The Productivity Cliff (part 1/3): 17 mindsets to find focus and deal with your burn

Climbing a mountain is hard. We need to push ourselves but we must be careful not to fall off the edge. Reaching the peak of productivity is just like this. It’s a very fine line between maximal output and falling off the productivity cliff i.e. burnout. After over a decade of trial and error, I’ve devised a system to help you reach your productivity goals while dealing with the burn. What makes my system different is that it’s systemic, based on experience, and long-term oriented. It’s divided into three parts. This first part covers 17 essential mindsets to stop wasting time on less important goals. You could experience the bliss of focus, the calm of an organised plan, and the time to enjoy what you love the most. I hope you enjoy the journey 😉

How to use this post: This blog post was supposed to be long-form but it ended up more like a mini-book (2h reading). So it has been separated into three parts: 1. laser-sharp focus, 2. high energy management, and 3. hyper organization. This is part 1. These posts are for people who want to go deep into productivity, have a complete view with context, and to have a better understanding as there are a lot of synergies between the mindsets. Please don’t be scared by its length or by “losing” time, it should be worth the time invested.

The inspiration for this post came in 2019 when I read an excellent blog post on seeking the productive life from Stephen Wolfram, the brilliant founder of Wolfram Alpha. I learned a lot from his post and shared some thoughts with Stephen.

Much to my delight, Stephen responded! When I told him I was planning on writing my own productivity post he said something very encouraging:

“I need all the personal productivity I can get!”

This post is meant to help Stephen, but also, and perhaps even more so, all you leaders, performers, ambitious students, and productivity seekers who could benefit. We all need all the personal productivity we can get. I hope this helps you find it.

Disclaimer for transparency: I’m not trying to sell anything (no affiliate links to the products) and I’m not monetizing the post. I’m publishing this post to give back and to help me learn (Feynman technique).

Who needs productivity?

Everyone!

Whether you’re an entrepreneur, an ambitious employee, or someone who wants to find more time for the things you love, you can benefit from being more efficient.

I also believe there is no age limit to start. It might be harder to start at an older age because of technological barriers, but it’s possible. Most of the following hacks are rather simple (but not easy).

Being productive has no money barrier. Most of the hacks are free. But improving your productivity requires hard work and investing time into it. It’s only going to be worth your time if the benefits come quickly, continuously, and last for the long term. I believe this will happen for you.

The real question is not who needs productivity, but how to get started, what are the best hacks, and what’s the most optimal path to progress.

What will you learn in this productivity series?

• To increase your focus. Discover the 17 most successful tips to keep your mind on the task at hand.
• To manage your energy better. Learn 12 ways to organize your time to have more energy in the long run, helping you to achieve your biggest goals.
• To improve your organization. Test out 20 productivity hacks to help you to be more organized.

Here’s a mindmap to help you visualize the 49 hacks and to help you navigate through the content.

How I got into productivity (even if I wasn’t meant to)

I’ve come a long way in my productivity journey. As a youngin’, I didn’t see the point of productivity and organization. I’ve always been very creative and could pick things up quickly. I thought I could get by without the boring-sounding organization.

This ended up leading me down a path of struggle. I hardly got through high school. Once I got to uni I realized I would have to make a change or I would fail.

Luckily for me, my girlfriend at the time gave me a good push in the productivity direction and things started to change. I started small, making summaries of my classes. I quickly began to see results and continued to work on it.

When I came to launching a startup at age 23, productivity was crucial as founders have so much to do with so little time. If I didn’t have productivity on my side, I would have sunk.

I had a lot of learning to do and experimented with all the categories listed above. The findings had a tremendous return on investment. Feeling the benefits led me to believe deeply in the value of productivity.

I could also feel the importance for others of sharing my findings and helping anyone, including my team, to train their productivity skills.

While I’ve progressed on my productivity skills, (some people such as the ones below seem to appreciate it) I still have a lot to learn. I’m constantly experimenting (please send ideas if you have any) and finding new ways to reach even further towards maximal productivity.

Wait, but why should we be productive?

Productivity is not an end in itself, it’s just a tool. It’s a way for you to achieve more and reach your vision.

