In our relentless pursuit of productivity, it is easy to lose sight of the richness and complexity of human existence. Life is not a series of tasks to be completed or goals to be ticked off; it is a tapestry of experiences, connections, personal growth, and self-discovery. True fulfillment lies not in the constant chasedown of efficiency but in the exploration and pursuit of what truly matters to us as individuals.

In a world fixated on achievement and progress, we must challenge the notion that saving time is as good as savoring it. Someone said, "Do you want to save time, or savor it?" which was an invitation for us to reconsider our priorities and seek a more holistic approach to life—one that goes beyond the confines of productivity metrics.

While productivity has its place, we must also make space for unstructured moments, reflection, leisure, and meaningful connections with others. It is in these moments that we discover our passions, nurture our relationships, and delve into the depths of our own being. By embracing the paradoxical nature of our lives, we acknowledge that true fulfillment arises from a delicate balance between productivity and savoring the present moment.

Finding meaning beyond productivity requires us to shift our focus from the pursuit of external achievements to the exploration of our inner selves. It involves nurturing our well-being, cultivating our interests, and engaging in activities that align with our values and passions. It means embracing the messiness, uncertainties, and unproductive pursuits that allow us to savor the richness of life.

As we embark on this journey of self-discovery and purpose, we open ourselves up to a world of possibilities. We uncover the inherent value of slowing down, being present, and experiencing the full spectrum of human emotions. Through this, we realize that true fulfillment comes not solely from achieving more but from aligning our actions with our values and living a life that is authentic and meaningful to us.

While productivity self-help books offer valuable tools and strategies, it is essential to approach them with a discerning eye. They should serve as a guide, not as the sole determining factor of our worth or success. By expanding our perspectives and reevaluating our priorities, we can navigate the complexities of existence and discover a more balanced and fulfilling way of living.

In conclusion, the pursuit of meaning and fulfillment extends beyond the narrow lens of productivity and efficiency. It involves embracing the juxtaposition between productivity and savoring the moments that truly matter. By finding harmony between achievement and experience, we unlock the true essence of what it means to live a purposeful and fulfilling life. Let us embark on this journey together, embracing the beauty of life's complexities, and finding meaning beyond the confines of productivity.

These 6 recommendations help decrease procrastination. Here’s how.

When working, you do different kinds of things, different kinds of tasks. You reply to emails to confirm meeting times and you also write the memo that will change the direction of the company for the next five years. The email to confirm a meeting time is the kind of task a personal assistant could do for you if you had one. But only you can write the memo that will change company direction. Some work you do is idiosyncratic to you. Only you could do it. That’s your sui generis work, as I like to call it. 

If you are able to make a distinction between the important, deep, idiosyncratic work you do and the less important, superficial, busy-work you do, then you should apply the following recommendations to your important, deep, sui generis work. Most of these strategies work because they make use of habit, ritual, automaticity, environmental stimuli and other so-called “System 1” factors, instead of counting on the weaker System 2. 

(Subscribe to learn more about procrastination as it relates to the dual-process psychology of System 1 and System 2.)

Preliminarily, however, let me strike an extremely important distinction between two kinds of work we do.

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At work, you do different sorts of things, right? There are different kinds of tasks you perform. You reply to emails to confirm meeting times and you also write the memo that will change the strategic direction of the company for the next five years. The email to confirm a meeting time is something a personal assistant could do for you. Even if you don’t have a personal assistant, it is still the kind of thing a personal assistant could do for you. However, only you could write the memo that will change the company’s strategic direction. Some work you do is idiosyncratic to you. Only you could do it. Or, at the very least, it’s the work that you will be recognized and rewarded for producing. I’m going to call this your “sui generis work.” 

If you are able to make a distinction between the important, deep, sui generis work you do and the less important, superficial, busy-work you do, then you should absolutely apply the following recommendations to your important, deep, sui generis work.  

Writers, lawyers, software developers, desk jockeys, and “knowledge workers” in general will find the following recommendations helpful for increasing productivity and decreasing procrastination. Anybody who has sui generis work can apply these recommendations with excellent results. 

1. Do your sui generis work at the same time and place every day.

2. In the workspace you’ve set aside for your sui generis work, do only your sui generis work. No Facebooking there.

3. To block potential media and technological distractions, turn off Notifications, use Airplane Mode and the Freedom app or turn off your Wi-Fi.

4. Establish “deferral policies” for colleagues who might interrupt your sui generis work.

5. Do not multitask; when it comes to your sui generis work, monotask, i.e., work on one thing at a time, perhaps with a timer.

