How to Organize your Workflow to Maximize Productivity

Three Roles

Pilot (10%)

Decision maker and the overall brain of the process ^ad722c

Plane (80%)

Executor ^eea06f

Engineer (10%)

The role who takes care of the system and makes sure that everything works efficiently ^0cf7cb

Three Myths

Time is what we want most, but what we use worst. – William Penn

Time

We have more control of our time than we thought. It is not that we don’t have time. We are actively convincing ourselves not to choose to do it. As a result, our brain is trained to fool ourselves to always to choose the easy way out. Work with our time like it is our muscle. ^909b27

Motivation

^90c584

Motivation is overrated:

┌───────────┐     ┌────────────┐       ┌──────────┐
│  Thought  │────▶│ Motivation │──────▶│  Action  │
└───────────┘     └────────────┘       └──────────┘

Motivation is whimsical and fleeting. Discipline should be the enforcer instead.

Two aspects to consider when conquering the motivation dilemma:

• Output:
  • Short feedback loop.
  • More salient output.
• Action itself:
  • Make it more enjoyable, fun: e.g. gamifying the process. The 4th law of reward in [[Book Atomic Habits]]❌ – making it satisfying.
  • Make the inaction painful. The inversion of the 3rd law of [[Book Atomic Habits]]❌ – making it easy/difficult.

Multitasking

Multitasking (context switching to our minds) is expensive. Instead, aim to get into the flow state (pushing our mental state to the limits, challenging way but not too difficult). - Choose not to be distracted, just like we can choose how we spend our time [[]]❌

Three Laws

Parkinson’s Law

Work expands to fill the time we allocate to it. To apply this in our life, we need to plan tasks with a stricter time window aka. assigning artificial deadlines. For example, allocate 6 months for a ten-year plan. It forces us to prioritize our tasks and time.

Pareto’s Law

The famous 20-80 rule. Choose the right thing to do (20%) to harvest the 80% of the results.

Newton’s First Law of Motion

The first step is the hardest and use the momentum to your advantage. But being in the motion != doing a quality job, which means once you are comfortable of spending 5 minutes on a habit, find a way to improve it and invest more time on it.

Three Powers

Power of Habit

$$ 1.01^{365} = 37.7834343329 $$

1 percent better a day means 37 times better a year. The discipline and the consistency help us be in the motion. [[Book Atomic Habits]]❌

Power of Productive Downtime

Use the time otherwise wasted.

Power of Procrastination

Try to gain something out of procrastination. E.g. learning something while watching Youtube videos.

Fun Factor

$$ \text{Productivity} = \frac{\text{Useful ouput}}{\text{Input}} \times \text{Fun Factor} $$

Make sure you are enjoying what you are doing. YOLO!