Don't Put the Tool Before the Craft

For the most part, I was using my vast expertise in productivity to... make more content about productivity.

Myles helped me avoid an easy error:

Putting the tool before the craft.

To attempt to provide some minimum-viable-scaffolding for productivity, so you can turn off the feed and get back to work, here it is in one sentence:
Do the most important thing for a few high-energy hours, with minimal interruptions, every day.

To the extent you’re going back to working on your tools, it should be driven by some noticeable shortcomings in the actual work. Your knife isn’t cutting like it used to. You’re losing too much time to email. Tool work should always be a focused attempt to fix a specific problem, not passive information consumption hoping to find a quick win that ... See more

We need to find the minimum viable scaffolding to get our work started and then focus on doing the work from there, making little adjustments as we go.

Most of us are wasting time we could be spending learning our craft by playing around with our tools and washing our pickup truck instead of hauling anything.