Do you really identify as a productive person? Do your mornings start with instagrammable cups of V60 coffee, an easy 3 mile jog around the block, and a commute filled with carefully curated podcasts, or perhaps another session of Mindfulness Meditation to your favorite app (like Headspace or Calm)?

If you’re like most of the people I know and love, no. Your snooze-proof alarm proved to be fake: who wants to wake up for this shit, again? You’re ostensibly “running late.” Fortunately you’ve mastered the art of minimum viable morning: squeezing in the bare essentials like brushing teeth and changing clothes, gulping on Mr. Coffee or perhaps using your daily overpriced latte addiction as motivation to get going.

Well I am here to tell you that productivity is a fuck. The folk concept of productivity has done untold damage to people’s psyches, including yours. It has made people fearful of work, rather than invigorated to wake up and seize the day. It has created an unattainable archetype for a successful person, that is, someone who juggles a tightly packed schedule of socially-admirable activities with nearly robotic execution and no leftover temporal surplus.

Now imagine a morning where you pull out a newly proofed loaf of bread, an experimental labor of love, from the oven, or wake up to an unapologetic snuggle with your puppy; or perhaps you have a rather “unproductive” morning with your partner where you discuss whatever is on top-of-mind. You have no real expectations for this loaf of bread. You’re riding the groove of a fun, maybe whimsical, experiment. You ease into your day after luxuriating in the decompressive benefits of a companion.

If you’re a night owl like me, you either sleep in or make peace with minimum viable morning, knowing well that you’ll slip more stitches onto a knitting project, or review the conversations and insights of the day during your notetaking ritual, in the evening. You won’t spend cognitive energy guilting over an ungraceful morning routine, or itching to try to fix it. It’s accounted for.

Such a morning (or evening, in my case) fits more authentically with your organic needs. It is free from guilt for failing to fulfill unrealistic aspirations. Such a day embraces your revealed preferences and is designed to fit them, rather than to follow a socially-upheld script or narrative about productivity (more on Design vs. Narrative Mindsets later.)

By being honest with yourself about what actually feels personally important and enriching, you can gain new perspective on how soul-wrenching “work”-work can be silo-ed away. You can even grease out the ugh-field surrounding “work”-work, knowing that it has a carefully contextualized and intentionally designed place in a day that otherwise has more important and enriching demands of you. It will be easier to begin such work knowing there is a definitive end and other activities to look forward to. If you’re part of the lucky few who enjoys their day job, it will only be a lateral move from here to apply these principles to your career.

The key is to start from a place without assumptions. Derive, from first principles and lived experience, what truly ignites you: redefine productivity as something akin to personal efficacy, how effectively you live in accordance to what feels good, for you. Have you considered redirecting all the time you spend agitating over your lack of folk-productivity towards engaging with the things you actually want to do? (Relatedly, what did you do today that aligned with your values, with the person you would like to be?)

In the examples above, time guiltlessly spent with a pet or partner is not regarded as wasteful. You mindfully account for temporal surplus, knowing that, realistically, these activities play an important role in contributing to your overall quality of life and shaping your subsequent activities.

Even more joyously, fiercely defend these times as opportunities to play. You could try something so off-brand it makes your online followers confused. For me, a quiet girl who enjoys cooking but is impatient, that could be boxing or kneading out some dough. I firmly believe that growth often turns up in the places you tend to not look, or have long, perhaps unconsciously, decided are unavailable to you.

OK, I am about to hit you with some actually-cliché advice: if you have an aspirational project you keep avoiding, e.g. writing an essay, rip the band-aid, open a new page, and just see what happens if you try to regurgitate some thoughts, no matter how messy. It is important to not punish yourself for not meeting some standard. Maybe you will find that with some initial effort, beading along completed sentences is a process that writes itself. Or maybe you’ll realize that this project actually does not jive well with your mood.

In fact, there really shouldn’t be any expectation that the exact project you had in mind is the right solution for the ideas that matter to you. By approaching ideas from a stance of play, you can allow them to travel to the carriers they naturally seek. And you can more confidently open up space for the ideas that actually want to blossom, right here and right now.

Get comfortable with abandoning projects early-on. Simply make a note of your initial idea and trust your future self to come to it at the right time, wisely scrap it, or iterate on it with adjustments or improvements. With some good habits and perspective changes, you’ll have no problems developing a harmonious relationship to both your past and future selves, relying on a good notetaking practice to open up those channels of communication.

How do you identify what feels personally important and enriching in the first place?

Start a daily notetaking habit.

I personally use and recommend Roam. Roam is unlike its predecessors, Evernote and Notion. It borrows from research demonstrating that the human brain tends to organize ideas in an associative, rather than hierarchical, manner. By providing users with a tool for networked thought, Roam helps people unlock their thoughts and retroactively find connections between them.

