can have two panes.

00:02:12.000 | And on one pane I have the notes from my research, and on the other pane is the section of the article I'm writing,

00:02:17.000 | and I can therefore type verbatim from my notes into the article I'm writing.

00:02:22.000 | That makes my life 20% easier.

00:02:25.000 | But it's still really hard to write an article.

00:02:28.000 | And I wrote seven books without having Scrivener.

00:02:31.000 | Yeah, it would have been a little bit easier, but it doesn't make the work itself easy.

00:02:36.000 | That's the key thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about productivity habits or tools.

00:02:40.000 | You want a good set of them because you don't want to keep track of things in your mind.

00:02:44.000 | You want to be intentional about your work. That really matters.

00:02:47.000 | You want to get rid of friction you don't need, but don't sell yourself on the image that the tools itself is going to make hard work not hard.

00:02:54.000 | Nothing can do that for you. Hard work in the end is going to be hard.

00:02:58.000 | Now productivity prong hit its peak in the first decade of the 2000s,

00:03:03.000 | but there is a particular thread of it that I think has come back in recent years.

00:03:08.000 | It's something I've been talking about a lot on this show,

00:03:11.000 | which is over promising about what a note-taking system called Zettelkasten can actually offer.

00:03:18.000 | There's this really interesting approach to note-taking that I've talked about on this show.

00:03:23.000 | If you look at my interview with Srini Rao from a couple months ago, we got into it,

00:03:27.000 | and it's a really interesting way of taking notes where you link your notes with links like you would web pages.

00:03:32.000 | You create a conceptual map of different ideas, a perfectly fine way to take notes.

00:03:37.000 | I'm messing around with it myself.

00:03:40.000 | There is, however, an extreme view of what is possible of Zettelkasten that is brewing out there,

00:03:47.000 | where the actual art of having original creative thoughts is being offloaded, according to the scheme, to the note-taking system itself.

00:03:56.000 | There's an extreme version of this out there where people think that if you're just creating notes and making good links,

00:04:01.000 | eventually you will be able to survey those links, to surf or navigate those links,

00:04:06.000 | and have really original creative connections come up, and you'll have really brilliant thoughts,

00:04:10.000 | and a book or an article will just fall out of your complex web of notes.

00:04:15.000 | I just don't think that's going to happen.

00:04:17.000 | I've been writing books and articles my entire adult life,

00:04:20.000 | and there really is no shortcut to this very human and very cognitively demanding task of thinking and sorting through all this stuff you know,

00:04:29.000 | these expert schemas you have in your mind for what articles are,

00:04:33.000 | all these hundreds or thousands of articles you've read in your life,

00:04:35.000 | and slowly trying to accrete something that could actually work as a piece.

00:04:39.000 | That's never going to just fall out as a side effect of you using a software tool properly.

00:04:44.000 | So I give that example just to emphasize that the productivity-prone mindset is still out there.

00:04:49.000 | So life hacker addict, care about your tools, care in particular about the types of things I talk about,

00:04:56.000 | which is less about tools and more about being intentional with your time and organized with your information.

00:05:00.000 | That's all great, but also be ready that hard work is going to be hard, and that's not a bug, that's a feature.

00:05:07.000 | There's no miracle out there, so stop wasting time seeking that miracle.

00:05:12.000 | Spend that time instead doing the hard work right in front of you.

00:05:15.000 | [Music]

How Do I Overcome Productivity Pr0n?

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