Our next question comes from LifehackerAddict928. LifehackerAddict asks, "How do I overcome productivity prong?" He elaborates here, and I think this is useful to hear about his relationship with this. He says, "Do you have any thoughts and suggestions on how I could overcome productivity prong for good? I have practiced time blocking fairly successfully for quite some time now.

I use a straightforward set of tools to do it to avoid productivity prong distractions. I do not want to be about which tool to use, but I still struggle with a persistent, nagging feeling that I might be missing out big time by not using various apps or keyboard shortcuts, etc." Alright, this is a good question because there is a subset of people who really do struggle with this.

The core claim of productivity prong, which by the way, if you want to find out more about, I wrote an article called "The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done." It came out last summer in The New Yorker. My editor and I were excited to get the term "productivity prong" into the hallowed pages of The New Yorker after 100 years.

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. But the core message, if I'm just going to summarize it, is that with the right tools, with the right configuration, with the right software, you can make work easy.

You can make producing very high impact, high value results, something that is a walk in the park. The tool can somehow take off of your plate the cognitive strain of producing really good output. I call shenanigans on that notion. It's not going to do it. Here is what you get with better tools, better configurations, better software.

You can get at max a 20% improvement in the difficulty of getting your work done. That 20% matters. It's nice. I like that when I use Scrivener to write an article instead of Word, I can have two panes. 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, and I can therefore type verbatim from my notes into the article I'm writing.

That makes my life 20% easier. But it's still really hard to write an article. And I wrote seven books without having Scrivener. Yeah, it would have been a little bit easier, but it doesn't make the work itself easy. That's the key thing to keep in mind when you're thinking about productivity habits or tools.

You want a good set of them because you don't want to keep track of things in your mind. You want to be intentional about your work. That really matters. 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.

Nothing can do that for you. Hard work in the end is going to be hard. Now productivity prong hit its peak in the first decade of the 2000s, but there is a particular thread of it that I think has come back in recent years. It's something I've been talking about a lot on this show, which is over promising about what a note-taking system called Zettelkasten can actually offer.

There's this really interesting approach to note-taking that I've talked about on this show. If you look at my interview with Srini Rao from a couple months ago, we got into it, and it's a really interesting way of taking notes where you link your notes with links like you would web pages.

You create a conceptual map of different ideas, a perfectly fine way to take notes. I'm messing around with it myself. There is, however, an extreme view of what is possible of Zettelkasten that is brewing out there, where the actual art of having original creative thoughts is being offloaded, according to the scheme, to the note-taking system itself.

There's an extreme version of this out there where people think that if you're just creating notes and making good links, eventually you will be able to survey those links, to surf or navigate those links, and have really original creative connections come up, and you'll have really brilliant thoughts, and a book or an article will just fall out of your complex web of notes.

I just don't think that's going to happen. I've been writing books and articles my entire adult life, 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, these expert schemas you have in your mind for what articles are, all these hundreds or thousands of articles you've read in your life, and slowly trying to accrete something that could actually work as a piece.

That's never going to just fall out as a side effect of you using a software tool properly. So I give that example just to emphasize that the productivity-prone mindset is still out there. So life hacker addict, care about your tools, care in particular about the types of things I talk about, which is less about tools and more about being intentional with your time and organized with your information.

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. There's no miracle out there, so stop wasting time seeking that miracle. Spend that time instead doing the hard work right in front of you.