Introduction

Nearly everyone wants to be more productive. There is a huge amount of advice on this. I want to share (and keep for my own reference) some strategies I found effective. ¹¹ Matt Might wrote an excellent post on his blog on this as well. Before diving into more practical advice, it is worth considering what makes someone productive or unproductive and the broader goals.

I think it is important to consider the goals of productivity. After all, with infinite time and no deadlines, productivity stops being important. In fact, motivating any effort at all becomes difficult. But my personal philosophy is to use productivity as a tool to create free time for health, activities, and people you care about, all while still achieving your goals. To this end, explicitly or implicitly recognizing what is important to you can be productive. Being fast at responding to emails frees up more time for research. Being a productive researcher frees up time for friends and family. Being healthy in diet and exercise extends and improves the quality of this time with them.

When thinking about how to be productive, every strategy below does one of two things: it either lowers the barrier to start productive work, or raises the barrier to being unproductive. For many people, myself included, discipline and rigid structure aren’t sustainable on their own. It also makes failure more personal and more demotivating. Instead, it is more practical design your environment so that being productive takes less energy.

Lower the barrier to start

Consolidate recurring effort into one-time effort

Often, replacing long-term recurring tasks with a single larger one-time task helps productivity. Even if the one-time task takes more effort initially, the mental energy and scheduling flexibility gained by not having to repeat it can outweigh the added time (within reasonable limits). What makes some tasks hard is often their recurring nature — the consistent energy and commitment required to complete them even in weeks when other things matter more.

Money can be thought of as a conversion of effort into a substance. Spending money on recurring costs is the same as spending the time it took to earn that money. These transactions aren’t always lossy — if the recurring cost is cheap, you earn enough, or you have enough spare time — but generally, the act of purchasing recurring items should also be considered part of its time cost. I have also found myself using fewer disposable items where possible, with the added benefit of eco-friendliness.

Automate or build a quick tool to outsource labor

Write a script or build a tool quickly to solve your problem. With generative AI and some simple scripting, it is becoming easier and easier to write small scripts. Although generative AI can sometimes struggle with larger projects, for smaller scripts it can be very convenient.

Try to keep these solutions simple. Although it can be better to manage your own tools, also check for simple, readily available solutions first. For example, Google Calendar has an appointments feature through which other people can book your time. This saves the effort of managing your calendar and setting up appointments manually (which I always found got confusing and redundant quickly). I also use the tasks feature quite extensively. The integration with Thunderbird isn’t the best by default, but Provider for Google Calendar seems to fill in the gaps.

Eliminate redundancy for inevitable tasks

Repeating redundant tasks and maintaining multiple parallel similar things is a waste of energy. For example, I like to use a mail client, not for any composition feature, but because I can consolidate my email accounts across Gmail and Outlook and view them all in the same feed. Similarly, I would not purchase a dicer if I have a knife. A hybrid wok with a lid is also a great kitchen implement, since it can function as both a pot and a pan, and can handle many types of ranges.

Redundancy can also create major problems. In fact, this is why I created my website using Typst — so that I could update both my CV and personal website at once. ²² which I learned from brutal experience, having accidentally submitted a version of my CV with incorrect dates during grad school applications ³³ Thankfully nearly every school let me submit a new version of my CV, since I had submitted everything several weeks early in case of disaster.) These sorts of things are inevitable, so eliminating redundancy here doesn’t help the way, say, owning too many plates does.

Weigh maintenance cost against benefits

Does owning a possession save me more time, energy, or effort than the effort required to maintain it? A good rule of thumb: is there another tool that does the same task with similar effort? In the kitchen, a good example is a knife. Most people only need one or two. As long as it’s maintained, one well-kept chef’s knife can handle nearly everything, so the time spent keeping several specialized knives sharp vastly outweighs the time saved by using each one for its “ideal” task. Watches have become largely useless in an era where everyone has a phone. Every item carries some burden on the mind, time, and energy. There is nothing wrong with any item inherently, so, as George Fox (might have) said, “hold it as long as thou canst.” ⁴⁴ http://www.qhpress.org/quakerpages/qwhp/pennswor.htm

I used to feel obligated to hold onto possessions I owned or had been given, and felt very emotionally attached to them, but this ultimately created more clutter than it was worth. Worse, the emotional significance of each item was lessened, since I had so many. I am now much more intentional about giving and receiving gifts, and have shifted toward minimalism — valuing and using only the gifts that address a real need in my life.

