Perhaps you’ve read productivity posts in the past and have never implemented the ideas in them, which causes cognitive dissonance. Or you visit LW when you’re tired and you don’t have the energy to work on self-improvement. Or reading a post on how to be productive makes you feel bad about your current level of productivity, which is demoralizing.
A bit of all of this is in play, but the lengthiness of the essay is also a factor. If I’m reading an essay that is supposed to help me become productive, I want the essay to make bold definitive statements and get directly to its point. If the essay delays its message, reading it turns into procrastination. I prefer plans that motivate me to begin execution right away.
Here’s how this essay might have been written instead:
I’ve written the popular How to be Productive post. But I haven’t always been this capable. I struggled with productivity for years before finding a method that allowed me to achieve my goals. While How to be Productive is written for someone already highly capable, this post will serve as a step by step guide for those who are currently struggling, just as I once was.
Step 1: Get some goals!
Before you do anything else, you need to clarify your goals. Most people think that productivity is about “how”, but I’ve found that it starts with “why”. Don’t move on to the other steps until this one is complete.
Choose two goals, no more and no less. Write them down. Then focus on these goals, imagining in detail what it would be like to achieve them.
Step Two: Track Your Time!
You won’t be able to achieve your goals if you don’t dedicate any time to them. In order to do this, you need to know where your time is currently going. Using paper and a pencil, Google Calendar, Toggl, or some other time tracker, map out roughly what you think you do on a given week. If your week is atypical, wait until a more typical week. Don’t worry about making the record perfectly precise, just do the best you can.
Record your time spent on various activities for at least a week before moving on to Step 3.
Step Three: Timebox
Look at your time log, and notice where you’re wasting time most often. Make plans to change your behavior so you can work more often on your goals. Don’t cut out too much free time, as breaks are important to your psychological wellbeing and you’ll work much less effectively without having some of them.
Step Four: Commit
Willpower is not necessarily sufficient for success. To change your behavior, you need to change your incentives. Make yourself accountable for failures to stick to your planned schedule. Go to the gym with a friend and don’t let them let you cancel. Sign up for Beeminder. Sign up for HabitRPG. Bet a friend. Start making checkmarks for every day on track and don’t let yourself break the streak. Do more than one of these things. Do whatever it takes to get yourself on track!
Your commitment mechanism needs to be inescapable. Don’t choose a friend who’s gullible enough to believe you if you lie. Don’t make a bet if its amount is small change. Unless you’re not planning to fail in this attempt at productivity, making your commitment device more reliable can only help you, so err on the side of increased and extra reliable penalties.
It may take you a while to find a commitment mechanism that works for you. Experiment with it if necessary. Once you’ve found a system that lets you work on your goals consistently for three weeks, you are sufficiently ready to add a new goal into your schedule. Don’t try this before three weeks are up, lest you overwhelm your capabilities early. Congratulations! You’re now a highly productive human being!
I think this post is easier to read. It has lost some aspects of the original’s charm, but the original was focused too much on trying to be charming and not enough on trying to be motivating or succinct. I think the brevity could be retained even while recovering the charm if I were a more practiced writer or were willing to spend more time on this comment.
Now that it is all written out in front of me, I can see another reason for my irritation is that I’m already familiar with all of these ideas. My own impression of them is that only Step 4 is likely to help the typical person, and only Step 4 is likely to be unfamiliar to the typical reader. I would have preferred to see a post concentrating entirely on commitment mechanisms and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, rather than a post that says “commitment mechanisms are very important; figure it out on your own by experimenting”.
Thanks!! I’ve got some more questions, would love it if you (or anyone else) would answer as many as you feel inclined to.
Any thoughts on the difficulty of reading posts like the Ugh Fields one? Would you say you dislike reading long posts in general, or just long posts about productivity? What about posts that aren’t framed as being about productivity but nonetheless contain insights about how to be more productive? If I’ve got some kind of productivity insight, is it best framed as an insight about productivity or just a random interesting insight?
Also, if a post is actually going to ask you to take steps to be more productive, what’s the best way to accomplish that? Is it better to have some kind of call-to-action at the end of the post giving the reader an easy way to take action now? Or is it better to just give the reader some actions they can take later when they’re in a high-energy, motivated state? (Or just tell the reader to save the post and come back later when they’re feeling high-energy and motivated?) What if the call-to-action is relatively easy, like, say, installing a Google Chrome extension that tries to help you waste less time on the internet in a relatively unobtrusive way?
More generally, if you (or anyone) looks as the posts that actually resulted in them trying things out to improve their productivity (regardless of whether those things worked or not… that’s not the stage in the process that I’m trying to debug right now), what features did those posts have?
This essay felt exploratory to me, as though it was trying to take a concept and introduce it to the reader in a very thorough way that would be fully understood. It went into a lot of detail and sometimes described the same idea in two or three different ways. I think this approach is better suited for providing an academic argument than for providing actionable advice.
The Ugh Fields post is attempting to introduce a new concept, whereas this post is attempting to provide a list of useful steps that the novice can follow. So an academic approach fits the Ugh Fields post better. That said, I feel like even that post would be improved if it were condensed.
I have a slight dislike for lengthy posts. But it’s the efficiency or inefficiency of a post that concerns me most. A medium post with dozens of insights is better than a short post with none.
The best productivity post that comes to my mind is Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic. I also like some of PJEby’s stuff. It’s not clear to me why I like those so much more than anything else, but that’s how it is.
This essay felt exploratory to me, as though it was trying to take a concept and introduce it to the reader in a very thorough way that would be fully understood. It went into a lot of detail and sometimes described the same idea in two or three different ways. I think this approach is better suited for providing an academic argument than for providing actionable advice.
