Productivity schemes
If you can tell me why this placeholder post from 2014 is still consistently in my top 10 most popular posts I would be grateful
October 9, 2014 — June 4, 2020
Because “life hacks” and “productivity tips” are next to “viagra” and listicles when it comes to “stuff I reflexively delete from my inbox.” Anyway, “schemes” evokes the snake-oil sheen that productivity tricks have, whether you are selling them to others or to yourself. This is the correct attitude.
1 Against productivity
The need for slack time in your life, because that is what life is about. Alternatively, certain types of slackness produce greater overall productivity, e.g., meditation.
Kottke’s link bag on The tension between creativity and productivity includes Doctorow’s Lifehacking considered harmful.
The corollary of this is that it gets much, much harder to winnow out activities over time. Anything I remove from the Jenga stack of my day disturbs the whole tower.
And that means that undertaking new things, speculative things that have no proven value to any of the domains where I work (let alone all of them) has gotten progressively harder, even as I’ve grown more productive. Optimization is a form of calcification.
However, one should still avoid clickbait.
2 Empirical optimisation
See quantified self.
3 Habit design
4 As project management
See project management.
5 Online services
5.1 Avoid email
Email and other such social time-suck. Corollary: avoid social networks EVEN MORE, since they are designed to leverage your psychology to waste your time
5.2 Procrastination tools
See time management.