Tips for Productivity, Thinking, and Doing

One of the more underrated insights you can get from reading self-help books is that the story you tell yourself about yourself matters. If you tell yourself you’re very energetic person, that feeling tired is temporary, and you keep this belief going, you actually become more energetic. If you tell yourself you don’t get jetlagged, you might get l... See more

10. Map out problems using logic trees.

This is a classic problem-solving and brainstorming technique, also known as

morphological analysis

. It’ll be familiar to any consultant, as it’s 80% of their secret sauce.

Take a problem, say analyzing a business’s profits (as in consulting). Break it down into

logically exhaustive possibilities

, e.g. “reve... See more

Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.

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This is true for literally everyone, regardless of whether you want to be a writer or not, whether you want to publish or not. Just have a Google Doc in which you add a page a day of whatever’s on your mind. This has a million benefits, but a simple one is just clearing your cache: if you don’t do this, your brain sort of gets clogged by all the th

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When I say ‘restate it in several different ways’, one useful way would be drawing it. Just draw a schematic representation of what you think is being said. Another would be to state it as though you’re writing an article for simple words Wikipedia.

Energy compounds on itself. If you start the morning by getting something done (a workout, an important task, writing) then you’re going to have a higher baseline energy day overall. It’s as though the initial thing gives you a persistent ‘boost’ throughout the day. Doing additional things becomes easier. Without this boost, there’s a good chance I... See more

Most people’s mental models of energy are flawed: they think there’s a ‘tank’ of energy that gets depleted as you spend it. This may be roughly true for physical energy, but mental energy is different: spending mental energy on things that you consider productive or important gives you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop. ... See more

spending

mental energy on things that you consider productive or important

gives

you more mental energy for other things: a positive feedback loop.

Take a problem, say analyzing a business’s profits (as in consulting). Break it down into logically exhaustive possibilities , e.g. “revenue” and “costs”. Break down each branch further into its component parts, e.g. revenue becomes price * quantity. Follow this process recursively, each time breaking the tree down into components.

Now you have a fu

... See more

Do the most important thing first thing in the morning, and don’t check social media until you’ve done it. Because energy compounds, the first actions in the day matter a lot: the right actions get you into a positive spiral, the wrong actions get you into a negative spiral.