Thanks, that’s valuable feedback.
How do you think this post compares to my other one? Does that one frustrate you as well?
I like the intro to that. The four subdivisions were a smart idea, they helped make it easier to process quickly.
The “Organize” section felt a bit disorganized to me. It went into a lot of detail about emails, to do lists, and various zones. That was a lot of content to put in a mere subdivision, you might have been better off breaking it into its own post. If that option didn’t seem like a good idea, you could at least have shortened the advice. Just guessing, it feels like half your word count went into this section, when it should have been closer to 1/6th based on your headers.
The “Do” section had a problem similar to this post’s, though less egregious. You could probably have described the Pomodoro technique in one paragraph instead of several, or even just provided a link to Wikipedia or something like that.
The “Additional Tips” section was haphazard, though you probably already know that.
But don’t let me discourage you. I liked and agreed with all of the content. A lot of my criticism here is nitpicky, I am trying to provide a lot of criticism in order to be as helpful as possible, but don’t think that means I’m only seeing bad things. I liked the post a bunch despite these minor issues. Anything I failed to explicitly mention is probably something that I liked.
Also, I probably care more about word efficiency than the average reader because I did debate back in high school, and that places a premium on efficient communication because speeches are only a few minutes long.
A bit of all of this is in play, but the lengthiness of the essay is also a factor. If I’m reading an essay that is supposed to help me become productive, I want the essay to make bold definitive statements and get directly to its point. If the essay delays its message, reading it turns into procrastination. I prefer plans that motivate me to begin execution right away.
Here’s how this essay might have been written instead:
I think this post is easier to read. It has lost some aspects of the original’s charm, but the original was focused too much on trying to be charming and not enough on trying to be motivating or succinct. I think the brevity could be retained even while recovering the charm if I were a more practiced writer or were willing to spend more time on this comment.
Now that it is all written out in front of me, I can see another reason for my irritation is that I’m already familiar with all of these ideas. My own impression of them is that only Step 4 is likely to help the typical person, and only Step 4 is likely to be unfamiliar to the typical reader. I would have preferred to see a post concentrating entirely on commitment mechanisms and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, rather than a post that says “commitment mechanisms are very important; figure it out on your own by experimenting”.
Thanks!! I’ve got some more questions, would love it if you (or anyone else) would answer as many as you feel inclined to.
Any thoughts on the difficulty of reading posts like the Ugh Fields one? Would you say you dislike reading long posts in general, or just long posts about productivity? What about posts that aren’t framed as being about productivity but nonetheless contain insights about how to be more productive? If I’ve got some kind of productivity insight, is it best framed as an insight about productivity or just a random interesting insight?
Also, if a post is actually going to ask you to take steps to be more productive, what’s the best way to accomplish that? Is it better to have some kind of call-to-action at the end of the post giving the reader an easy way to take action now? Or is it better to just give the reader some actions they can take later when they’re in a high-energy, motivated state? (Or just tell the reader to save the post and come back later when they’re feeling high-energy and motivated?) What if the call-to-action is relatively easy, like, say, installing a Google Chrome extension that tries to help you waste less time on the internet in a relatively unobtrusive way?
More generally, if you (or anyone) looks as the posts that actually resulted in them trying things out to improve their productivity (regardless of whether those things worked or not… that’s not the stage in the process that I’m trying to debug right now), what features did those posts have?
This essay felt exploratory to me, as though it was trying to take a concept and introduce it to the reader in a very thorough way that would be fully understood. It went into a lot of detail and sometimes described the same idea in two or three different ways. I think this approach is better suited for providing an academic argument than for providing actionable advice.
The Ugh Fields post is attempting to introduce a new concept, whereas this post is attempting to provide a list of useful steps that the novice can follow. So an academic approach fits the Ugh Fields post better. That said, I feel like even that post would be improved if it were condensed.
I have a slight dislike for lengthy posts. But it’s the efficiency or inefficiency of a post that concerns me most. A medium post with dozens of insights is better than a short post with none.
The best productivity post that comes to my mind is Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic. I also like some of PJEby’s stuff. It’s not clear to me why I like those so much more than anything else, but that’s how it is.
Thanks, that’s valuable feedback.
How do you think this post compares to my other one? Does that one frustrate you as well?
I like the intro to that. The four subdivisions were a smart idea, they helped make it easier to process quickly.
The “Organize” section felt a bit disorganized to me. It went into a lot of detail about emails, to do lists, and various zones. That was a lot of content to put in a mere subdivision, you might have been better off breaking it into its own post. If that option didn’t seem like a good idea, you could at least have shortened the advice. Just guessing, it feels like half your word count went into this section, when it should have been closer to 1/6th based on your headers.
The “Do” section had a problem similar to this post’s, though less egregious. You could probably have described the Pomodoro technique in one paragraph instead of several, or even just provided a link to Wikipedia or something like that.
The “Additional Tips” section was haphazard, though you probably already know that.
But don’t let me discourage you. I liked and agreed with all of the content. A lot of my criticism here is nitpicky, I am trying to provide a lot of criticism in order to be as helpful as possible, but don’t think that means I’m only seeing bad things. I liked the post a bunch despite these minor issues. Anything I failed to explicitly mention is probably something that I liked.
Also, I probably care more about word efficiency than the average reader because I did debate back in high school, and that places a premium on efficient communication because speeches are only a few minutes long.
Thanks, I appreciate the feedback. :)
The true shortest productivity post would be: “stop reading this and just do something”.