The quest for improved productivity is Sisyphean. Bit by bit we push the boulder up the mountain only to occasionally stumble, lose our grip on that chunk of granite, and then get summarily smooshed by the damned thing.
Yeah, that’s right, we’re coming straight out the gates, swinging towards the fences with our weird, strange analogies. Buckle up, billy.
Studies consistently show that if you want to maximize your productivity, you must harness the power of routine. Today we’re going to chat about how we can wield this power for good, so that we might become more productive, and not simply more busy.
Do not mistake busyness for productivity.
A lot of us fill our days with truly mundane shit. We bury our noses in our inboxes for hours at a time under the delusion that emails are, ya know, somehow making the world (and yourself by extension) a better place.
Spoiler alert: It’s not.
Email is one of the greatest smoke-screens to productivity I’ve ever seen. Sure, no doubt that emails are occasionally quite important, and I do not mean to suggest that you destroy your Yahoo account with a flippant click of the mouse.
But do recognize that there are two types of work to be done:
Shallow vs. Deep
Cal Newport wrote an entire book on Deep Work which I highly recommend you check out.
To give some quick and dirty working definitions:
Shallow work is the sort of work you could train an intern to do. Those emails? Yeah, with very few exceptions, you could train somebody in a matter of weeks to handle those.
Deep work by contrast is cognitively demanding work that requires extreme focus for extended periods of time. It is value adding work that only you are capable of doing. That book you’re writing? Yeah. Can’t outsource that shit. Unless you’re James Patterson.
But if you’re James Patterson, what the fuck are you doing here? Seriously? Don’t you have like 52 books to publish this year? Go on, Jimmy. Git. You ain’t wanted round here no more.
Anyways. Take an objective measure of the work you’re doing on a daily basis. Ask yourself, is this shallow or deep work? If the answer is shallow, push it down the schedule until you’ve hit your deep work for the day.
Why?
Because cognitive load, yo.
Cognitive Load is the psychological principle pertaining to the fact that we can only exert so much energy in our working memory. Specifically, you can only remember so many things at one time. But this principle can be expanded to touch on decision making and will-power as well, because these too are like our working memory in that they have finite reserves.
That’s right. Let me repeat that:
You have a finite amount of will-power to be used in a day.
It’s science. Don’t argue. And please God don’t ask me to cite my sources. It’s 5:32am on a Tuesday morning and that sounds like the absolute worst thing I can imagine doing at the moment.
Knowing that you have only a finite amount of will-power in a day, it’s important therefore tostructure your time in such a way as to focus the full-force of your mental dexterity on the most important tasks.
You do this by creating routine. Well, actually no. You do this by creating a routine… and then sticking to it.
Creating a Daily Routine
The more routine you can make certain aspects of your life, the more energy, will-power, and decision making capability you’ll have at your disposal to deploy in the pursuit of high-level, cognitively taxing tasks.
Some of the most successful people the world has ever known have tapped into the power of daily routine.
Example: Steve Jobs wore virtually the same outfit every single day to save himself the mental tax of having to “decide” every morning.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about what you wear, what you eat, when you workout…creating routine around the small, seemingly insignificant tasks of your day will boost your overall productivity as you are now wasting less time and cognitive energy constantly having to decide.
I wrote a whole article called The Power of Decision which dives into three areas you can create a daily routine around. Namely: Eating, Sleeping, Exercising. Check it out below.
Win the Morning, Win the Day.
I am a fairly productive person despite having severe ADHD. This is only made possible through a strict adherence to a daily routine. Now, I won’t bore you with the ins-and-outs of my entire day which (yes, I do actually sit down every morning and plan out my day in 15 minute chunks ’cause I’m super weird like that), but I will share a bit of my morning routine with the hopes you glean something worthwhile for your own life.
Mornings are for creating. At least they are for me. There’s a lot of reasons for this, but really it boils down to: Nobody else is awake to distract me. And, I’m as cognitively fresh as I’m ever going to be.
Alarm Clock
I set 5 separate alarms on my phone. This reduces the overall effectiveness of the snooze button, which is a small thing, but juuuust annoying enough to make my strategy work.
Alarm numero uno goes off at 4:45. I squelch that shit right quick.
Second alarm fires a salvo at my groggy cerebellum at 4:50. Shit, didn’t I just merc the last one?
Alarm tres explodes at 5:00. Now I’m more or less fully awake and cranky for having subjected myself to such torture. I still hit the snooze/cancel button even though I’m awake.
Alarm number 4 drops at 5:10 and now I’m like, whatever, I don’t even care anymore. I’m awake, but I’m still keeping my head on the pillow cause I know I still got 5 minutes of chillaxing left.
The final alarm sounds at 5:15 and at this point I’ve had nearly 15 minutes to prepare for this, the moment of truth.
This is the first battle I have to win for the day. It’s also the hardest.
I remind myself of this fact, and then we’re in motion.
Start your engines
Coffee time. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. This train leaves the bed-station at 5:15 and is parked outside the cofee-maker by 5:15.02. I used to have a coffee maker next to my bed that would start auto-brewing at 4:45, which was nice ’cause it allowed me to wake up to that fresh java bean scent, but it’s sort of a cruel torture for whoever happens to be sharing my bed at that moment, so I moved the coffee-making-apparatus to the kitchen. I’m a kind soul.
Phone
Oh yeah, by the way, I sleep with my phone in airplane mode so that nobody in the world can bug me while I’m sleeping. I don’t need those Facebook alerts going off every five seconds.
I reconnect to the world while coffee is prepping, just to make sure our fearful commander-in-chief hasn’t launched us into World War 3. Ya know, ’cause at that point, writing a blog post on morning routine takes a backseat to packing the car and moving to Canada.
Check Social Media and Finances
For whatever reason, I can’t fully engage my mental faculties in the morning until I’ve checked my piggy bank to make sure I haven’t been robbed in the night. It’s weird, but it puts my mind at ease, so don’t judge. At this point I am usually sipping on my coffee, waiting for the caffeine to kick in anyhow.
Start Writing at 5:45
That’s right, I’ve wasted nearly 30 minutes of my morning drinking coffee, playing on the internet, going to the bathroom. But my engine runs on diesel and takes a tick to rev up. After that coffee hits (which is conveniently marked by a trip to the bathroom at 5:40 sharp) I am ready to sit down, crack my knuckles in overly dramatic, training montage fashion, and get to work.
Write until 7:00
By 7 I’m pretty friggin’ hungry and it’s time for a break. I go and make a couple eggs while listening to a podcast, and then I’m back in the chair by 7:30 for another hour and a half of writing.
Typically I work on my fiction in the first session and non-fiction/blog post related stuff in the second. I find chunking tasks like this makes it easier to maintain focus and motivation.
Audio Stimulation
As eluded to earlier, I have fairly severe ADHD and if given half a chance, my gerbil for a brain will scamper willy-nilly in whatever direction the breeze blows. To minimize the opportunity for distraction, I invariably work with headphones in.
Unfortunately I’m not one of those people who can listen to music while writing. I tend to fixate on the voices or instruments too much. Instead, I listen to straight up white-noise. My favorite track is a 10-hour loop available on YouTube and I’ve been relying on it for the past 5 years. Seriously. I love it.
