How to Actually Follow Productivity Hacks

I’m starting a new blog, which you can follow here, on what I call “mindful productivity”. But this post is here because first I want to make sure that people understand how to incorporate the strategies I describe in their own life.

When you are a student, it can be frustrating to feel like you don’t understand material as quickly as others or to see yourself fail an exam despite studying hard for it. It can make you feel like you’re inadequate and that maybe you’re just not meant to be great at <insert your field of study>. But often, the underlying problem is that you’ve never been taught to learn how to learn.

In the same way, people often become frustrated at their inability to ever stick to that awesome, new productivity hack they saw on LifeHacker the other day. But analogous to the students, there’s a missing meta-technique that underlies that frustration: hacking productivity hacks.

Productivity hacks don’t come ready-made. Everyone has an extremely different life, current mindset, social surrounding, etc. The secret to making productivity hacks work is to adapt them to yourself.

You shouldn’t be thinking about a hack as an end in itself. Improving your productivity is a process, not simply a collection of disjoint hacks. It’s essential to understand that you’re not a failure if you don’t succeed in using a productivity hack out of the box. For a student, getting problems wrong on a practice exam is useful because it sheds light on what you don’t understand completely. Likewise, “failing” at a productivity hack can give you deeper insight into the root of your problems and steps you can take to overcome them.

In order to effectively hack a hack, there are three things you’ll need to understand: yourself, the hack, and where the tension is between yourself and the hack. This corresponds to the following three questions:

1. What problem am I trying to solve through the hack? Try to be as specific as possible. If you can’t imagine the problem, then you might want to rethink how useful the hack would be in the first place.
2. What about the hack could help me solve the problem? What is it about the technique that is supposedly effective? The most important part of a hack isn’t the hack itself; it’s why the hack works. The underlying technique is what you’ll be able to mold and tailor to yourself, so focus on this instead.
3. What prevented me from sticking with the hack? Was it internal or external? Why didn’t whatever I said in #2 work?

To make it more concrete, I’ll give two examples of what the thought process could look like.

Limiting Facebook Time

Hack: Use a Chrome extension to limit the time I spend on Facebook every day by blocking Facebook after I spend 30 minutes on the site.

1. What problem am I trying to solve through the hack? Too much time spent on Facebook.
2. What about the hack could help me solve the problem? It’ll force me to stop using Facebook as much.
3. What prevented me from sticking with the hack? I thought blocking Facebook after I used it for 30 minutes would prevent me from using it later in the day, but so many of my friends and group chats use Messenger that I needed to check Facebook to message people back, and then I ended up getting distracted while looking at my newsfeed. And, I’m the admin of a group, so sometimes I needed to create events for it. Plus a lot of the time I wasted on Facebook came from checking the mobile app, not the desktop website.

Answering #3 made my #1 a lot clearer. After “failing” at the hack, I realized that my time was really being sucked away by looking at newsfeed. Since I can’t avoid logging onto Facebook because of messages and groups, I instead downloaded a Chrome extension to block my newsfeed. Also, alot of the time I wasted on newsfeed came from the mobile app, not the desktop website. So, I deleted the mobile app.

So in this case, the original hack didn’t work for me. But by attempting the hack, I ended up understanding more about my problem, and thinking of other solutions that did work for me. (I actually haven’t seen newsfeed in months now!)

Pomodoro

1. What problem am I trying to solve through the hack? It’s really hard to get myself to start working on something I don’t like.
2. What about the hack could help me solve the problem? It really helps me get over my initial aversion to work I don’t like by thinking about the work as just a 25-minute chunk instead of picturing hours and hours and thinking, “Oh my god, I have *so* much to do.”
3. What prevented me from sticking with the hack? n/a

When you understand your problem properly, you can avoid the pitfall of using a technique universally, when it should only be used in specific situations. I never use Pomodoro when I’m doing things I like, such as math or programming, because I’m usually in a state of flow then, and Pomodoro would simply be distracting.

In this case, by knowing exactly what I wanted to fix, I was able to avoid that by only using Pomodoro in cases when I needed a jumpstart to begin working.

And if you really understand #2, which is the underlying technique behind the hack, then you’ll be able to flexibly use the technique in more ways than the original specification. The technique of imagining something as a smaller chunk I use all the time when I have to do anything I feel an aversion to. (For example, if I’m doing 100 pushups, I imagine it as 10 at a time, instead of 100 all together.)

Here’s another route that could have happened in implementing Pomodoro:

1. What problem am I trying to solve through the hack? I’m not focusing to my full potential. Sometimes I take breaks and don’t even realize that I’ve stopped working for a bit.
2. What about the hack could help me solve the problem? If I work in specific 25-minute sprints, I’ll be able to keep my focus during the 25-minute work time and restrain my breaks to the 5 minute break periods.
3. What prevented me from sticking with the hack? The 5 minute breaks weren’t long enough for me to do anything that I found satisfying as a break. Normally I read a quick article as a break, but 5 minutes wasn’t enough for me to finish an article, so I just ended up always going over time during the breaks.

This is an example of how a problem can be very specific to the individual. Luckily in this case, there’s a clear extension. Make the break times longer! Try 50 minutes of work time and a 10 minute break instead.

And what you’ve really learned if this succeeds is that you need to make clear, conscious distinctions between your work and play time. So maybe you do this even more by scheduling break vs work time on your calendar. Or maybe you stop mixing work and social time by no longer studying around your friends.

Sometimes you might realize that the hack you’re trying isn’t solving your true problem:

1. What problem am I trying to solve through the hack? I get really distracted when I’m trying to work. I end up checking my messages, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
2. What about the hack could help me solve the problem? Maybe by getting all my distractions out of the way in the 5 minute Pomodoro break, I’ll be able to focus in the 25 minute work time.

At this point, you might think the rationale for how Pomodoro can solve your problem is sort of weak. There’s a problem-solution mismatch here. If you try Pomodoro and then end up finding that you’re still distracted, maybe what you really need is to just block those websites or turn your phone off while you’re working. Understanding yourself and your problem is as important as understanding the hacks you’re trying.

Once you’ve started thinking about hacks in this sort of way, you won’t be limited to just hacking other people’s hacks. Soon you’ll be able to come up with your own productivity hacks that are already focused on your specific problems.

Did you like this post? Follow the blog for more like it! And follow me on Twitter: @SmithaMilli.

Thanks to Sumukh Sridhara and Qiming Weng for reviewing this post.