Being enthusiastic is more important than being productive

Photo credit: Dina Belenko, 500px.

I’m often asked to give advice on how to be more productive. Here’s what I usually say (apart from Pomodoro, healthy 7–8 hour sleep, scripted first 1–2 hours of the day to minimize decision making, tiny daily habits to secure easy wins every day, morning jogs to maximize your physical potential, cold shower to wake up, meditation, etc.). It’s important to remember that most of the productivity tricks are marginal 5–10% optimizations. You can ignore them all and still be very successful. In fact, the more you’re obsessed with tricks, the higher the likelihood that you’re actually not that productive.

You can read about productivity all day long and feel the illusory sense of accomplishment, but that pseudo-knowledge doesn’t move you from A to B. Being enthusiastic about something is more important than being productive. If you have an inner motivation and drive to build something fantastic, you jump out of the bed every morning to get back to where you left off the night before. You’re not distracted by the outside noise. You’re truly unstoppable and, as a side effect, extremely productive.