What Maximum Productivity Looks Like for Me

If I look at things that have turned out well in my life (my marriage, some of my essays, my current career) the “design process” has been the same in each case. It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding .1 Put simply:

• I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people

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A consistent challenge in my development as a researcher has been: how to cultivate deep, stable concentration in the face of complex, ill-structured creative problems?

In roles oriented around operation and execution, I benefited enormously from standard “productivity” advice. Task managers and time-planning tools were essential. But now, task mana

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More and more, I think my issues with conventional productivity advice – indeed, with the very notion of productivity – boil down to this: Spending your days trying to get through a list of things you feel you have to do is a fundamentally joyless and soul-destroying way to live; and most productivity problems, like distraction or procrastination o... See more