Set aside a time and a place so you do your sui generis work at the same place every day and at the same time. For example, a writer should set up a habit to write at the same time of day every day. Protect this time ferociously. Do not book any meetings or phone calls at this time. Say “I’m busy; I have a meeting at that time,” if you have to. We want to foster automaticity so that our non-conscious activation system sets us to work. Writing at the same time every day (or doing your sui generis work, whatever it is, at the same time every day) sets up a work habit that will increase productivity and prevent procrastination. You won’t have to use your willpower and thereby suffer ego depletion, forcing yourself to get to work. Ego depletion makes procrastination more likely.

[This is part of a series. See main series page “My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated.” ]

Only use your willpower in those initial efforts to set up the habit. Once the habit is established, the non-conscious part of you that has been conditioned to work at this time will cause you to work. And non-conscious causes that set us to work are stronger and more reliable than our consciously willed attempts to start us working. 

Temporal but also spatial cues help to establish the work habit and they set up self-reinforcing conditioning, resulting in “learned industriousness,” the opposite of learned helplessness. Treat the work time as sacred and treat the workspace as sacred too. Do not do anything but your sui generis work in the workspace set aside for it. 

It is not a space dedicated to your sui generis work if you do other kinds of work there, and especially not if you Facebook there. The environment in which you do your sui generis work needs to be distinct from your other space in which you do your other tasks. Because it is the environmental cues that will play the role of the “conditioned stimulus” at the outset. Once the conditioning is established, you will be inclined to set to work simply by exposing yourself to the workspace conditioned to being a place of sui generis work. You undo all that learned industriousness if you also Facebook there or do anything else at all there.

[This is part of a series. See main series page “My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated.” ]

It makes sense, therefore, that you should have a separate desk dedicated to your sui generis work. Or at least have a separate corner of your desk. Differentiate however you can sui generis work from all other activity. Ideally, you would have a separate computer for sui generis work. If you cannot afford a separate desk and separate computer, invest in a lamp with a specially colored light bulb and when that light bulb is on do only your sui generis work. That’ll set up the conditioning.

We knowledge workers are at our desks a lot. We eat lunch there, send meeting confirmation emails, watch YouTube, check Facebook, and listen to music; and we have typically tried to do our most important work at the same desk under the same conditions. That’s not good enough. Your sui generis work needs all the support you can muster from your non-conscious activation system, such as from rituals, habits, sacred places, and sacred tools. As a writer I have a regular desk where I do anything under the sun. But I have also set up a smaller desk in a corner of the room with a different computer, which is for writing only.  I uninstalled all the other software. And so to preemptively block potential distractions, I have the Wi-Fi and desktop notifications turned off.

The science shows that interruptions of sophisticated work cause quality of performance to decrease. When you are interrupted in your sui generis work, your work results in inferior quality product. In lab settings, interruptions of trivial tasks cause there to be a certain measurable time before resumption of work on the task takes place. Interruptions in the lab setting of complicated work—which can stand in for what we’ve been calling sui generis work—cause there to be a significantly longer resumption time. That is, it takes longer to get your concentration and flow back.

[This is part of a series. See main series page “My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated.” ]

Interruptions of your sui generis work increase stress. And overtime these interruptions decrease your attention span, because interruptions break your focus and the attention or focus “muscle” atrophies when not used regularly. So when you are doing your sui generis work, concentrate on it and don’t do anything else; don’t engage anything that would distract you from your work.

Studies show that distractions at work come from the same small number of places over and over again. There are three main kinds of distractions. The very tools we work with such as our email client, our phones, and our web browsers can stop working for us and start working against us. Media or technological interruption is one kind of distraction from work. 

Another kind of distraction comes from ourselves as when we remember something we had forgotten, or when it occurs to us that we have a pressing matter to attend to soon, or simply when our minds wander. If something off-topic comes to mind while you are doing your sui generis work, let it go. Or if you feel the need, write down a note on a 3x5 card or PostIt so you can come back to it later. 

This is part of a series. See main series page “My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated.”

The third kind of distraction comes from the other human beings you share your world with. I have suggested you protect as best as you can the time you have set aside for your sui generis work. But being rude could backfire. Rather than sending away a colleague who wanders into your workspace with a curt tone, I suggest you say as gently as possible, “I’m deep in the weeds at the moment, can I come find you in 10 minutes?” 

Additionally, you might want to announce or make public somehow that you will be following these kinds of deferral policies when you are doing your most important and complicated work, your sui generis work. You could utilize a trope from show business where they have an “On Air” sign which everyone knows means you must not interrupt what’s going on. You could have some similar sign outside your workspace along with a way for a visitor to leave you a message indicating they came by, like maybe a small whiteboard on your door.

In any case, you should use the idea of the “extended will” to set up preemptive bulwarks against potential distractions—technological, biological and sociological.

When you really come to understand the dual process theory of the mind (as I will layout in a later newsletter/post) you will realize you need to protect yourself against the untoward potential pit falls your unconscious is going to try to throw your way. Nonconsciousness (which is not a word, but which should be) tends to be stronger than consciousness: a habit always has an advantage over the willpower trying to resist the habit. 

