Do you squander your valuable work hours?

Hours that you’ve painstakingly gathered through early mornings, quick lunches, and fast-walking?.

Have you ever sat down to work, opened up Chrome, realized you need to clean your Desktop because the screenshots annoy you, then you open up Gmail and a read a few emails - and then you take a quick break and scroll on TikTok for a few minutes… and suddenly 30 minutes have gone by.

Let’s say you write a blog like me.

Despite having 2 hours free on your calendar, you actually only end up with 30 minutes of ACTUAL writing time. Enough time to get into the groove, but not enough to stay in it.

You pump out a quality article, at best, once a week (if that).

Now further imagine that you have multiple responsibilities to juggle.

You write, but you also code. You not only have multiple articles to write, but multiple features to build, meetings to take, emails to respond to, research to do.

It gets complicated quick.

There’s far too many things to do and far too many distractions (including “productive” distractions) that steal your time and energy.

Sahil Bloom once said, “No one cares about your deep work ritual or morning routine if you don’t get sh*t done. Input quality may get you social media likes, but output quality (and quantity) is what gets you paid.”

After many hours of reading, research, experimentation, and struggle over the years I’ve collected a few tools to give yourself the best chance of producing QUALITY output.

The reason I say quality not quantity is because because a large quantity of garbage is still garbage.

We’re focused on results here, not output.

The tools to maximize your personal productivity fall into two steps steps:

how to gain and protect your attention (so you don’t white-knuckle your way through work) = playing defense
how to prioritize your attention to produce the most results = playing offense

This article is long, and reads like a short book. Take your time and understand each framework. (Each framework is a day’s worth of writing work).

Play Defense

Agree or disagree? The modern world is designed to steal your attention.

TikTok, junk food, junk products, breaking news, push notifications, text messages. emails… all designed to get you to look. Just for a split second!

Attention is gold. Truly.

It’s more important than time. It’s definitely more important than money.

The currency of life is attention.

How can you be productive when literally everything works against your focused attention?You’d be taking one step forward and two steps back.

Before you do anything else, let’s clean the slate. That’s where “defensive” strategies for productivity come in.

Let’s begin.

1. Address the low hanging fruit

Low hanging fruit means things that are easy to do, and provide the most gain.

The first thing to do is get rid of the attention-seekers.

The following things have given me an incredible productivity increase. So much that you wouldn’t believe it.

Step one. Clear your phone screens of apps. Only keep the ones you actually use every day. You can always find the rest through the search bar.

Step two. Cancel all the push notifications that don’t provide value. Personally, I’m on DND 24/7.

Step three. Clear your computer Desktop once and for all. All the screenshots, folders, and more. Clean your Downloads folder while you’re at it. If you’re running out storage, clear things out, get Google Drive.

Step four. Clear your desk and keep it clear. Clear desk, clear mind. Genuinely. Try it.

I know some creatives have messy desks and they’re okay with it. But you’re not them. Just trust me, clear your desk. Get a junk drawer and throw all your stuff in there.

That’s all. Thank me later.

2. Close the open loops

A long time ago, I learnt a trick to get rid of songs that are stuck in your head.

It’s simple: you listen to the ending of the song. The reason why is the Zeigarnik effect:

a psychological phenomenon stating that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Let’s saying you’ve been meaning to email someone, or call someone, or run a particular errand.

Even if you’re not actively thinking about that task, it’s going to steal from your attention. You don’t realize it, but your subconscious is busy computing in the background - just like a song stuck in your head.

Once you “close open loops” - i.e. do (or cross out) those tasks that you started but didn’t complete, or that you wrote down in your to-do list but never got to - your subconscious is free to think about more important things.

Ever notice that the answer or an idea just suddenly comes to you? That’s the subconscious at work.

Closing loops helps particularly with creative tasks: product ideation, writing or poetry.

It also helps with the difficult decisions: do I take the job, do I move out, do I proceed with this idea?

Try it. You’ll open up a hell of a lot of brain power that you otherwise occupy with pointless tasks.

Bonus: you can use this as an “offense” hack too. Before you take a break, write down the next step. That way, your brain stays engaged and subconsciously solves hard problems.

3. Conserve your energy so you can do hard things

Naval Ravikant once said, “Work like a lion, not a cow.”

The biggest lie that the corporate world gave us is that you need to be productive for 8 hours a day. It’s low intensity. It produces low-intensity results.