Where do you want to go and why? Your vision is the most important thing for you to know, along with the whys.

Having a solid and clear why is like a foundation. Just like building a house, it’s a good idea to start with the foundation before trying to build up. If you’re not sure about the whys then it’s harder to figure out the what’s and how’s to reach your vision.

To give you an idea, my whys (and core values) are:

• Building, competition, and curiosity
• Passion for biology and tech
• Impact: significantly helping the world be a better place
• In summary: building something in the bio field that has a big impact on society.

A fantastic resource to help you to find your whys is the book Ikigai: The Japanese secret to a long and happy life.

Whatever your vision and whys are, there is one eternal truth to helping you to reach your goals: it will help if you manage yourself productively.

Thanks Korbi for the quote.

For every hour of work you do on improving your productivity, you will have a multiplier. Imagine if you were using a horse to get around. When someone gives you a car you can go faster and get where you want to go more easily.

In other words, working on increasing your productivity might give you huge benefits. If you become 10% more productive this year, the time and effort you saved through this efficiency will accumulate over time. If the next year you become 10% more productive again, the compounded benefits will get even bigger.

Figure from this great article “Compound Interest Formula — Explained — https://www.thecalculatorsite.com/articles/finance/compound-interest-formula.php

Sounds all good, but where do I start?

While there are three parts, they aren’t all of equal importance.

The first two, extreme focus and balanced energy management, are far more important. These are focused on creating a sustainable system for productivity. This is where I recommend you should start.

Once you have your system built then everything else will flow. Then you can start having fun with the productivity hacks!

I’ve separated the parts into three different posts so we can go deep. You can find the other parts here:

• Part 2: High Energy Management
• Part 3: Hyper Organization

Let’s get started on a productive journey!

Part 1 — Laser-sharp Focus — The most important skill to get meaningful things done

“When Warren Buffett and Bill Gates were at a dinner in Seattle, they were asked what their biggest reasons for success were, and they both replied without hesitation: Focus.” (sourced from Buffett’s biography The Snowball)

Enhancing your focus is one of the most important things you can do to reach maximal productivity. Even if you’re someone who can get caught up procrastinating, this is not necessarily as hard as it sounds.

What is needed is a mindset shift and a couple of systems, hacks, and tactics that will reduce distractions and temptation.

Most of the sections have synergies. When added up, the benefits will be even bigger.

Here’s a list of everything I’ve found works for me. They’re all achievable for anyone to put into practice. I would recommend working through this list and testing each one for yourself.

1. Learning to say No

Saying no is hard (and much harder than saying yes). You could be scared of deceiving someone or just find it easier to say yes. Learning to say no is one of the best skills you can have.

It makes sense. It’s not possible to do everything. Having a networking call with somebody you aren’t that interested in takes away your time for a call with a top person you would love to connect with.

When you think about it like that, saying no becomes an essential productivity skill.

I love how Jony Ive (and Apple in general) defines focus. They focus on saying no. I came across this quote this summer and have been using it every week since.

Here’s a handy trick, copied from Tim Ferriss, to help you decide what to say yes and no to. This is a system to rate your opportunities with a quick and clear template. Here’s how to use it:

• Rate the opportunity from 1 to 10.
• 7 is the banned rating so you can’t rate an opportunity as 7. This moves away from the average and forces you to make a decision.
• Consider saying yes to things above 8.
• Say no to things below 6.

If you aren’t sure about something then you subconsciously know what it should be. A 6. If you’re super excited about it then it’s a 9 or 10. Go for it!

To see if the opportunities you said yes to were worth it, you can try tracking your experience over time using the same rating system. If you rank it the same 3 times in a row then it was an excellent decision. If it starts to fall in the rankings then you should stop.

This doesn’t just apply to business. It works for your personal life too, from movies to the restaurants you try. That way you can optimize every part of your life! But make sure your partner understands 😜

Now for the tricky part. How to say no. There are a few things you can say that get the point across without being rude. Here are a couple of examples:

• I have too much on my plate.
• I would prefer to pass.

Here’s a template from Tim Ferriss which you can adapt:

“I’m grateful for the invitation, but I’m struggling to make time with everything I have on my plate. I thought carefully about this as it’s a great opportunity but I’ll have to decline. I’m sure X will be a big success.”

