The Weekly is a 1000-word-or-less essay on something I\u2019ve been thinking this week. Let\u2019s talk about how productivity is (basically) a scam and how daily and weekly rituals are the backbone of any sane person\u2019s productivity.
I once had the goal to move to Paris. I didn\u2019t achieve it (there was a pandemic). I had a goal to learn Italian (laziness). We\u2019ve all got visions of our future where we\u2019re cleverer, skinnier, more intelligent, or in my case simply the same person but somewhere else.
But we don\u2019t do visions. We reach them. But actually we don\u2019t reach them because the Hedonic Treadmill keeps us all both in motion and stationary at the same time.
I\u2019m going to put the tinfoil hat on properly in about 500 words, but I genuinely don\u2019t think productivity people want us to be productive, and \u201Cproductivity\u201D isn\u2019t a thing. It\u2019s a thing only because businesses and organisations need way to quantify the impact they\u2019re having.
You are not a business. You are an individual. You do not have to justify yourself economically to anyone. You are whole, you are complete, you are enough.
But we all want to be just a little bit\u2026more.
The secret to doing that little bit extra is in ritual. Every day you\u2019ve got to wake up and do the hard work of redefining what \u201Cbeing productive\u201D looks like. One day it will be writing a eulogy for a family member, the next it might be six hours of visual design work, or a board meeting. Can you compare these things? Maybe, but what a waste of mental effort you could have spent doing things you actually wanted to do.
I\u2019m going to share what that actually looks like.
There are two ways I store my productivity system: in my physical notebook (the Leuchtturm 1917 Hardcover A5 with Dotted Paper) and a digital Second Brain (Obsidian).
I use these to do two things:
Every week, before I create the next-weekly note, I review my previous week. I look at what I did during the days, I look at what I wanted to get done, and I index things: thoughts that came up, projects which might be important for long-term use.
The entire process is vague and not-specific. But if I go into any more detail it\u2019s not going to be useful to literally anyone else. How many other people are working in a small laundry startup, building language-learning tools, and taking nerdy notes on a small subset of podcasts because one day maybe something will stick and I\u2019ll be able to sound insightful in a conversation. There are none.
Despite not making it to an apartment in Paris (yet), I like to think that I am a productive person. I got a PhD and once knew a lot of French. A lot of people would like to think they\u2019re productive. Globally, the personal development market is valued at around \\$38b. There\u2019s a lot of money to be made by helping people be more productive.
A pessimist would say there\u2019s a lot of money in making people feel unproductive, and that you can make them productive.
People will try and sell you a framework, app, or system that will solve all your personal productivity problems. For a long time I was very committed to time-chunking, task managers, and efficient email. I don\u2019t religiously adhere to these anymore.
Or worse, there are the Vaynerchuck-esque \u201Chacks\u201D which promise, as Pilta Clark writes in the FT puts it, \u201Cto transform useless, Solitaire-addicted sloths into hard-charging models of efficiency\u201D.
Learning the click-baity 14 Must Know Tricks For Productivity From A Wall Street Manager isn\u2019t going to help you.
That\u2019s because knowledge isn\u2019t the problem. We don\u2019t have a knowledge deficit. We have abundance. An overwhelming abundance, things we want to do, or should do, or feel like we should want to do. If only we had the time to achieve them.
When there\u2019s \\$39b dollars at stake, and you want to keep it there, there are two things you can do:
Most worthwhile goals require sustained effort. Fat comes back, muscles decay, French words disparaissent , and your fingers will forget a G-minor scale very quickly.
The modern personal productivity industry is selling you a solution to a problem it created to benefit itself. People started making money off that. Loss aversion keeps that idea alive.
Productivity is a daily ritual.
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