Directives on Productivity (v0.1)

A list of directives on productivity, with a preamble.

Read Me

This is the preamble… we do end up talking about productivity… this is just a bit of productive procrastination.

1. I used to write these things called ‘Adam Scripts’, these were instructions or prompts for myself, something like computer programming for my brain.

2. In my interview with Tom Froese, we talk a little bit about ‘the Knowing’, this sense of knowing what we need to do as artist. When I write morning pages these emerge as lines and lines of things I need to do. “I need to renew my driving licence”. I need to email that client. I need to draw an octopus… in Today’s pages, one of the things I NEED to do and this comes up over and over again is to collect a list of directives. Like the ‘Adam Scripts’ but shorter. Sentences instead of essays. The point I think is to codify knowledge into it’s most useful and potent form.

The following is my directives (for myself) on productivity it’s a list that I’ll keep coming back and adding to and updating.

I’m starting this list now because it’s part of my ‘Knowing’ as revealed in my morning pages. And it’s also the topic of the month for

illoguild

… If you’re interested you can hear us talk about productivity as a group here

Illoguild talks productivity

1. Productivity for its own sake is nonsense, productivity is the measure of useful effort contributed towards an aim.

2. Have an aim and adjust it sparingly, it’s difficult to hit a moving target.

3. When you have an aim contribute to it daily this way you make it a way of life and achieve your aims as a way of life.

4. Understand and apply the Pareto principle, 20% of the effort produce 80% of the results, if you only do these high productivity efforts, you will always be 5 times more productive ( even 500 times if you really consider the principle)

5. One way to arrive at high productivity efforts is to develop a smell for low productivity efforts and ignore them completely.

6. Another way to arrive at high productivity efforts is by understanding your unique strengthens and maximising your use of them.

7. Sequence matters. You will always have an endless ‘do list’. You will only be able to do one thing now. Develop the skill and intuition for being constantly aware of the top dozen most important items on your do list. Do these first. In order of importance.

8. Except for appointments. Don’t follow a clock, to do so is arbitrary foolishness, instead match energy to the task.

9. Avoid appointments, where possible work asynchronously.

10. Charge appropriately for your expertise, and pay people for theirs. Assuming the price is the same you’ll be using money you earn quickly to avoid what would take you a long time, by paying someone sales to do it quickly.

11. Take breaks when the time would be better spent doing so than pushing on on empty.

12. Understand how caffeine works, and prescribe it to yourself skillfully. This means knowing when to abstain as well.

13. Understand timeframes so you stop thinking that everything needs to be done now.

14. Understand what systems and conditions make you feel most productive and communicate this with stakeholders, so that you can set up systems together that benefits the aim the most.

15. Productivity tools are rarely worth the cost to learn how to use them. But you still need systems for tasks, appointments, projects and schedules. So learn or develop systems for these and stick to them.

16. Have a metric for daily productivity. Either dollars earned or hours spent in deep work.

    I’ll keep adding to this list subscribe so you’ll always have access to this growing list.