The key is to remain honest while staying firm on your position. If you want you can be more specific about the reason, especially with people you know well. It can help to be better understood.

Thanks to Tim Ferriss for this useful productivity hack.

2. Work on goals that matter

Saying no will help to make sure you only say yes to the most meaningful goals.

But how do you make your goals matter? You should try to make every goal and result measurable and defined in time. This makes your goals much more accurate and achievable. OKRs, which means Objective and Key Results, as popularized by John Doerr in his book Measure What Matters and Google/Intel, are a great inspiration for goal setting.

Here’s an example:

• Goal: I want to be more productive.

This is not an ideal goal. There is no specific thing you can measure, has no time associated with it and is vague.

Here’s a different way:

• Goal: I want to be more productive by adopting zero inbox by the end of Q4 to save X hours per week on emails.

This is much clearer and attainable. You can see what you will be testing (zero inbox), what the results are (how many hours you want to save per week by tracking it), and have a time frame to do it (end of Q4). Because of this, you will be able to tell whether it has been a success or not.

Goal setting like this is similar to the scientific method. You have a hypothesis, do an experiment, look at the results, and if necessary, repeat.

What happens if a goal is so big that it’s scary to get started? This often happens to me and it’s a good sign that the goal might be of high value. If it is the case, I will try 5 hacks:

1. I break it down to the smallest subpart to make it more actionable and less “scary”.
2. Plan time to evaluate it properly. This also helps to break it down and become more realistic.
3. Not combining it with other projects, even if it’s tempting. It usually makes the project even more complicated and long.
4. Get started. Just get started with the first part or the first hour, and then take it from there. It’s like jumping into a lake. Once you’re in, it’s not that bad (unless it’s frozen).
5. Take it step by step. Move little by little and continuously adapt (see the lean manufacturing method).

One more thing about OKRs. I played with OKRs quite a lot. While they have many benefits and sound amazing in theory, in practice, they are not that easy or perfect. The important thing is to test it out, find a system that works for you or your team, and go incrementally. What is just as important as the OKRs themselves is what you learn from playing with them.

3. Plan more realistically

Once you’ve set proper goals, planning should be smoother.

Having a good plan is crucial to help you focus and be more realistic about what you want to achieve and how.

The importance of planning is not the end result. It’s the process.

Here’s how I like to structure my planning:

• My main doc is my monthly plan. Below is an example from my November 2021 month. Try to have 3–5 main goals here. It’s also important to estimate your time well and be realistic. A way that works for me is to plan less time in the month than for example in a week. For me, at the moment, it’s 2h per day of plannable hours versus 2.5h per day in the weekly plan. This is because when I plan my month there is a lot of uncertainty as I would have made the plan a month in advance. When it comes to planning my week, I have a much better idea of what’s happening. I plan at the end of the previous week, leaving far less time for the unknown.
• Next, you will have your weekly plan, far more specific. Would recommend not to have more than 3–5 goals here.
• Finally, you will have your daily plan, your lists of tasks you want to complete that day. It should have one most important task to complete from one of your big weekly/monthly goals.
• You can also use a quarterly plan that lets you see ahead but not too far to remain realistic. Try to have no more than 5 big goals (over 2h of work per goal).

On top of your quarterly plan, you might want to plan even further ahead, to have an annual plan (high level) and even a 5–10 year plan (very high level).

When making the goals for each of your plans, make the goals in the longer-term more high level. As you go down, the goals become more detailed.

This cascade of plans is inspired by how to use OKRs. They are very useful to connect all your plans together. OKRs are mostly used for company planning but I’ve also found they work on the personal side as well.

What about the goals that didn’t fit into the plan? If you’re like me, you might have a long list of goals that you want to work on but don’t have time for. One great hack, inspired by Warren Buffett, is to add all those goals to an “avoid-at-all-cost” list. These are your secondary goals. No matter what, you shouldn’t start on a secondary goal before finishing your top goal, especially the ones in your monthly and quarterly goals. Avoid it at all costs until you’re actually ready for it.