Make productive behaviors easy to access

Make it easier to access productive behaviors. This is most obvious with food: if I keep healthy food around and prepared, I almost always find myself eating healthy without thinking about it. When I wanted to practice piano more during COVID, doing my work near the piano made me naturally play more, simply because I interacted with it so much. Neatness achieves the same thing. Space (including digital spaces) with little to do other than productive tasks, lowers the barrier to starting work. Less effort gets wasted hunting for something buried in the mess, and there are fewer distractions around to catch your attention and pull it elsewhere.

Rely on habits

Forgetting to brush your teeth is rather difficult. It takes no willpower to do, it just happens automatically. Habits are by far the easiest way to accomplish tasks, especially low-exertion, time-consuming tasks, which must happen repetitively. Building habits is difficult, but once they are created the cost of maintaining them is very low.

Raise the barrier to unproductivity

Create scarcity

I hate doing the dishes. Truly, I despise it. Given the option, I would never do it. But I care enough about the environment not to rely only on disposable utensils, so instead, I eat out of a single microwaveable pasta bowl that doubles as a plate. It forces me to clean it right after use, or I won’t have a bowl for the next meal. This also forces me to eat intentionally.

This may not be practical for everyone, but it accomplishes the same effect: the barrier to being unproductive, or letting tasks accumulate, is diminished.

Reduce recurring energy costs

Reduce the energy associated with the environment if possible. One major drain of energy for me is notifications and emails. A few years ago, my phone broke. White waiting for the new one for two weeks, I was forced to let people wait for responses. I felt much freer, and more able to accomplish tasks without distractions. The background noise associated with that thing had gone. That’s not practical long-term, but it pushed me toward other cuts. I decided not to use a smartwatch to not have to worry about notifications. Phone fitness tracking, smart rings, and cheap pedometers now also cover much of fitness tracking functionality now as well.

I interact with the internet mostly through RSS feeds and newsletters, but I was running into a few problems. My inbox was getting cluttered, and keeping it clean took sustained energy. I was also getting enough notifications in a day that I felt constantly tied to my phone to respond and deal with them. Most weren’t important and didn’t need a response, but deciding that still took consistent effort, especially for newsletters with irregular schedules. I found that making an aggregation tool like Mailbrew helped curb this. My biggest complaint was that the number of sources was limited and I couldn’t set a digest for specific days of the week, but it serves the purpose well. ⁵⁵ https://matt.might.net/articles/productivity-tips-hints-hacks-tricks-for-grad-students-academics/#procrastination

Make unproductive behaviors hard to access

If your phone is always nearby and fun to use, it’s easy to reach for it. This, to some extent, is why social media is so addictive — it’s easy to engage with endlessly and at no cost. So: block Instagram, YouTube, etc. on your phone. Unsubscribe and unfollow — every YouTube channel automatically generates an RSS feed you can subscribe to instead. XKCD had a similar idea for raising the barrier to browsing on the computer as well, ⁶⁶ https://blog.xkcd.com/2011/02/18/distraction-affliction-correction-extensio/?blogid=79314890&blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog. I made such a firefox and thunderbird extension here with the help of generative AI: ⁷⁷ Firefox Thunderbird. I’ve also found a slow, cheap phone with a small screen good at making phone activities less fun, while staying functional enough for email and messages. Put your phone away in class and while working. Leave it somewhere out of reach.

You can always access an apps or sites, but having to do so every time creates enough friction to avoid compulsive checking.

Conclusion

When trying to be more productive, consistency matters more in the long run than any single burst of motivation. Mechanisms and environment will, in the long run, be more positive than flash-in-the-pan effort. Deviation from these systems is natural, and is fine. You can enjoy your vacation, your weekend trip, etc. and that’s fine; lapsing is neither a moral failure, and can even be productive to let the brain relax, it is just a data point. Becoming more productive is an ongoing endeavor, and there are many strategies you can use, but in the end, don’t chase perfection. The attempt itself is worth making.