“Crazy”. “Insane”. “He’s a lunatic”.

All words or phrases commonly used to describe me.

Nowhere does my lunacy shine brighter than in my relentless pursuit of time efficiency and productive output.

This is probably because I hate wasting time, but partially because I’m taking a risky turn in life.

Spend 2 minutes scrolling through the Twitter-Reddit-YouTube sphere, and it’s clear that productivity is a topic of widespread interest, so I felt inspired to share how I stay productive… unhinged style.

Before getting into the obligatory “hacks” list, let me say this: all the productivity hacks in the world don’t really matter if you’re working on the wrong thing or aren’t interested in what you’re doing.

Unless you’re superhuman, it’s nearly impossible to give it everything you’ve got when you’re working on something you don’t care about.

Motivation is extremely sensitive to interest in both directions. Sam Altman expands on this well, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here.

Let’s start with 2 big productivity no-nos.

No-No #1: The Optimization Trap

Focusing so much on being productive that it becomes counterproductive.

Productivity hacks are seductive, so this is a slippery slope.

I’ve found myself here before, but I try to be self-aware about whether I’m falling into the trap in real time.

The majority of productivity hacks offer marginal benefits, and sometimes you just need to get going on whatever you’re working on.

No-No #2: The Grind Trap

Blindly focusing on “efficiency” and number of tasks completed.

I call it the “Grind Trap“.

Productivity is not just about efficiency, it’s about impact.

You can use energy efficiently to run on a treadmill, it doesn’t mean you’re going anywhere.

It sounds obvious, but it’s an easy trap to fall into because grinding out tasks tends to be less cognitively demanding.

Spending all morning advancing slightly on a super impactful project is often more productive in the long run than cranking out a bunch of to-do list items.

But smashing through your to-do list feels good and is usually easier.

Don’t get me wrong, there will always be times to just sit down and bang stuff out, but generally speaking, measuring your productivity by number of tasks completed without thinking about their impact on your medium-to-long term goals is not value maximizing.

If you’re really “productive” at doing things that shouldn’t be your 1st priority, you aren’t really being productive, and the opportunity cost is high!

A little bit of time spent on something each day grows into an enormous amount of time spent on it in the long run. So consistently getting caught in the grind trap can magnify into massive productivity losses over time.

I try to avoid the grind trap by constantly asking myself whether I’m actually being productive or just “active” (I even set up a little reminder post-it note that stares me in the face all day).

Here’s an easy trick when torn between 2 things to work on: it usually pays to choose the one that’s more difficult in the short term.

On balance, the more intellectually demanding tasks tend to be the more impactful ones.

I know, it’s hard. But just remember, we are momentum fiends!

Force yourself to take that difficult first step, and every one after that becomes significantly easier.

This blog post is a great example. I’ve been putting it off for days because it was easier to jam through other less demanding stuff on my list!

Day Compounding and Sustainable Productivity

Compounding works to your advantage in almost every area of life, from fitness and relationships to learning, productivity, and money.

If you can gain 1 more productive hour per workday, in a year, that’s 260 hours. In five, that’s 1,300 hours. The long term impact of small but consistent productivity gains is massive.

Generating productivity gains that compound is only possible if your methods are sustainable. The easiest way to do this is with methods that have a high impact-to-ease of implementation ratio.

Whatever you do, it should be a) easy to implement and keep doing, and b) it should have an outsized positive impact on your productivity.

Finding these involves a lot of trial and error, and there may be some minor productivity losses in the pursuit of productivity gains.

Everyone’s different, so don’t be afraid to just try something even if it doesn’t seem suitable to you at first.

I’ve tried a lot of methods over the years and have come up with a pretty reliable list that works for me.

So without further ado…

4 Things That Had A Big Impact On My Productivity

_{Quick disclaimer: It’s important to maintain flexibility in your workflow. I try to do a lot of these things as regularly as possible, but life comes at ya. Being arbitrarily rigid is counterproductive.}

⚡ Setting a daily to-do list the night before

This is my number 1 productivity hack for a reason. I cannot promote it enough.

I get it, seems trivial, right? What’s wrong with setting your daily to-do list first thing in the morning?

The answer: a lot.

Setting your to-do list involves a) choosing from a larger list of to-dos, then b) prioritizing.

We’re not talking rocket science here, but this is an important and thoughtful exercise.

Doing this first thing in the morning means the first thing you do is spend time contemplating and making a decision.

Doing this the night before means the first thing you do in the morning is take action.

I want to spend my peak mental sharpness hours immediately diving into meaningful work that requires high impact decision making, not making a decision about how to spend my day.

Setting your to-do list the night before lets you avoid a small, but momentum-sucking decision and gets your day started by immediately executing on what you’ve already decided to do.

Remember how we’re momentum fiends?

Get out of your own way! It’s so easy remove the “to-do list obstacle” and kickstart the momentum train, but no one does it.

Same deal with laying out your gym clothes the night before, so you can just roll out of bed, put them on, and head straight to the gym.

“Past You” can help you “Future You”, you just have to let ’em do it.