On top of planning, reviewing is also a critical part. It allows you to learn from your previous plans, adapt, and make sure you stick to what you prioritized. My habit is to also review the previous plan when planning the next one, so I review my previous week when planning the current one.

Planning and reviewing take time. It needs to be prioritized. My habit is to block 2h for the quarterly planning, 1h for the month, 1h per week, and 5–15m per day. For the annual plan, I usually block one day as part of my thinking days (see part 16). Thanks to Michael Simmons in his blog post for sharing his timing.

You may think this sounds like a lot of planning. But when you’re running on autopilot, racing to get everything done, you can’t clearly see where you’re going and what the big picture is. You can also miss important things that you may have been able to see if you’d taken the time to plan.

Planning helps you to zoom out and zoom back in, giving you a much better understanding of what needs to get done and how you should do it.

4. Stay flexible to weather all storms

The flip side to all this is over-planning. This is when things become unrealistic. There are too many factors that are out of your control so you have to learn to roll with the punches.

It’s so important to be flexible. This is somewhere that I made a lot of mistakes. Trying to plan absolutely everything doesn’t work. When life happens, as it always does, the system breaks down rapidly.

A good and optimized plan is one where you integrate or plan flexibility. For example, I always have 1 hour of my day unplanned. If I know there will be a bit more uncertainty on that particular day, I will add more time in.

The difference between these rigid and flexible plans are like buildings in an earthquake. An earthquake will topple those rigid buildings. But the flexible ones make it through, swaying with the tremors.

For being more flexible, applying a buffer is a useful trick to stop you from underestimating how long it will take to do something (well, at least not as much). I started with 20% after reading it somewhere and increased to 30% after testing it out.

We’ve all been there, saying something will take a certain amount of time but finding once we get down to doing it that our estimate was completely off. Having a 30% buffer to all your planning will help alleviate this and make things a bit more realistic.

On top of this, unexpected things pop up and tasks get delayed. It’s normal. Having this buffer can help you avoid frantically having to play catch up.

For example, whenever I plan a project for 45 minutes, I plan 1 hour in my system.

To go further, as pointed out by Korbi, the opposite theory also exists, trying to schedule less time than expected to force us to get it done faster. For me, it doesn’t work as I’m too optimistic and it ends up making my planning unrealistic. I would say that this part depends on what kind of personality you have (optimistic versus pessimistic). It’s worth trying both methods to find what works for you.

5. Stay on track with weekly themes

This idea is inspired by Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey (thanks guys 😜)

The concept is simple:

• define what you want to do and when
• balance out your week
• don’t spend too much time on one thing

For example, if you want to network but not spend all of your time on it, book half a day as your networking slot. Once your slot is full with meetings and such then you don’t plan any more for that week.

This helps you to decide where to put what, creating a useful set of guidelines to categorize everything.

It’s particularly handy for scheduling meetings or calls. You know when you made your slot for meetings (i.e., Wednesday afternoons) so that’s when you can schedule it.

Weekly themes help you to stay on track and remain realistic. If you have a sudden inspiration to write lots of blog posts but your slots are already full, you won’t do them. Instead, you schedule them for another time. This makes sure you don’t sacrifice your other goals by spending your time on one thing.

6. Busyness vs Deep Work

Being busy can feel good. It can make us feel important and useful, and there is a certain amount of ego tied up in it.

Busyness is a short-term way of thinking. These feel-good loops are not the best way to achieve your goals faster.

Deep work can help you be more productive than busy work.

Deep work is when you spend the first 2 hours of your day working on your most important task. These 2 hours are uninterrupted work where you can go deep into the task at hand and reach your flow state.

This is a challenging shift in how you work. But prioritizing deep work will reap long term results.

To visualise the difference, here’s a great example from YC Paul Graham. Think of a product manager (or executive) compared to the software maker (developer). The manager jumps from task to task, quickly ticking off lots of small things on the to-do list. The maker has to go in deep, reaching their flow state to allow their most creative side to come out.

My thoughts on this are that while the maker will need more deep work, the manager still needs some. I would say the maker should try to use deep work 50% of the time and the manager should aim for 25% (for example for thinking, planning, creating documents, training. The book High-Output Management has a great chapter on that).

