5 Productivity-Killing Habits You May Want to Quit
Subtraction, not addition, is the key to revolutionary productivity
The Most Ignored Murderer
It’s appalling how our toxic hustle culture has not only normalized sleep deprivation but also made it “brag-worthy”.
Forget productivity, the lack of sleep kills you itself — thanks to effects such as disrupted hormones, cardiac risk, and damaged brain functioning
A hellish bout of insomnia taught me this the hard way — reduced to almost a zombie, just scraping past those days had taken all my willpower and tons of caffeine pills.
If not insomnia, I’m sure you’ve experienced how a single awful night of sleep ruins the next day — irritability, frequent yawns, wavering focus, and the constant thought of crashing in bed.
8 hours of quality sleep + 4 of work >> 8 hours of work on 4 of sleep.
Now, sleep is one of the top priorities of my life and I’ve never been happier, healthier, or more productive. Here are 5 tips that have helped me and can help you fix your sleep:
- Based on your convenience and preference, decide a sleep time. As late as 1 AM or as early as 8 PM, the time doesn’t matter as much as the duration does. Sticking to the chosen timings is the key here.
- At least 45 mins before bed, tuck away all your electronic devices. By emitting blue light and disrupting the sleep hormone Melatonin, electronic screens disturbs sleep.
- Find a pre-bed relaxing activity. Anything that puts you in a serene mental state will work. My go-to is reading a book lying on my stomach.
- Only sleep and have sex in your bedroom. Our brains associate activities with places, so if you eat, work, chill, and live on your bed, there won’t be any association.
- As the last resort, consider sleep supplements. Having used Melatonin myself, I can attest to the fact that it works. ZMA is another supplement that might help. But better first consult a doctor or a sleep specialist.
Marathoning Instead of Sprinting
The human brain isn’t built for marathons, it’s optimized for sprints. But most of us use it for the former.
Thanks to our incredibly short attention spans and limited mental energy reserves, any work past the first 2–4 hours suffers. And the resulting burnout impedes future work as well.
Over time, this compounds to incredible inefficiency — focus reserves dwindle. 2-hour tasks now take 4. And when this spirals out of control, you get absolute burnout.
“Forty-hour workweeks are a relic of the Industrial Age. Knowledge workers function like athletes — train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”
— Naval Ravikant
No wonder millions of people are leaving high-paying jobs for lower-paying but lesser-stress ones.
The solution is brief bursts of ultra-focused work sandwiched with pockets of leisure. While the former lets you tap into the peak cognition flow state, the latter replenishes your focus and mental energy.
It’s a win-win-win — you can achieve more, in lesser time, all the while not even approaching burnout.
Avoiding Leisure Like the Plague
It’s precisely by trying to be productive all day that you actually hamper your productivity.
Even a car with the most efficient of engines can only go so far without refueling. Your brain’s no different and leisure is its fueling station — running on an empty engine will only harm you.
But leisure doesn’t mean binging Netflix or sniping with bated breath in a FPS game. Those activities are the exact opposites of leisure —as they further leech your mental energy.
True leisure vaporizes your stress and calms you — meditation, pleasure-reading, talking to a friend, a steamy shower, chilling to music, or admiring the setting sun while sunk in your chair.
With that important distinction out of the way, here are a few ways to inject some quality leisure into your day:
- Interlace work sessions with leisure. A steamy coffee after your first morning hour of work. A brief nap after your afternoon work. A workout to break up the evening and so on.
- Turn your meals into leisure. Stop treating your meals like chores and relish every bite. I’m already looking forward to my dinner — steamy delicious food over an even tastier fantasy book.
- Set up work start and shutdown boundaries. Be it my full-time job, writing, investing, or any work, 7 PM is the moratorium. Similarly, 10:30 AM is the start of my work-day. The rest of the day is for — sleeping, working out, meditation, phone calls, hobbies, and family time.
Something Most Think of As a Productivity Booster
Multi-tasking isn’t really multitasking — it is rapid sequential switching between tasks. And nothing fragments your focus, amps your anxiety, and destroys mental energy as much as this does.
By definition, anything other than the task at hand is a distraction. With multitasking, the tasks themselves become distractions.
So, multitasking is actually just multi-distracting.
By preventing you from tapping into the flow state and swinging your focus, multi-tasking deals you a double whammy — shabby sub-par work + a much quicker burnout.
Do one task at a time and you’ll do each one damn well. Do everything simultaneously and you end up doing nothing.
Working in A Distraction Rich Environment
Noise. Notifications. People. Calls — distractions are the arch-nemesis of productivity.
“One look at an email can rob you of 15 minutes of focus. One call, one tweet, one instant message can destroy your schedule, forcing you to move meetings, or blow off really important things, like love, and friendship.”
Even the sharpest of focus and the strongest of attentions can wither under a distraction-rich environment. But in a distraction-free one, even an average mind will shine bright.
You can’t cut out all distractions, but there are tons of them you can. Here are 4 ways to do the same:
- Move to an isolated and calm place. Let your coworkers or family know you don’t want to be disturbed unless there’s an emergency. Next to the window in my room is my go-to place. I latch my door as well.
- Disable all notifications. Unless the task at hand relies on them, turn off all notifications — Instagram, email, everything. Its effect is nothing short of miraculous.
- Pop a pair of headphones and loop the same song. While music can drown out external noise, the songs themselves become distractions. Looping the same song solves this problem. My go-to is Loving You by Eric Prydz.
- Leverage distraction blocking software. ColdTurkey writer is a boon for writers — until the set word or time goal is met, your computer’s turned into a typewriter. For general use, there’s the ColdTurkey blocker. The best part is — after a while, you become “trained” enough to work without them.
A Short Recap for Your Memory
- Don’t deprive yourself of sleep. Establish an 8-hour sleep routine and try to stick to it.
- Don’t pull long work stretches. Work in short but focused bursts. Take intermittent breaks to recharge.
- Engage in leisure — activities that vaporize your stress and put you in a tranquil state.
- Avoid multitasking — do one task at a time, with a singular focus.
- Eliminate distractions from your work environment — play looped music, disable all notifications, use distraction blockers, etc.