96. Bad Productivity Advice You’re Probably Following

Episode 96

You're following all the productivity advice you hear on the internet, you're waking up early, and getting to inbox zero, and doing all the "right things" ... but you're still overwhelmed and feeling unproductive. 

Whelp, the problem just might be that the advice you're following is ... bad.

In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I'm sharing 9 pieces of bad productivity advice that continue to fool so many people. The issue is that following this bad advice not only doesn't make you more productive at school or work, but it can make you LESS productive and worse off than you started.

What You Learn:

• How you might have the definition of productivity all wrong

• What role tools have in making you more productive

• The connection between quitting things and getting things done

• Whether waking up early improves or destroys your productivity

• Why trying to get to inbox zero is a waste of time

• How managing your time better may not be the right approach

Episodes and Resources Mentioned:

• ⭐SchoolHabits University (Parents, go here)

• ⭐SchoolHabits University (Students, go here)

• ⭐The College Note-Taking Power System (Brand New Program!)

• ⭐Assignment Management Power System (Brand New Program!)

• Episode 15 – Email Management Tips for Handling Your Inbox

• Episode 36 – How to Stop Procrastinating

• Episode 94 - Simplifying Task Management and Staying Focused Despite Disruptions (Q&A)

• Episode 95– Why You Always Think Things Will Take Longer Than They Do

Never stop learning.

❤️ Connect:

• Instagram

• Facebook

• Pinterest

• Get the Transcription

  The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I choose not to spend my time fixing them 😉

  Bad Productivity Advice You're Probably Following

  ===

  
  [00:00:00] Well, hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 96. We are so close to episode 100. I actually mentioned last week, but I have been thinking of some way to celebrate episode 100, and I definitely wanna do it in a way that's gonna give back to my listeners. So I'll probably announce what that's gonna be over on Instagram and I'm gonna do that probably in the next week or two. So if you are not following me on Instagram, I invite you to do so. You can find me @schoolhabits. I'm gonna make an announcement over there about something kind of cool that I plan to offer you guys as a way to say thank you for being along this journey with me.

  Anyways, today's show, we are gonna talk about some bad productivity advice. I think that's kind of a fun topic because it gives me a chance to poke fun at some of the wild advice that we hear floating around on the internet or wherever we listen to things. And I think that's kind of fun to poke fun at things, but also I think it's really important that we get in the habit of questioning the advice that we [00:01:00] hear and that we really take time to ask ourselves if the advice we hear would actually work for us.

  Okay, that's the name of the game. So we're gonna cover nine pieces of bad productivity advice that you've probably heard somewhere before, and you may even have thought they were really good ideas. I'm gonna explain why they're wrong and then I will explain what to do instead. Sound fun. Let's get started.

  So the first piece of bad productivity advice, and this is number one on my list for a reason, is that the point of productivity is to do more. This is absolutely not true. [00:02:00] I do not believe for one second that the reason we try to optimize our systems and get better at managing our time and our tasks is so that we can fit more into our day.

  And if you've ever gotten that impression from me, then I have work to do in my delivery, because that is the exact opposite of what I want to teach on this show. The point of productivity, in my opinion, is to optimize our focus and our systems and our time and our tasks so that we can get in, get them done, and get out.

  
  And by get out, I mean not to move on necessarily to the next task. I mean, move on to the other things that we have going on in our lives or move on to rest or move on to a good workout or to a conversation with someone, or a nap or a walk, or whatever you wanna do with your earned time. do the work productively so that you can move on to something else.

  Now, of course, for many people, that's something else is another work task. And if that's what you wanna do, great. In fact, that's what I often do. But I do not think that cramming more [00:03:00] work or school tasks into our day is a very satisfying approach to life. I think that if we instead optimize how we work and study, then we can just go about our days a little more peacefully, and that is what I think is the goal of productivity.

  So work with focus until the job is done and then move on without any idea that you're gonna get some trophy at the end of the day or at the end of your life for being the busiest person in the world.

  
  All right, bad productivity advice number two is to be productive, you have to wake up early. This is just categorically not true.