To dive deep into this important topic, you can read the book Deep Work by Cal Newport. It helped me a lot.

Deep work also means changing from an urgency mindset to an importance mindset. The Eisenhower Matrix below should help you understand what it means. I would recommend you use it to decide how important/urgent your projects are.

For more information on the matrix, feel free to have a read of this excellent blog post by Todoist.

7. Time = value

They say time is money. While that’s a cliche it’s also true.

It’s important to learn how to calculate what your time is worth. By this, I don’t just mean your salary. This also includes your value creation.

You should start by calculating your hourly rate, considering both your salary and what your time is contributing. Once you have this you can decide what will be beneficial to delegate.

For example, if you pay for a tool that will save you from doing it, will the cost of that tool be more than what it would cost for you to do it? If it’s lower than your hourly salary, it’s a good idea.

If the hour you save allows you to spend that hour on something else such as a higher-level task that will bring more value, it’s also a good idea to delegate. This is hard to quantify so you should judge each task individually.

This is a really useful way to make sure you aren’t doing everything alone and helps you to focus on the tasks, projects, and responsibilities where you add the most value.

If you do this right across your team or company then you all become more valuable.

8. Don’t be afraid to delegate

Calculating your time brings us nicely into the next point, delegating. It’s a good idea to delegate everything you can and only work on the tasks that bring the most value.

Some things are easier to delegate such as support tasks (scheduling meetings, organizing trips, accounting) or well-defined tasks (editing work, social media posts, CRM updates etc.). I would recommend you do these first.

But you may find that you need to invest time into training before being able to delegate.

This may seem counterproductive but as a manager, training can give you one of the highest returns on time, as Andy Grove taught me in High-Output Management. Even though the training might require a lot of time, having a more advanced team will save you every year.

At Labiotech, we scheduled 2 hours every month for team training with follow-on one to one discussions. This was one of the best uses of our time. As our team became more experienced, the more I could delegate to them, and the more I could focus on my most important tasks.

One side of delegating is the simple things you know how to do. The other side is delegating tasks that others are better at.

These could be things that are mentally consuming and you have no interest in, like taxes. Or perhaps it’s something that isn’t your area of expertise, such as editing or coding.

Delegating is key to alleviating your workload, recognizing your strengths, and making sure you stick to tasks that are going to give you the highest return.

9. Make your meetings efficient

Meetings can be fantastic and the best way to make decisions, brainstorm, and build team spirit. Unfortunately, lots of them are not that optimized.

When a meeting is not prepared, has no agenda, and has no time limit, lots of time will be wasted. All of these things are crucial to maintaining structure and keeping everyone on track.

Jeff Bezos has an interesting way of structuring his meetings. For the first 5–10 minutes, everyone reads all of the information so they are on the same page. This avoids having only some of the participants preparing while others forget. I tried this at Molecular Partners and it worked surprisingly well!

If the meeting is an external meeting, it’s much better to be prepared. A good habit is to spend 30 minutes every Monday morning preparing and reviewing all your agendas and meeting notes for the week. If something will take you a bit more time, add it to your to do list. Add everything into your meeting event so that when you open your zoom link, everything is ready and waiting for you.

It’s also ok to say no to a meeting (using the template from point 1). If it’s not clear why you should be there then you probably don’t need to go. It may seem a bit scary to do this but it’s worth it.

A good rule to follow: if you’re in a meeting and you’re not saying anything it’s a bad sign. This means you’re only receiving information. A written format such as an email, slides, or a recorded video like a Loom would have been fine.

Another good indicator of a bad meeting is if there are more than 5 people. Sometimes this is fine, for example, if it’s for team building. Otherwise, there are usually too many people for it to run efficiently.

10. Only touch things once

This is a high-level rule. Try to optimise the task to touch it only once.

Take receiving an email as an example. If you read it straight away and don’t have time to deal with it properly, you might end up going back to it 3 times before you finally answer.

In comparison, if you only read your emails when you have time, you can answer straight away and the email is sorted. There is no need to spend that extra time revisiting it.

If you have something that will take longer than 5 minutes to complete you should place it in your system, otherwise, it will remove focus.

