The dumbest and best productivity trick

But they don’t address the urge itself. Even if you quit Facebook, or ban yourself from social media during the workday, or exile yourself to a cabin in the mountains, you’ll probably still find it unpleasantly constraining to focus on what matters, so you’ll find some way to relieve the pain by distracting yourself: by daydreaming, taking an unnec

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Eliminating distractions can help prevent unnecessary interruptions, but it’s entirely possible to waste energy mentally thrashing even if you have the entire day free. The best approach to avoid unnecessary cognitive switching is to group similar tasks together. For example, I find it difficult to make progress on creative tasks (like writing or s

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The strategies I’ve collected here represent a greatest hits of sorts, culled from my years of experience battling distracting task lists. This advice is unified by the notion of containment. Several of these ideas focus on containing the overhead tax of tasks you cannot avoid tackling. In many cases, it’s not the actual execution of a small commit

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Simplicity. It is hard to focus on the signal when you’re constantly surrounded by noise. It is more difficult to eat healthy when your kitchen is filled with junk food. It is more difficult to focus on reading a blog post when you have 10 tabs open in your browser. It is more difficult to accomplish your most important task when you fall into the ... See more

In rarefied pursuits like professional writing, the importance of doing fewer minor things so you can do the main things better makes a lot of sense. We like to imagine our novelists cloistered in sheds, toiling in undisrupted concentration, oblivious to the distractions of the world. But we also assume that this lifestyle doesn’t generalize to the

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