My daily to-do list for this past weekend looks like this:

Rarely does anything ever make it onto the “mission critical” list.

If something is truly mission critical, I will literally not do anything else until that thing is complete. Most things aren’t mission critical by this definition.

I try to limit the “top priority” list to a maximum of 2 items.

These tend to be more cognitively demanding and impactful tasks, but don’t have to be. My criteria for something to be “top priority” are urgency and impact.

The “if possible” bucket is for less urgent things that are still relatively important in the near term.

This to-do list structure is just my own version of the Eisenhower Matrix.

Setting my to-do list is the last thing I do before “signing off” of work for the evening.

I do it most days, and once before the weekend if I have some stuff to get done. If I’m caught up on things or not particularly busy, I’ll skip it.

⚡ Getting up super early

Getting up early has 2 huge benefits for me:

1. Maximizing distraction-free peak mental hours
2. Minimizing “time slippage”

My peak mental sharpness occurs between waking up and lunch time, and everything after that is a steady decline.

The world comes online around 8-9am, and distractions start to roll in.

Waking up earlier shifts more of my peak mental sharpness into the distraction-free zone.

The productivity benefits are self-evident.

Once I started regularly waking up early, I realized time slippage is EVERYWHERE.

I define time slippage as the difference in time required to do something if it’s done at different times of day.

Here are a few annoying examples of things that take longer if done later in the morning with some conservative time loss estimates:

• The gym is more crowded (lose ~10 minutes)
• The elevator is more crowded and makes more stops (lose ~3 minutes)
• There’s more traffic, or the subway is slower/more crowded (lose ~10 minutes)
• There are other dogs on the street distracting my dog from peeing so the walk takes longer (lose ~10 minutes)

These 4 examples alone would cost me ~30 minutes a day of my sharpest time. That’s more than a workday per month that I get back just by waking up earlier!

If I offered you an extra workday each month, and all you had to do was regularly wake up early, would you do it?

Um, yeah.

And the gains compound: an hour at 6am when I’m much sharper is worth more to me than an hour at 10am.

Beyond the distraction-free time and reduced time slippage, there’s also the motivation derived from knowing you’re crushing the day. It’s cringy but true.

Don’t knock it ‘til you try it 😉

I’m generally in bed around 9pm and wake up around 5am. I tried pulling a Bob Iger and waking up at 4:45am, but I couldn’t swing it. He’s a machine!

_{One caveat: I acknowledge that I’m a morning person through and through. Some people aren’t and do their best work late into the night. Waking up early isn’t for everyone. It’s more important to structure your workday around your peak mental sharpness rather than waking up early simply because it’s associated with being productive.}

⚡ Adopting Notion

This is a BIG one.

I’m constantly surprised by the number of people who haven’t heard of Notion, despite it being a massively successful software company.

Notion is just a cloud-based documents, workspace, and database app, super charged with useful functionality.

What Notion does for my level of organization constantly makes me think “where have you been all my life?”

Notion can be used for almost anything, but here are a few personal examples:

☑️ To-do lists
☑️ Any other kind of list
☑️ All note-taking (bye-bye Evernote)
☑️ Writing, collaborating on, and sharing documents
☑️ Event planning / guest list tracking
☑️ Project management
☑️ Travel planning
☑️ Saving articles
☑️ Recording workouts
☑️ Storing and enriching datasets
☑️ Drafting blog posts 😉

All this stuff is beautifully organized into one place on your computer and mobile app, with a bunch of embedded functionality that makes retrieving information fast and intuitive.

It’s like outsourcing part of your brain.

Notion is so simple and works so well that I often ask myself how it didn’t exist 10 years ago.

Getting started with Notion can be a little intimidating.

The application is infinitely flexible, and all the functionality choices can be a bit overwhelming.

There’s also no shortage of gurus out there promoting crazy optimized personal Notion dashboards.

Don’t worry about all that.

Start small by creating something simple like your to-do list, and see if it’s for you. Some people prefer a good ol’ handwritten to-do list, and that’s fine too.

So I’m not completely biased, here are the only things I’ve found that Notion is not great for:

❌ Anything that’s done best in Excel
❌ Cloud file storage
❌ Calendar functionality (January 2024 update: Notion released Notion Calendar, and it’s awesome)

⚡ Ignoring email

Hot take!

Ignore email entirely for 3 hours at a time. This is commonly called “email batching”.

Email is an attention stealer, and most emails do not require an urgent response.

And yet, we’re carpet bombed with these little things all day long, constantly breaking our focus.

“But wait! How can you ignore email?!
What if someone needs to get in touch with you?!
Aren’t you negatively impacting your teammates’ productivity?!”

No. I solve for this in 3 ways:

1. Make sure the relevant people know how to contact you for urgent stuff. Either via text, call, internal/external company chat, etc. Don’t be off grid, just don’t be constantly breaking focus to check your inbox.
2. Understand that if something is truly urgent, the person will find a way to get in touch with you. If you’re contactable, but they can’t figure out how to reach you, it’s not urgent enough.
3. Skim your email 3x per day for urgent messages only, then block off 30 minutes to an hour 1x per day to go through your entire inbox.

