Tips for Productivity, Thinking, and Doing

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

Tell the right stories about yourself.

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 ... 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.

[2] As Alexey Guzey

has pointed out

, sleep can be thought of as similar to hunger in this way: everyone accepts that you shouldn’t just eat whenever you feel like it or you’re likely to overeat, but for some reason people don’t apply the same reasoning to sleep.

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

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.

3. Tell the right stories about yourself.

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 yourse... See more

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

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

... See more