Stuck in productivity content prison?

Here are 3 mindset shifts to help

Discovering the world of productivity content has both absolutely transformed my life and been a massive time-sink.

If I’d channeled most of my time spent on consuming productivity advice, that would’ve been the most productive thing for me to do. However, directly as a result of it, I’ve been the most productive I’ve ever been over the last few months.

Once you start realizing how game-changing some of this advice is, it becomes addicting. Life becomes a chase after maximum optimization, which is basically impossible.

I know this from experience. There was a point where I was subscribing to every podcast, YouTube channel, and newsletter I could find and wasting hours a day re-learning the same stuff.

I kept telling myself “just one more, I swear.” Who knows what life-changing advice the next one might have?

I was basically stuck in productivity prison, and it took me a while to get out even once I realized it.

Here are the 3 mindset changes that helped me break out.

Productivity is self-experimentation

The first step in your jailbreak is to understand one concept.

What works for me probably won’t work for you.

What does and doesn’t affect productivity is highly personal and based on random circumstances.

Productivity gurus are often self-experimenters who stumble across productivity hacks that work for them.

The best way to figure out what makes you productive is to just try lots of different things and keep track of them in something like a journal.

If you track things like your mood, focus, and distractions, patterns will quickly emerge.

You’ll learn what times of day you work best, what distractions come up often, what work you find fulfilling, how much work is too much, when the best time for relaxation is, etc.

Instead of being dissatisfied by the failure of following someone else’s advice, follow your own.

Become your own productivity guru.

Apply the Pareto Principle

If you’re well and truly in productivity prison, you’ve heard about the Pareto Principle a gazillion times.

So actually use it.

Most productivity content begins to blend together very quickly. There are too many people and not enough unique advice in the sphere.

The skills you learn in the first week of productivity content binging are probably 95% of what you’ll learn if you spend a month doing so.

The skills you learn from the first few creators you follow will also be about 95% of what you’ll learn if you go on to follow 30.

As a tiny creator, this is very hard to say, but following/subscribing to a creator that doesn’t provide much value is accepting a massive time cost.

You’re basically allowing this person to notify you whenever they have a new catchy title to flash across your screen.

Clarification: By subscribing/following, I mean that you are letting them notify you or reach out to you in some way with their latest content.

Ask yourself, what are the 20% of podcasts, productivity apps, productivity hacks, newsletters, YouTube channels, and courses that give me 80% of the benefits?

This is not to say that you should never explore content by other creators again. In fact, I encourage exploring different ideas.

I just think that you should only allow a few creators to reach you consistently.

Take Notes

Passively taking in productivity advice feels great because you get to procrastinate while feeling like you’re being productive.

In fact, I think productivity content is the worst form of procrastination because it’s the easiest to justify to yourself.

Without positive change, productivity advice is just entertainment.

To actually be able to use productivity content I would recommend taking copious notes.

Taking notes has two benefits.

1. It helps you engage with the content more, instead of passively taking it in. This increases the likelihood of actually deriving positive change.
2. It makes consuming content less fun. When you have to slowly take notes on the content you consume, it makes doing the thing less appealing (for most people), which makes it less addicting.

It would be kind of pointless if my article about deriving positive change from productivity content didn’t help you derive positive change :), so here’s a short summary in case you missed something.

1. Figuring out your productivity comes from self-experimentation.
2. Be hard to reach by creators that don’t add value.
3. Take notes on everything you learn if you want actual value.