For example, if you have an email asking you for some information that you’ll need to spend time collecting, put the task on your to-do list and add it into your schedule. Then, reply to the email telling the person when you’ll be able to get it to them.

This simple trick can save you 2–3x the amount of time you spend on the actual task and reduce a lot of interruption time.

11. Managing interruptions to avoid the switching costs

When you’re working, try to have the least amount of interruptions possible. Every time you get interrupted there is a switching cost to get back into focus. According to the book Deep Work, this is about 15 minutes on average. Quite a lot when you think about it.

Interruptions come in many different shapes and noises. Here are a few examples:

• Instant messages (Slack, Teams, WhatsApp) or text messages
• Email notifications
• Project management software (Trello, Asana, Monday.com)
• Direct interruptions (chat in an office or call)

Minimizing these things is important. On the flip side, you don’t want to be unreachable (at least not for too long, and not for very important and urgent matters). This is where a system for when you can be interrupted is useful.

Here’s what I do.

When something is urgent, i.e., needed in less than an hour, I can be interrupted. This is far fewer tasks than we think (shouldn’t be more than 5%).

If I want someone to reach me but will get back to them in the next few hours, instant messaging apps are good channels.

If it’s not that urgent and I won’t need to get back to them in under 24h, email is the best platform.

There are, of course, times when someone will interrupt you for an urgent matter which wasn’t that urgent after all. In this case, it helps to give them feedback and ask them to try one of the other methods in the future.

12. Batch your tasks to save time

This system batches your tasks together so you do all of one task at the same time.

A good example of this is emails. Answering all of your emails together at a time you have scheduled is far more efficient than answering them sporadically.

This image is from The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss. Rather than checking his email throughout the day, he batched it. As a result, he ended up spending far less time on his emails. It perfectly illustrates why batching is so important for increasing productivity. I’m using the same system.

This concept goes hand in hand with the weekly themes. By creating a dedicated time where you can be super focused on one task you will be able to condition your brain. Eventually, your brain will be able to completely focus on one activity and you’ll be able to get it done much faster.

13. ASAP is the devil

I hate it when someone tells me they’ll do something ASAP. What this usually means is you don’t know when you’ll do something, suggesting you don’t plan ahead and instead, put everything in the ASAP basket.

No timeline can make you seem unreliable. Ultimately, I found most people who use ASAP are not focused or productive.

It’s better to stop using it. Instead, if you aren’t sure when you’ll be able to get something done because you need time to plan it, let the person know you’ll get back to them by X days with a more precise deadline.

There’s a fantastic chapter on this in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson which I highly recommend reading.

14. Shrink the unimportant

We all want to focus on the important things. But that can be hard. Lots of unimportant things pop up all the time. Sometimes we might not be able to tell how unimportant it really is.

This can be tied to habits. Habits are things we do all the time. We assume they must be important because we do them a lot.

For example, reading lots of business news (and news in general) might not be as useful as you think. This is an unimportant habit that I found for myself.

Once you’ve identified a potential unimportant habit, make a test. Using business news as an example again, try not reading the news for one month and see if anything changes. Have you missed out on anything really important? Does it affect your work in any way?

The trick is to be honest. Inspect yourself and ask if it is that important. What would happen if you eliminated it or at least reduced it? You may be surprised by what you discover.

15. Find your work-life balance

This one is something that is talked about often. Unfortunately, it’s all too common to let work take over.

Even though you might think you’re getting more done by working more, it isn’t the case as shown by Stanford researchers (55 hour cliff). The more you find balance, the more energy you’ll have, and the more focused you’ll be.

If you’re exhausted or not fulfilled in your personal life then everything suffers. Pushing through to get more done won’t help.

To go deeper into this, feel free to have a look at my post on life optimization.

16. Invest in thinking days

Thinking in Finland

I’ve been doing thinking days since 2018. I find them amazing. They are a fantastic way to gain clarity, enjoy self-reflection, and take time to think.

Made famous by tech founders such as Bill Gates, they’re 1–5 days of fully non-operational work. Instead, you can use this time to plan, think, and consider where you want to go. It’s a really useful way to come up with new ideas, focus, encourage creativity, and see what your priorities are.