  You've probably heard this advice before, and if you follow other people in a similar space, you might hear gurus I'm using air quotes, you know, if you're watching this on YouTube, and you might hear them talking about their 4:00 AM wake up routine, followed by an hour of journaling, an hour of an ice bath, an hour in a sauna, and then they run a marathon before they even sit down at their desk for the day.

  And I don't know about you, but those things make me laugh. And hey, if it [00:04:00] works for some people, that is wonderful, or maybe like a super ultra mini version of that and you like it, awesome. But in reality, most of those people are men with no children. And there is no deeper comment there other than the reality that most of the people who could have that kind of early wake up routine are men with no children.

  And that's not to say that waking up early is bad for productivity. Not at all. I'm just saying that it is a terrible prescription for everybody, and it kind of shames people into thinking that if you can't pull that off, then you're not gonna be a productive person, or that there's something wrong with the way you are doing things.

  Now, there were days when I used to wake up at five just to have the time to get in a workout before I had to get ready and leave for my teaching job and get my kids ready for school. And you know, my first class that I taught used to start at 7 25 in the morning.

  
  That's when I used to teach high school. And there's no way that I could wake up any earlier than five to work on anything or to journal or to have an ice bath, right? Because I had to like get my kids out the door to their [00:05:00] school. And also because after my teaching job, I would go directly to my school habits private practice office and work with students until 10 o'clock at night.

  And then I'd come home, eat dinner, and manage to get myself in bed by midnight. And waking up any earlier than five o'clock would've put me in a significant sleep deficit because I was only getting like five hours to begin with. So no, waking up at four would've been terrible productivity advice for someone like me.

  Even still to this day, I go to bed pretty late because of my client's schedule, and I don't get up much earlier than seven these days unless I have to, but I need seven hours of sleep. So that's what I do. Now, I think better productivity advice is to prioritize sleep and then to pay attention to your energy rhythms.

  Some people are night owls, some people are early risers. Some have a burst of energy at three in the morning and they get their work done so they don't even go to bed until after that, right? Or some people don't even wake up at three in the morning, right? There's no one way to do it as long as you are prioritizing your sleep, [00:06:00] because insufficient sleep is absolutely the worst thing that you could do for your focus and your productivity.

  You know too that people with A DHD tend to have more disrupted sleep patterns than someone who's neurotypical. So the last advice I would ever give any of my private clients with A DHD, or even to my listeners with a ADHD is, Hey, why don't you wake up at five or four to get a head start on your task list?

  Because I know that in many of those cases, they've been up all night and aren't even going to bed until five in the morning. Right? And waking up early is not a guarantee of being more productive unless you want to do that. Some people really want to, and honestly, sometimes I do. Sometimes I wake up an hour before my family just so that I can have some peace and quiet at the computer with my cup of coffee before everything begins.

  But that's usually dependent on my physical energy. And as I said, the better advice is to prioritize sleep. And respect your body's natural energy rhythms.

  All right. Number three, bad productivity advice number three, you need big [00:07:00] chunks of time and perfect conditions to get your work done. Not true at all. If you had listened to episode 94, a few episodes ago, I had a listener write in with a question they asked.

  How were they supposed to focus on their work when their day was constantly being interrupted with meetings that like they didn't have any control over? And if you're in a situation where you can't help those interruptions, well, you just have to work with it. And you can work with it. You can redefine what a work session looks like.

  You can use something like the Pomodoro technique, which is a series of 25 minute work sessions followed by five minute breaks, and you stack them back to back until you get the work done. That is a great way to make progress on something important to you in just 25 minutes. I mean, it'll typically take multiple, you know, sessions of 25 minutes, but 25 minutes it's nothing to like scoff at. It's true that sometimes, depending on what we're working on, we do need a large chunk of uninterrupted time to really make progress and to gain some momentum on the thing. But life doesn't [00:08:00] always work that way. Now college students sometimes have only, let's say like an hour in between courses and in that time they need to grab lunch and walk to their next class, which means they may only have 35 minutes left over.

  And for those students I say, Hey, there is like so much you can do in 35 minutes. The key to being productive and short sort of fits and spurts, and by that I mean anything less than I'd say 40 minutes or so, is to have excellently dialed in task management so that you know exactly what you're gonna do the moment that you sit down in one of those precious time slots, even if it's short.

