□ Placeholder: 18 — Productivity Porn and Writing Everything
Dear friends (and family!),
This is your friend, writing to you from a rainy, cloudy Amsterdam about… [And “…” being a Placeholder. This is the last time I'll be making this pun. You're welcome.]
I'll be honest. I'm a master procrastinator and for the last few weeks I got sucked into Productivity Porn. An intellectualised and highly sophisticated kind of procrastination. The kind of procrastination that makes you think motion is progress. Spending hours, looking for your next book to read is motion. Picking up the next available book (and tossing it aside when it starts being a drag) is progress. Having come to this insane (!) realisation that reading about productivity is not productivity but being productive is productivity, I thought I will share what I’ve learnt about productivity as a note to myself and as a warning to you and call it a day.
If I had to summarise the gist of learnings, it would be this: Write Everything. That’s all there it is to productivity. But there’s more.
## Write whatever crosses your mind
Offload, offload, offload. Offload ideas, tasks, questions, literally anything that crosses your mind onto paper or a document. Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them said David Allen, years ago. At some point in our lives we might have come across what’s known as Zeigarnik effect: Open tasks tend to occupy our short-term memory — until they are done. Focus brings productivity and these open tasks lingering in our brain is the prime reason for our distraction that eventually makes us unproductive.
It was my Eureka moment when I first learned that we don’t actually have to finish tasks to persuade our brains to stop thinking about them. When we write those unfinished tasks in a way that convinces us that it will be taken care, our brain stops thinking about those tasks. Our brain is smart but dumb in a way that it can’t differentiate between when a task is finished or it has been postponed by taking a note of it.
Writing an unfinished task is only the first step. Take it from a master procrastinator, it will remain unfinished for as long as the earth exist if that task doesn’t have a clear, immediate next step. And if the next step can’t be finished in 25 mins or less, good luck with completing that. So the subsequent step after offload, is to chop, chop, chop. Chop ‘em in small pieces so that it’s can be done in 25 mins or less.
From experience, finishing those small pieces, one after another gives a satisfying sense of progress.
This is all you gotta know about stying productive. Write, review, chop, repeat. I’ve learnt that it’s completely acceptable to not pick up everything that crosses our mind at once but making it easy for our future-self to pickup where we left off does wonders.
Hang on! Up until, I’ve only expanded on writing your tasks and why that matters. Didn’t I say “Write Everything?” Writing everything down, turns out, has more to offer than productivity. Let me explain.
### Writing is understanding
When we write about something, it uncovers gaps in our understanding. No written piece is ever a copy of a thought in mind. Things make perfect sense in our head but the moment we try to write it down, a realisation hits (often brutal) that we didn’t understand things as well as we thought in our head. In a related sense, writing is a form of deliberate practice because we get immediate feedback and in the process we can enhance and deepen our understanding.
### Reading everything as if we’re going to write about it
The goal of reading any non-fiction work is to learn from it and in order to learn anything, we need to understand it. You see where I’m going with this. It creates this virtuous cycle of competency as more we understand, the more we learn and the more we read. Writing about what we’re reading (and in this case it’s purely non-fiction works I’m talking about) helps us to have conversation with the text. Or as Sönke Ahrens wrote in his book, to have a “meaningful dialogue.” How does this fact fit into my idea of … or what does X mean for Y. You can’t have this conversation in your head but only as you write about these fleeting ideas.
### Writing helps you remember things for longer
Yeah, no kidding! But we all knew that, right? We might not be aware of “why” behind it. Let me test my understanding by writing it for you: When we write about things, we understand them. And when we understand things, those things are connected—through rules, theories, narratives, pure logic, or mental models or explanations. And our brain is phenomenal at keeping connection. And that’s why when we understand things (by writing them down) we tend to remember them for longer. Hope that made sense.
I can go on and on about why we should write more but these 700 words or so should suffice for now. Agreed, writing is difficult and requires effort but that’s the thing about compound interest. The immediate results aren’t evident from the get go. (On a related note I wrote a few words about personal finance and investing here.)
So write more peeps! That's all you need to know. And keep wearing the masks even if you’re fully vaccinated.
Until next time,
K
PS: The header is from a hike in Black Forest, Germany last year shot on Fujifilm X100V.