You can either do them per year or quarter depending on your schedule and needs. I would recommend that you dedicate time at least once a year.

To go into more detail on how to plan your thinking days, you can read my post on how I organize them.

17. Empty your brain with a second brain

Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a second brain? Well, you already have it. It’s technology!

By taking the pressure off your brain through utilizing technology you will be far more productive.

To do this, try to delegate everything you can to your second brain.

Try out Notion or Evernote to take notes and search for the information you need rather than trying to remember everything. Memorise the path on how to search for it rather than the fact.

Look into using Trello or Todoist to record your tasks and projects so that you never miss anything.

Don’t worry about remembering birthdays and phone numbers, even your own. The calendar and address book on your phone does it better.

To go further, you can check the content from coach Tiago Forte on how to build a second brain, and thanks to him for the wording “second brain”.

Conclusion on Focus — The most important step to get meaningful things done

Focus is a fundamental building block of productivity.

To gain focus it involves both mindsets as well as hacks. The key, and where a lot of benefits lie, is that they are all connected and have synergies.

Here are my top 5 techniques from this section I think are the most important:

• Learning to say no
• OKRs for better planning and goal setting
• Shifting to a mindset of deep work rather than busy work
• Batching your tasks to reduce the time you spend on them
• Using technology as your second brain to help ease the burden.

Now, it’s up to you: Which of the 17 parts would help you the most in improving your focus?

Congrats for making it to the end of part 1 and here’s how to get started

I recommend you get started with one actionable item for this week and keep it going. For example, start by testing saying no. If it works, consider a second actionable item.

You should be able to progress step by step. I recommend that you don’t try to run before learning to walk. This will be more sustainable and will last long-term. For example, it’s useless to make too many plans and then never follow them. You need to work at it and build it into a real system. This is where you will get the most value.

By testing these hacks I’m sure you will notice a difference, both in your professional and professional life.

If these hacks and mental models were helpful to you and you think they could be beneficial to others, feel free to share them with your friends and colleagues to help them reach their productivity goals.

And feel free to reach out if you have any questions, I’m always happy to help! Just ping me at me-at-philiphemme.com.

A warm thank you to:

-Laura, Joachim Eeckhout, Joerg Schwarzrock, Florian Parain, Simon Bungers, Christian Piepenbrock, Stephen Wolfram, Tim Ferriss, Serge Faguet, and the many people for helping me build my systems.

-To Katherine Douglas for collating and editing the post, and to Wayne Harvey for the graphic illustrations.

-To Arnaud, Camille Hetez, Korbi Weisser, Mischo Kopak, Patrick Liebl, Raphael Blanchard, Raphael Ferreira, Tre Wee, and my partner for honest feedback on this post.

Where are the next sections?

This was part 1 of this series of posts and to get the most out of it, feel free to check out part 2 high energy management and part 3 hyper organization. Also, most asked questions are at the end of part 3. The links to these parts will be added once they’re published.

References:

1. Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure — Stephen Wolfram
2. How I set and execute 50-year goals — Serge Faguet
3. The Productivity Project: Accomplishing More by Managing Your Time, Attention, and Energy — Chris Bailey — Summary
4. The Complete Guide to Planning Your Day — Doist blog
5. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity — David Allen
6. Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time — Brian Tracy
7. The Compound Effect: Jumpstart Your Income, Your Life, Your Success — Darren Hardy
8. Managing Oneself: The Key to Success — Peter F. Drucker
9. Deep Work — Cal Newport
10. Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less — Greg Mckeown
11. Warren Buffett: “Really Successful People Say No To Almost Everything” — Michael Simmons
12. The 4-Hour Work Week — Tim Ferriss
13. Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life — Héctor García
14. Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs — John Doerr
15. Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule — Paul Graham
16. High Output Management — Andrew S. Grove
17. Jeff Bezos: This is the ‘smartest thing we ever did’ at Amazon — Taylor Locke
18. Thinking Days: Here’s Why and How I Did my first Ones (and Why You Should Too) — Me
19. The Productivity of Working Hours — John Pencavel
20. How to Say No (#282) — Tim Ferriss
21. It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work — Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson