Quick Notes on Productivity

This is a direct draft for a future post that’s been sitting in Google Docs. I know that I’m probably not going to write that post for at least a few months (because writing about productivity is usually boring) so I thought it would be good to put it up here until then.

• Productivity from the perspective of work + life habits: basically just doing the kinds of things you want to do and being the kind of person you want to be
• This is information that will probably be familiar for most people who find their way to my blog (they will probably inhabit a relatively similar subculture) but something I would like to write about anyways to clarify my own thoughts and to send to friends who are more “normal” in terms of the content they consume on the internet.
  • This post will be centered a lot on defaults/ground states and falling into a productivity rhythm (plus, how to recognize when you’re falling out of the rhythm and how to get back into it). Will be partially based off Rest in Motion.
    • Explore my “rut” between July and September from the perspective of defaults
      • Productivity-wise: I wasn’t actively unproductive but on average I was about 85% of normal for an extended period of time work-wise
      • Misc-things:
        • I lost a lot of habits and am currently working on rebuilding them
        • My leisure time became “lower quality”
          • Went from ~75% things that I’m fairly happy with (reading books, reading high-quality articles and blog posts, listening to podcasts, biking, journaling, blogging, spending time w/ friends and family) to <50% things that I’m happy with (which was replaced by bingeing shows, doomscrolling Reddit, etc)
      • Explain how I randomly got “shocked out of it” and quickly switched back to living much like I did before the rut
    • Defaults matter a lot, and it’s easier to fall out of them than you might think (in both ways).
      • It’s worth spending some time thinking about how to preserve your rhythm
        • If you’re having a bad day productivity wise (you intended to take a small break and it stretched to 6 hours) how will you “salvage” the day while preserving your rhythm to get back on track the next day?
        • It’s often really hard to get to work when feeling tired/bad weather/other factors can make it hard to feel motivated to get started.
          • I find that having something that takes a small amount of cognitive effort but still feels relatively productive helps a ton here.
            • For me, that’s usually something like doing my Anki, journaling (I’ll start by journaling about my day but usually end up talking about something “work-related” and end up getting excited enough that I’ll start working on it), blogging (blogging is cognitively demanding, but I often have multiple drafts in progress and can trick myself into thinking “I’m only going to read through these and sanity check for grammatical mistakes”).