Some days tend to be more email-heavy, but I try to systematically skim and ignore email as often as I can.

6 Little Productivity Hacks

⚡ Drink less

It’s amazing how many things in life fall into place when you cut down on alcohol.

Energy, focus, cleanliness. The list is endless.

⚡ Uncomfortably cold showers

A freezing cold shower will obliterate brain fog.

The water should be so cold you can barely tolerate it, then stand in it for 2 full minutes (set a timer). It will feel like an eternity.

I admit, it’s miserable, but the benefits are real. I get out of the shower energized, and the mental clarity can last for hours.

I only do this once or so per week since it’s so unpleasant.

⚡ Switch from coffee to green tea

Coffee comes with pretty extreme peaks and troughs, and it regularly has me coming back to the machine for another espresso.

By the early afternoon, I’ve already had 2 or 3 espressos, and I’m entering “more coffee will disrupt my sleep” territory. I end up forced into this groggy state in need of more caffeine.

Enter green tea (or matcha).

Green tea’s caffeine buzz is longer lasting than coffee’s, with less pronounced peaks and troughs.

I don’t get jittery, and the crash is more of a “soft landing”, allowing me to stay focused for longer. I also end up consuming less caffeine overall.

I’ll usually have a cup in the early morning, maybe another in the late morning, then one after lunch if necessary.

Pro tip: Try matcha with a little coconut milk. Thank me later.

I’m not religious about this and will have a coffee here and there since I love the taste so much.

⚡ Intermittent fasting and low carb lunches

Ah, intermittent fasting. The latest and greatest health craze.

Longevity benefits out the wahzoo. Allegedly.

Honestly who tf knows if it’s good for you long term?

I will sometimes skip breakfast for 2 productivity-related reasons:

1. I don’t have to think about making and eating breakfast, and
2. I feel better and am more focused for longer through lunchtime.

Assuming I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep, my mental sharpness is higher, and my morning energy is more consistent when I skip breakfast.

Another trick: I keep weekday lunches very low in carbs to avoid the afternoon crash. It works.

Note: If you get so hungry that you can’t think straight, this defeats the purpose, and you should just eat. I also don’t skip breakfast after big strength training workouts.

⚡ Stop reading the news

The news is a doom-scrollable list of headlines and stories jockeying for your eyeballs, 99% of which do not matter to your life.

If you’re worried about not knowing what’s going on in the world, don’t be.

If something is important enough, unless you are a bona fide recluse, there is a 100% chance you will hear about it, and hearing about it first matters zero.

If your goal is to be “informed” and sound smart, read books or long form deep dives on topics you’re interested in.

I subscribe to a few newsletters that blast out a list of the top headlines, and I’ll take a minute to skim through that. If something really important or interesting happened, I’ll dig into it further, but it’s rare.

I used to spend 30 minutes to an hour a day doom-scrolling through the news, the majority of which I didn’t retain.

Waste of time.

⚡ Build in time to screw around and do nothing

This is less of a hack and more a necessity.

Burnout is real, and if you’re trying to be productive all the time, it will quickly work against you. I’ve been there.

We have a finite capacity for mentally demanding work each day. If you spend too much time draining your mental gas tank, your cognitive performance and motivation will suffer.

Don’t be afraid to relax.

Working hard is important, but slipping into “hustle culture” is counterproductive in the long run.

Build in time to hang with friends, spend time outside, or sit around and watch TV to let your brain reset, like taking a rest day after a workout.

My 3 Big Productivity Vices

For some people it’s procrastination, for others it’s chocolate. For me, it’s YouTube, Reddit, and the snooze button.

🐌 YouTube

I LOVE YouTube.

I tell myself it’s not as mindless as Instagram… lol.

If I had a nickel for every time I cracked open a video with the intention of watching 1 or 2, but found myself an hour later down some unexpected rabbit hole…

🐌 Reddit

This one can be scary since it’s “intellectual” and doom-scrollable. A dangerous cocktail.

It’s hard to not keep scrolling after you open it, and there’s so much garbage interspersed throughout the good content that Reddit scrolls can be pretty mindless if you’re not selective.

I curate my feed pretty heavily, but Reddit scrolls still suck up too much of my time.

🐌 Snooze button

This is less of a vice and more of an Achilles Heel.

In bad cases, I’ve been known to snooze in 15 minute increments for up to 2 hours. Brutal.

Regardless of how well-rested I am, I’m fully addicted to hitting snooze.

All will power evaporates in the critical moment, and it costs me in time.

If anyone knows how to conquer this one let me know.

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If I had to ruthlessly narrow it down and leave you with 3 things to take away from this post:

1. Set your to-do list the night before
2. Wake up early
3. Use Notion

Drinking less gets an honorable mention 😂.

But hey, that’s just me.

I’m always open to trying out the latest hack, so hit me up if you think you’ve found the secret sauce!

Thanks to Sarah for reading a draft of this post.