Life is not actually a marathon. If you ran a marathon for 16 hours of the day (8 hours sleeping) can you imagine how exhausted you’d be?

Life should be many sprints that end up looking like a marathon.

Here’s an unfortunate truth. Unless you’re on prescription stimulants, you can’t be high energy all the time.

Some tasks require a “high activation energy” to do. These tasks require a great deal of courage, energy, and intelligence - but for a short amount of time.

Think about interviews, public speaking, sales calls, writing an amazing email, critical debugging, or a 1-rep max lift. If you live on that level of energy for your entire life, you’re going to burn out and not have a good a time.

And yet, most make-or-break moments of our life come down to these.

Instead of living “somewhere in the middle” - why not conserve energy and prioritize ruthlessly so we’re prepared for the moments where we really need to be present?

If you’ve decided to do something, why not do it right?

Why not wait for the right opportunity and put every ounce of your energy to take advantage of it?

4. Prevent burn out through the “energy balance sheet”

Think about your body’s energy as a balance sheet. What activities consume the most and give you the most energy (both physical and mental)?

Shape your life to contain activities that give you the most energy, or you risk burnout.

Remember, hard tasks do not necessarily consume more energy than they give you.

A marathon runner may come out of a marathon extremely physically tired, but the exhilaration and sense of accomplishment of the activity may give them enough mental energy to now pick up other tasks with more intensity.

We are defined as the activities that give us the most energy.

Extroverts can be defined as people that gain energy through socialization with other people.

Introverts can be defined as people that gain energy through silence, reflection, and time spend in meditation.

Neither is better than the other. Just know that the “energy balance sheet” should stay positive.

For instance, I burn out from my 9-5. I don’t like to sit, I don’t like to talk all day, and I don’t like to listen to what other people tell me to do (what to do, when to take a break, etc,).

As a result I lift weights, spend time in silence, and do self-driven creative tasks to avoid burn out.

Keep the energy balance sheet positive.

Play Offense

Now, you’ve done all the prior work needed to play offense. Let’s get into it.

1. “One Big Thing” (OBT)

OBT (noun): what’s the one thing on my list that if I nailed it, would make the whole day a success?

I got this one from Shaan Puri, in his “All Access Pass” newsletter (awesome read, not so available on the internet, so I compiled in an ebook here!).

He himself credits it to Peter Thiel, who would require every employee to work on a single problem a day and walk out of meetings if they discuss anything apart from that problem.

Instead of a to-do list, which feeds the idea of “grinding” (trying to optimize for quantity of output) you pick an OBT for the day.

You can even set it the night before.

Do your OBT as soon as possible. If you’re done before noon, you’ve already won the day. The rest is just bonus.

Here’s why morning time is the best:

2. Morning brainpower

Sahil Bloom once said, “*There’s no such thing as a loser who wakes up at 5am and works out.”

It’s not just about exercise. It can apply to anything important & difficult.

The reason this works is because if you plan to do something important in the morning, you force yourself to have good sleep.

If you have good sleep, you have more brainpower to do hard tasks & fewer interruptions (if you wake up early enough).

Alex Hormozi splits his day like this. Deep work in the morning and meetings in the afternoon.

Instead of scheduling calls in the morning, work backwards.

If you want to end at 5 p.m., your first meeting should be at 4 p.m., the next one at 3:30, and so on.

Protect your morning brain power because that’s when the best work is done.

Here’s how to not waste your peak brain power:

3. Separate the planning from the doing

Planning is like getting Claude Opus to write out a spec/implementation doc. Doing is getting Haiku to actually follow the doc. What you get is fast, cheap, and high quality results.

Here’s the human equivalent.

When you’re fresh and energized, clear of decision fatigue - especially in the morning - you’re Opus. Every time else, you’re Haiku.

There’s two types of decisions you make:

Strategic (long-term) - decide direction, prioritize which projects - Opus mode. Do this first thing in the morning.
Operational (short-term) - prioritize small tasks - Haiku mode. Do this at the end of the day, planning for the next day.

Separate the decision-making (<== important to get right!) from the execution.

Then, you can spec out the task. If AI can do it, tell it to write the spec.

If it can’t, just write out the FIRST step you need to take to get started.

Here’s why: if you make the steps low-barrier enough, you’ll do them.

The classic example of this is to leave your gym shoes and clothes ready the night before a work out. In the morning, you put them on before you can hesitate.