Do not count overmuch on willpower. Even Roy Baumeister, the author of Willpower, says so. (More on that later too.) But more than just protecting against your nonconsciousness, you should also learn how to harness the power of your nonconsciousness. Instead of trying to force yourself using your weakest toolset, you ought to try to foster automaticity and engage your strongest toolset (your unconscious activation system) by setting up rituals, habits, and little bits of “extended will.”

Job seekers used to brag on their resumes about their ability to multitask. They had better not do that anymore. The latest scientific work suggests that multitasking is a myth. When you think you are multitasking, what you are actually doing is simply attempting to work while being distracted with worse results. You never really do multiple things at the same time. Instead, you work on one thing and then another and back to the first one and, studies show, the quality of your work on each goes down. 

This is part of a series. See main series page “My Best Productivity Recommendations, Boiled Down and Annotated.”

When it comes to your sui generis work you should monotask, which means work on only one thing at a time. Concentrate on just one thing. Do it for a limited amount of time since real concentrated attention and focus cannot be sustained over longer periods anyway. So, rather than multitasking you should monotask—perhaps with a timer set for 10 minutes at first. You can extend your time to 25 or 45 minutes as your attention muscle gets stronger, but 45 is probably tops. Then you need to take a break. 

And you need to make it a real break. Do not work all the time. Taking real breaks will make work time, work time. It will make you more productive in less time if you take proper breaks and properly differentiate work time from non-work time.

A study run by The New York Times that showed that workers expecting an interruption that never came were many times more productive than workers in a control group who were not expecting to be interrupted and indeed were not interrupted. The expectation of an interruption in the lab setting could be mimicked in your work situation by setting a timer. Counting on the interruption by the timer will make the short time to work more precious and your concentration muscle will really dig in. 

If you are working from home under lockdown and worrying about how to be more productive, then consider yourself fortunate. 

You are lucky to have your health—if you had COVID-19 you’d be too busy coughing your lungs out to worry about productivity. And it could be worse: you could have come down with a severe case and ended up in the hospital. Besides your health, you are also fortunate to be able to work from home instead of not being able to make money or, alternatively, being forced to go to work where conditions are likely less safe than at home.

As fortunate as some of us are, the pandemic still sucks. And there are lots of reasons right now not to punish yourself if you are feeling less productive than you might want to be. 

These are not normal times. Mounting research shows that lockdown is detrimental to one’s mental health. The health threat of the novel coronavirus itself is frightening and stressful; plus social isolation has been shown to be seriously injurious to health, mental as well as physical. 

Instead of beating yourself up, consider doing some pandemic-related good. Write a letter to the editor, call your federal and state representatives, or get active in local governance, whether it be at the city or county level. And remember: right now, just doing well enough at the tasks associated with our new normal is a reason to pat yourself on the back. Homeschooling your children, and keeping house while all the members of the household are squeezed inside—these are worthy accomplishments, nothing to sneeze at.

If you still have a yen for self-improvement during the pandemic, let me make a few suggestions. Our universe of experience shrunk because of the lockdown and social distancing. Lots of options are off the table. So, focus positive attention where you can. If you miss going to the gym, take super long walks with loved ones or on your own. If you feel guilty or lame for not learning a new language or how to code or what-have-you, I suggest upping your cooking game instead. Add some new dishes to your repertoire, learn some new kitchen techniques, buy some uncommon ingredients. Spice it up! You are cooking anyway. That’s where you can most easily focus your desire to improve yourself. Similarly you could concentrate your efforts toward amelioration on other things you are already doing: perfect the pedagogy of the homeschool you’re now the principal of; concentrate on your relationships—be the best friend, sibling, parent or partner you can be. Maybe call your cousins too. 

Before turning to what I recommend as the best productivity and anti-procrastination strategies, one more word on the pandemic lockdown.

No matter your goals, there are some things you should be doing just to stay sane and physically healthy if you are in lockdown. Consider this a public service announcement. 

You need structure. Write up a schedule and stick to it. Regularity and some level of routine are conducive to mental health. Separate your workspace from your living space. Be as social with friends and family outside the home as social distancing will allow. Get regular exercise. Experience nature. Exercising with friends out of doors will let you kill three winged descendants of flightless dinosaurs with one stone. Meeting friends at the park for a workout covers socialization, exercise and nature. Staying 12 feet apart is recommended, but we’re adults we can do it. 

These are trying times. You are likely ego-depleted. So take it easy on yourself. Forgive yourself a bit more than you would in the before-times, when we all raced like rats after the cheese of the American Dream, so-called. 

Enough. If you’ve read this far and still want productivity tips, I’ve got you covered. Stay tuned.