Everything I know about productivity

Self Discipline

Self-discipline is about making a mindset shift - it makes you a better person. It’s about doing the right thing, the responsible thing, even if you don’t want to.

When making goals, they have to have these three attributes:

1. Are achievable
2. Have a timeframe
3. Move you forward

When trying to accomplish a dream, you need to make a roadmap of it first. Break each dream into several subgoals, and put a timeframe on each subgoal. An ambition with a schedule is just a dream. Put a schedule on it, and it becomes something tangible - a goal.

The biggest hurdle in your journey of productivity and goal seeking is doing stuff that doesn’t improve your life, like YouTube and Netflix.

This is some good info you can use to understand why we should chase our goals instead of pleasure:

• Science shows that after 30 minutes of passive leisure, we become more depressed than before. After 30 minutes, all entertainment loses its value.
• When faced with a hard choice and an easy choice, always take the hard choice. Facing our fears makes us mentally stronger.
• Anything worth it in life will always take hard work, hard work we don’t want to do because we’re wired to like the easy stuff. Don’t be like that. Rise above and do the hard things where other people won’t.
• Remember that each time you indulge in these activities, you are taking away from your future self’s happiness. Each of these vices is nothing more than trying to escape emotional pain.

Why You Should Do The Work

We feel terrible when we don’t make progress towards our goals. If we didn’t have stimulants all around us, we would feel terrible one minute into boredom.

You will feel happy when you are making good progress towards your goals. When you make progress towards your goals, every step of the way, you feel good. If you’re not happy, you haven’t made enough progress to your goals.

When faced with a hard choice and an easy choice, always take the hard choice. Facing our fears makes us mentally stronger. Anything worth it in life will always take hard work, hard work we don’t want to do because we’re wired to like the easy stuff. Don’t be like that. Rise above and do the hard things where other people won’t.

No one is coming to save you, to stop you from watching YouTube and to make you get up and put work into your goals. Nobody. Only you can save yourself. So whenever you don’t feel like doing work, remember that nobody else will tell you to work. Only you can. So get up and do it.

Skill acquisition is the way to level up in the game of life.

You should not even consider doing anything that will not level up your life or is not skill acquisition.

Yes, goals and habits may be boring, but these boring habits are good for you. Nobody ever got what they wanted by just sitting there. The universe didn’t hand it to them. They had to go get it.

The only way to achieve a goal is through constant, relentless action. You don’t achieve a goal by only doing it when you feel like it.

Imagine if you got everything you ever wanted without any effort. How would you feel? Like you haven’t earned it. We need to do the hard work so we can earn our goals, not be given them. Hard work is necessary

Principles of Learning

Put in the reps

The Super Mario Effect proves that the best way to learn something is to do it over and over again. The more repetitions you do, the better you’ll be.

Learning boring things

During a boring task, keep saying to yourself that you do it because you love it. Hard things are worthwhile. Tell yourself that because it is painful, you will feel better later and have a dopamine increase from this effort.

Rule of 2

Learning compounds over time - keep in mind the rule of 2:

• 2 year rule : If you stick to something for 2 years, no matter what, doing it consistently, you WILL BECOME GOOD AT IT.
• 2 day rule: Never miss 2 days in a row
• 2 minute rule : If procrastinating on something, only do it for 2 minutes. It only takes 2 minutes to see meaningful progress.

Have consistency

It’s also important to have consistency, but so what? Embrace the suck. Nothing worth having is easy.

Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration. The rest of us just get up and work - Stephen King

It’s not always fun. But if you want to be good at something, you have to do it even when it’s not fun. - Flea

For this spirit, you should do stuff for x amount of reps before worrying about what to do next. For example, “I will not try to make money from my blog posts until I have written 50 of them.”

Visual reminder

When doing work, write on a sticky note what task your are doing and make it visible throughout the work session.

What would your future self want?

90% of life would be better if you do what your future self wants. Constantly ask yourself stuff like, “does my future self want me to watch 4 hours of anime today? Or does he want me to practice music?”

I’m guessing the answer would be, “he definitely wants me to practice music.”

Productivity Tips

Cold shower and exercises

Take a cold shower after a workout in the morning. This helps increase dopamine and also burns fat. The more you shiver, the more you burn fat.

In between work bouts, take a short exercise break of 100 jumping jacks, 25 pushups, 50 squats, and 10 pullups to rejuvenate yourself.

Gauge your progress

You’ll know you’re being productive if the answer to all of these three questions is yes:

• are you proud of your recent efforts? Not achievements, but the hours you are putting in?
• are you grateful?
• are you excited for something coming up?

Improve focus

Do these tasks daily to improve focus:

• 15 min NSDR
• 5 min focus meditation

Avoid Procrastination

#mindset/procrastination

I’ll only say one thing:

“We must suffer from one of two pains, the pain of discipline or the pain of regret”.

But if you’re still procrastinating on something, grab a pen and paper and do the following:

1. Write down exactly how you’re feeling regarding the task
2. Why don’t you want to do this task?
3. What are you trying to avoid?
4. What do you think you need?
5. Why should you do this task?

Then focus on the very first step you need to take to do the task. Think about how you would do it in detail. Then just do it.

Structure the perfect day

The perfect day is based on splitting it into three portions: morning, afternoon, and evening.

• morning: for using your mind to do creative tasks and build your business.
• afternoon: to learn new things
• night: to empty your mind with meditation, journaling, and reading.

Motivate yourself to achieve your goals

Visualization

1. Ask yourself every morning if you are motivated to pursue your dreams
2. If yes, spend 3-5 minutes visualizing the positive outcome of achieving your dream
3. If no, spend 3-5 minutes on visualizing the negative outcome of failing your dream.

Reward

After each work session, follow these steps for random partial reinforcement tactics:

1. Flip a coin
   • If heads, set a timer for 1 minutes and say “I’m making progress” repeatedly.
   • If tails, don’t do anything and just move onto the next task of the day.

This is the best way to reward yourself so that you find effort and goalseeking itself rewarding.

Deep work Routine

1. When starting a deep work session, I will take out a piece of paper, and do the following:
   • I will write down what task I am doing, why I am doing this task and how it connects to my long-term goals.
   • I will write down the number $101.29 to remind myself the cost of wasting 3 hours of time
2. Establish Focus
   • I will set a timer for 60 seconds and use the Huberman technique of staring at the screen
3. Establish intention
   • I will set a timer for at least 60 minutes to do the task
4. When finishing a deep work session, I will do the following:
   • I will log the hours into the deep work google sheets tracker
   • I will log my hours into 10,000 hours
5. Deep work break: either go into nature for 15 minutes or meditate.

Improve deep work focus

To improve deep work focus after each session, we need to log our thoughts and how we are using out time. Each time you get lost in thought, write those thoughts down and label them as “helpful” or “unhelpful”.