The Best Productivity Pillars of a Killer Routine

Do more in less time.

Sometimes, things may not go your way, but the effort should be there every single night.

— Michael Jordan

Productivity is often misperceived.

Many equate it with working long hours, hustling, and working hard. That’s missing the point entirely. That means you’re busy, not productive. And busyness, for the sake of it, is meaningless.

We all experienced glimpses of what real productivity looks like. It’s the moment when you dish out an 800 words story in half an hour, oblivious as to how you’ve managed such a feat. It’s finishing the essay way ahead of schedule (as you’ll see, this rarely ever happens). In short, it’s exceeding your expectations with your output.

These moments are rare. But, by putting the effort every single night, you can influence their rarity.

Since productivity is a religion on Medium, I aim not to waste your time: after all, you probably know quite a bit about productivity yourself.

Here are three principles that will maximize your time. Where possible, you’ll see important stuff linked and studies cited. Some of them quite surprising.

Here we go.

1. The magic of the peak period.

You know the moments where you sit, think, and try to force your brain to do its job. An hour passes, and you drudge through one or two paragraphs.

I feel you.

Compare it to the times where everything seems to happen in slow motion. You get going and finish the piece in one sitting. Magic.

Or is it?

Understand the Ultradian rhythm

Ultradian rhythm is a 90–120 Minute cycle that governs your energy levels throughout the day. As the curve rises, you’ll experience higher energy levels and more concentration. When the peak is over, you’ll enter a slow and steady decline. When that happens, you’ll suffer anything from fatigue to straight out resistance.

What if the magic happens during the peaks, and the drudgery during the troughs?

The lesson is quite simple: work alongside the curve, not against it.

Let the peaks help you with the magic and use them for the meaningful tasks that require all of your capacity.

Use the troughs for your breaks or undemanding routine work.

For example, after 90 minutes of writing, my brain is usually fried. So I switch to reading a bit and interacting with Mediumites, both of which are helpful.

Full disclosure — it’s all idiosyncratic

Ultradian rhythm is one of many theories of how human performance works. What works for me doesn’t have to work for you.

Others are, for example, the Pomodoro technique (working for 25 minutes and resting for 5) or 5217 (working for 52 minutes and resting for 17).

If you plot these on the graph, though, you’ll get the same thing as the ultradian rhythm. Productivity, it seems — and life in general — is a dance between crests and troughs.

2. Combat icky items with ultra-specificity.

Frequently we aren’t productive because we don’t exactly know how to tackle a vague task.

It’s what Tim Urban, the brain behind the insanely popular blog waitbutwhy, dubbed an “icky item”:

We all know what an icky item is. An icky item is vague and murky, and you’re not really sure where you’d start, how you’d go about doing it, or where you’d get answers to your questions about it.

It’s the terrifying “learn how to code” or “pick up the ukulele” that always gets postponed like the feared dentist appointment (my childhood experiences with dentists weren’t exactly pleasant…).

The key here is to be ultra-specific. Let’s say you’re into psychedelics after listening to the newest Tim Ferriss podcast, and you want to write an article about it.

Instead of writing down “psychedelics article” in your to-do, consider something like this:

• get five sources on and read into how psilocybin works
• check five blogposts posts to learn more
• get transcripts of Tim’s podcast, annotate relevant stuff

Your productivity increases when you’re ultra-specific. Whenever lost, just refer to your notes.

And what’s more, each of these tasks can be ticked off. You’ll have a visual reminder of your progress that keeps you motivated.

But ultra-specificity can also be a straitjacket when overused. That’s why…

3. Be flexible with your planning.

It might sound a bit like a contradiction to my previous point, but it isn’t: you want to be both ultra-specific as well as flexible.

Why? Because all that planning often fails; we’re really, really bad at it. The extent of our suckage?

Take the Sydney opera house, for example. A building set to complete in 1963 with a budget of $ 7 Million was completed ten years later, in 1973, and cost $ 107 Million in the end. And those were people whose job is to plan. Imagine how bad you and I must be.

How people whose job isn’t to plan, plan (i.e., you and me), take a look at this 1994 study.

In it, the researchers asked students to estimate how long it’ll take to write their senior theses. On average, students guessed 33.9 days. They also estimated:

• Best case scenario: 27,4 days
• Worst case scenario: 48,6 days

Know how much they took in the end? 55.5 days.

So what have you learned? You suck at planning; embrace it.

Here’s how.

Always plan more time than you need. Add 30% on top of each task.

This means that if you want to write for one hour, add approximately 20 minutes on top. All that structure and ultra-specificity is good and well, and we should strive for it. But I feel it’s an ideal, not something that you can actually achieve.

Embrace the fact that you suck at planning, and you’ll come out on top.

The secret sauce of productivity

Take these with you:

One: Follow your peak period and follow it zealously. By doing so, you can get more done in less time. There’s no better deal than that.

Two: Combat the icky tasks by being ultra-specific. Small victories compound and motivate you to finish your big task.

Three: Be flexible with your planning. Add 30% on top of every item, and you have your actual completion time.

Sometimes you don’t need significant changes for big results. Sometimes little tweaks will do.

Implement these in your daily routine, and the results will come.