I’ve invested more time than I’d like to admit trying to design the perfect productivity routine for myself. Much of that time was, in fact, a plausibly deniable form of procrastination that allowed me to avoid the more difficult, messy work I should have been doing.
The result of all my efforts? Honestly, not very much.
Everything I tried would work for a little while and eventually fade out. The temporary gains of a new system would be mostly wiped out by the inevitable crash back to reality—and the feelings of guilt for not sticking with my own plan.
I seem to be the type of person who needs to try everything else before I can accept a basic approach. If I look on the bright side, each belief I now have about productivity feels hard-won and forged in failure. It means something to me in a way that simply reading a book never could.
I’ve learned many lessons along the path of trying—lessons I hope will inspire you.
4 Tips for Having a Productive Day
While the particular systems of other people rarely stuck for me, they were a constant source of inspiration and motivation. I hope the same is true of my words as I share a few thoughts on how to have a simple, productive day, without a complicated system.
1. Decide the Night Before
One of the most timeless productivity lessons I can share is simply to have a plan. Shooting from the hip might have a certain thrill, but it rarely produces the best use of your time. Deciding doesn’t have to take long—just spend five minutes at the end of each work day and decide on three things you want to prioritize tomorrow. That alone will give you a huge leg up on the next day.
2. Start With the Hardest
Your first energies of the day are usually your best, and even more than that, the motivation you summon when you start working influences how you’ll feel for the rest of the day. For example, if I decide to ease into my day by checking on my favorite blogs and websites, it puts me into a mindset of ease—making all future work feel even harder. However, if I hit the ground running and tackle my hardest work, I feel energized for the rest of the day.
3. Let Boredom Do Its Work
A big part of our productivity issues in the smartphone era is that we don’t let ourselves get bored. There are two problems downstream of this. The first is that in the past, boredom was a good motivator for doing something useful. If you felt bored, you found something to do because sitting around doing nothing felt, well, boring. Today, we no longer have to feel bored, as entertainment is always just a click away.
The second problem is that our baseline has shifted. Now that the baseline is entertainment—versus boredom—most work feels especially boring in comparison to the fun you could be having. This isn’t a matter of never having fun, but of being careful not to drip-feed your brain with hits of dopamine all day to the point that nothing else has any appeal.
4. Lower the Bar and Get Used to Discomfort
A huge hurdle to my personal productivity is a form of perfectionism that keeps me from getting started. I’m not the kind of perfectionist who starts something and won’t stop until it’s perfect. I’m the kind who invents a perfect idea in my head and won’t ever get started because reality never lives up to that ideal.
Work in the real world is always messy and imperfect and involves difficult tradeoffs. For people like me, that feels uncomfortable. You have to simultaneously lower the bar of work that you consider acceptable, and learn to tolerate the feeling of doing work that isn’t yet perfect. The only way to do good work, even great work, is to give up on the idea of perfect work.
Our society’s definition of productivity is heavily tied to economic output. While that may be useful on a population level, it can be corrosive to any person’s soul. It makes you think of yourself as a machine that just needs to run harder or longer to make more money.
Productivity can, and should, be considered at a more human scale. It’s about living with intentionality, facing your fears and discomforts, and readjusting your expectations to reality. When you do these things thoughtfully, you can have a nice, simple, productive day without the grind of hustle culture.