In the spirit of Roam, I try hard to not force my notes to look like anything in particular. Even though I use bullets and sub-bullets, I don’t rely on them to necessarily relate anything about the organization or structure of my ideas. I rely on [[Bidirectional Links]]. And I know I can easily, retroactively, refactor my thinking by clicking-and-dragging bullet points around, easily swapping them between hierarchical levels.

Given these features and assurances, I am free to truly capture the webbed-mess of thoughts in my head. By embarking on a quest to take Daily Roam Notes, I uncovered which ideas were recurrently important to me. By tapping into networked thinking, I was reminded of my previously captured ideas. I gained clarity on where to begin. On any given day, I can decide which of these projects feels pleasurable to start or resume work on. Maybe the answer is none. That’s OK. I forgive myself. I understand rest and emotional nurturing have their place, and even bad notes are good.

Allow Yourself The Freedom to “Prototype” New Projects and Experiences

This is similar to the idea of play I mentioned before, but is more structured. Not every pocket of temporal surplus has to be, or even should be, dedicated towards psuedo-productive activities like aforementioned play or relationship-nourishing. By every means, play that video game sometimes.

But some of that time, opt for prototyping new ideas. Prototyping is not only for designers. Prototyping is simply the process of building something to test an idea or concept. By getting in the habit of prototyping ideas before taking them to the next phase of development, ideas will seem less stressful and demanding. They don’t, out the gate, demand long term commitment in order to be worth your while. By expecting less out of newborn ideas, you will regard them as less costly investments and may find it easier to devote time to them. You’ll also gain the opportunity to see how well your ideas of what feels good align with your lived experiences.

How do you realistically begin to take your ideas to the next level?

Use a project management tool, like Asana or, my current choice, Todoist.*

This is really an optional second-phase to using Roam. Once you have some initial fuel for a notetaking practice, you can lift up important ideas to a project management tool and break your ideas down into manageable steps. Upon reflection, a key part of my being able to launch my podcast, Cognitive Surplus, was breaking the task down into bite-sized goals. Once I stopped doing this, I stopped being able to make and contribute new episodes. My progress stalled.

I never said project management tools, which are oft designed for folk-productivity, are useless. In fact, they can be remarkably helpful for bringing to your attention, time and time again, what you once felt was important. It forces you to re-confront, in an open-ended manner, whether you agree with the priorities of your past-self. And if you do, sometimes seeing that openly hanging goal, floating on the page, can prompt you to actually do something about it.

*If you have a project management system that works well for you, or that you recommend, I’d love it if you shared it with me!

Invest In Yourself.

As soon as I got my first decently-paying job out of a year of unemployment, I decided to invest in myself by getting a coach from Hello Walden to help restart my podcast. One of the habits that kept me from getting completely submerged in depression during unemployment was going to the gym. It is no small victory that briefly working with a personal trainer during the first half of 2018 left me with a enduring habit that has done wonders for my health. I know that self investment works. Its benefits are not always obvious at the time of purchase.

Conventional ideas of investing in yourself encompass things like paying for more education, going to therapy, acquiring a gym membership (when your physical boredom may be better acquiesced through hiking outdoors), or buying new folk-productivity gadgets like a smartwatch or Fitbit.

In reality, investing in yourself can look like any number of things, including relaxing any given expectations surrounding a goal. But I want folks to know that it is also OK to spend a bit more money on targeted coaching towards your personal goals. I believe that getting attention is an often overlooked need that most people possess. It is important to be seen. Therapy, socializing in public, or even a relationship aren’t the only solutions to this. I suspect that some personal goals deeply benefit simply from being seen, not just from being carried around like urns of soon-to-be-ashes in your head.

You might claim that being seen imparts a greater sense of being held accountable, not only to a coach but also the wallet which pays them. That may be true. In this instance, I am not suggesting you necessarily seek a coach whose style is to crack the whip, but to have faith that a) it is OK to invest your money in getting support on goals that seem indulgent and b) that someone else’s ability to receive your ideas and give you some personal attention may be uniquely useful.

It is absolutely heinous that folk-productivity has made so many people fearful of their lives by placing unrealistic expectations on them. Most people are likely more capable than they think. I admit, there is a part of me which is fairy-chasing but for my career. I don’t know yet what long-term trajectory my projects put me on. I just know that I didn’t launch my first business, Over the Moon Pets, at random. It was an idea that only came to me after several iterative steps, including following my intrigue for animals at the local shelter and even working for Rover, the dog sitting app. Who knows where my podcast project or even this Substack will take me? Who knows where your ideas can take you?

It may take a leap of faith to acknowledge, to yourself, what it is you actually care about. Doing this even enables all the boring, human stuff, like chores and “work”-work, to assume their rightful place, rendering them less scary.

Coupled with some perspective change and elbow grease, you can nurse newborn ideas to their rightful places, many of which may surprise you.