By doing the above, you’ve planned out what you’re doing, you’ve decided it’s important, AND you’re not using deep-work time to figure out the steps. You’re golden.

If you like the idea of writing down just the FIRST step, check out the following:

4. The A-B-Z method

Here’s another one from Shaan Puri. He says all you need to know is:

A = where are you now
B = next small step
Z = end vision

Instead of making a “grand plan” for B…Z, just know the next small step to take. Gain momentum.

For instance, for my TikTok distribution tool project I wrote,

A: I can now post decent carousels.
B: I have to improve the copy on the carousels to get more engagement.
Z: I can schedule long-term campaigns for any product.

Alex Hormozi says,

When you’re not sure what to do…
Doing more is always a great default.
Action creates insights.
Insights creates new actions.

Nobody is wise enough to know the right steps to take more than like 2 steps away…

The reality is, taking a step uncovers the next step, and so on.

But what if you know exactly what to do and still can’t bring yourself to do it?

5. Find the “minimum viable action”

Even if you know where you are (A), what you want (Z), and the next step (B), sometimes it’s hard to actually do it.

For instance, to create a successful blog, from scratch, you need to write. The immediate next step for that is to write one article.

Ok, cool. How hard is it to do that?

You try it for a day on the weekend. You walk to a cafe at 9am and order an iced latte. You sit down, stretch your fingers, write 1000 words (solid!), and call it a day at 12pm.

Then, you don’t come back to it until a month later. You just didn’t find another three focused hours to sit down and write. I mean, you have other responsibilities. Plus, it’s your Saturday. You deserve to sleep in.

Same thing happens when you want to eat healthier. You tried it once, but it just takes so long to prepare everything - you don’t have the time or energy to do it again.

Or when you want to workout, or run - you imagine it’s going to take so long to prepare for it, do it, and take a shower after, that you never do it.

What you need to do is lower the bar. To something insanely small.

For writing, start with 10 seconds. No need to prepare anything. Just set a timer, start, and done.

Either of two things happen once those 10 seconds are done.

You keep going, because who writes for just 10 seconds?
You stop, but you do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after. You build a habit. Then, you go for a minute instead of 10 seconds.

Plus, I find that the 10 seconds of stimuli gets you to think about it for the rest of the day, which makes you more excited to write the next day.

In fact, for the month or so that I’ve been writing nearly every day, I only aim to write 1 paragraph/day.

For eating healthier, you could start with just 1 extra ingredient, or make a new side dish, or replace one snack. Make the bar as low as you need.

For exercise, you could start with just 30 mins/week. What’s important is to start and give yourself a win.

In consumer apps, I aim to give the user a “first win” within the first 10 minutes of using the app (a streak, a completed analysis, a piece of useful information). The sooner the better. It increases the chances that they open the app a second time, because they feel rewarded and see signs of progress.

Do that for yourself - anything that lets you see progress in a habit you’ve meant to build, no matter how small.

Try it today, don’t just nod yes and forget about it!

6. Build an intrinsic love for pain

Honestly, when I see that something’s really hard to do, especially regularly, it makes me happy. That’s my comparative advantage.

When things are hard, fewer people do it. Even fewer people do it regularly.

If fewer people do it regularly, that habit is more valuable.

What if you could enjoy hard things, just because they’re hard?

If it’s hard, it’s worth doing. It makes you feel rewarded. It builds self-esteem and confidence.

Plus, the person that enjoys running will always run further (in the long-term) than the person that doesn’t enjoy it.

Aim to love the pain of weight-lifting, the pain of learning a hard concept, or the pain of filming and editing content.

Develop an intrinsic love for pain.

The best part is, you get to pick what type of pain you want in your life. You don’t have to be in pain 24/7.

Just by doing that, you’re above 90% of the population. Seriously.

If you made it this far, congratulations. You really care about your productivity.

I’ve dumped everything I’ve read and figured out over the years into a 2600 word blog post. I tried to make it as enjoyable, and immediately useful as I can.

Despite all that, the most important thing is that you start now. If you don’t you risk forgetting what you read, thus cancelling out all the hard work you just did.

Don’t disappoint future you. Clean up your attention, pick a task you truly want to do, figure out the next step, and get started with 10 seconds of it.

I’d love to know if this article helped, or how it could be better. Let me know!

X.. Email. Linkedin.