Nothing against this specific post but with the massive influx of productivity YouTubers and Medium morning routine gurus I increasingly feel like blacklisting the word “productivity” entirely.
I'm allergic to it too. There used to be a fantastic add-on which replaced every instance of the word 'cloud' with 'butt'. Very handy a few years ago. Could do with updating for the era of guilt-deflecting advice-meme pollutors.
At the risk of sounding like a trite lifehack peddler, in my experience, finding ways to remove the feeling of guilt is a powerful technique for combatting procrastination and burnout driven by anxiety.
If you have issues coming up with a strategem, just take two random words from the dictionary and add 'technique' to the end and riff off of that!
The Franchise Hospitality Technique. The Dirty Diplomat technique. The Proper Element Technique. The Bee Trustee Technique. The Linger Expansion Technique. The Path Feast Technique. The Brink Intelligence Technique. The Deficit Omission Technique.
Gotta admit, I'm a little tempted to make a humor productivity parody blog using this technique after seeing a few that came up.
I asked GPT-3, and this was the advice it returned after a conversation about my goals/feelings and with me prompting it with, “The life coach begins telling you about some ways to make progress on your goals.”
“The life coach tells you to create a daily schedule and plan out your week, month, and year. He tells you that if you follow through on this plan, you should achieve something. He also tells you to meditate for at least 10 minutes a day and focus on your breath.”
I think the whole thing is a problem. People opining on productivity are creating issues where there are none. And I say this as someone who has tried every productivity strategy under the sun. The only one I have found to work is to just do things until the work day is over. See a task, do a task. Think of something, do something. Get email, reply to email. You can call it inbox zero or eat the frog or Nike Just Do It or whatever other name you want to come up with. But I just do things. Productivity techniques are just structure that get in the way. It can be kind of addictive to design this perfect system for how you are going to organize your work and life - but nothing ever sticks. The only thing that sticks is to just do whatever is in front of you.
It's more a matter of when (in the cycle) than what.
Trends come in booms and busts. Late into the boom, they're usually most devoid of originality. Then they die back. ATM, "productivity hacks" are in the "butt rock" part of the cycle.