  So if you are that college student in between classes, you know exactly which homework assignment you're gonna be working on. You know exactly how long you're gonna be working on it. You know where you're gonna go to do it, and you know whether or not you have the right materials to do that thing before you even sit down to do the work.

  That's the key to being productive when you don't have these big chunks of time.

  Alright, let's move on to a fourth piece of bad productivity advice you may [00:09:00] have heard. And that's to plan everything. And that might sound wild coming from me, the person who literally likes to plan absolutely everything except, um.

  Vacations like, I don't like planning vacations or social events, but anyways, that's neither here nor there. And I must have a million podcast episodes dedicated to planning. But I'm also the first to say that over planning is a very real thing, and there it's a form of procrastination in disguise. Some people call it procrast planning, which is just a way that we convince ourselves that we are working on the thing.

  Because we are planning it and we're mapping it out, and we're thinking about it, and we're just waiting for the perfect time to start it. But in reality, all we have to do is just start. There is no such thing as productivity without action. Okay. I'm gonna say that again because it's really important.

  There is no such thing as productivity without action.

  So if we are planning and planning [00:10:00] and planning and we are not taking action, we're actually not being productive. And even if our plans are glorious and color coded and mapped out for the next 90 days, still not productive. So what's the fix? To not plan? No, I would never say that. The fix is obviously somewhere in the middle.

  
  Sometimes you just have to plan a few steps at a time and then dive in and do the thing. And as you're doing the thing, the path reveals itself and you can kind of see the next few steps take shape. In fact, sometimes what happens is we don't even know where to start.

  
  Like we have no clue. And so we don't even know where to begin the plan. Like we can't even plan the next, the first, you know, two or three steps. And so we don't start, but in that case, actually starting anywhere, starting anywhere is the right thing to do. Literally just jump in somewhere, even with no plan.

  Yeah, it's probably gonna be the wrong spot, right? It's probably gonna be like gonna be the wrong place to start. But oftentimes when we do [00:11:00] this, that's when we get a little bit more clarity about what we're doing and that gives us clarity that, well, this is actually the wrong spot. But if we hadn't started at that wrong spot, we wouldn't have known it was the wrong spot, right?

  And it's, it's starting at the wrong spot that reveals to us, oh, I actually need to take a few steps back and do this. Like I was missing this component. So that's what I have to do now. So planning is wonderful, but over planning at the expense of taking action is nothing but fancy procrastination.

  If you struggle with procrastination, I'm gonna direct you to episode number 36. In that episode, I give you a deep dive into the reasons we procrastinate and then how to overcome our procrastination tendencies with strategies that are based on those particular reasons.

  Okay? Moving right along. Bad productivity advice number five is don't quit. If you want to be productive, just keep doing the thing. And you know what, so that's the bad, bad productivity advice. I'm not telling you to do that, but in, in many cases, that is true, [00:12:00] right? Like sometimes you just have to keep going even if you don't want to.

  But the framing of today's episode is all of the scenarios in which this advice is not true. So, play along with me here. I absolutely so wish that I could go back in time and tell my younger self that it was okay to quit. Growing up, I was never once told that I could quit something. I don't think I was ever told directly that I couldn't, but that was the expectation.

  It wasn't until my senior year of high school when I quit swim team, that I realized the most incredible relief can come from quitting something. That was literally the first thing that I think I'd ever quit. I'd played three seasons of sports, varsity sports, all four years of high school like. I never once didn't play a varsity sport all four years of high school, all three seasons except my senior year when I quit swim team.

  Now, let me explain why this, oh, such a good [00:13:00] feeling and I, I'm laughing about it 'cause like the relief is still like, I still feel like I sit with it. But let me explain why this is bad. Productivity advice. Sometimes we try something, an idea, a project, maybe a book, a certain way of doing a task. We start an email, a letter, an essay, a brainstorm, a slide deck, a poem, a painting.

  Like literally anything. We start something thinking it's a good idea to start this thing, and then we reach a point and we realize like, eh, like this isn't what I thought it was gonna be, or, this isn't coming out so good. Whatever the little voice in our head is telling us, it's saying, this isn't the direction that we should be going, but due to a cognitive bias called the sunk cost fallacy, it is really hard for us to quit these things Now, the sunk cost fallacy is a phenomenon in which we don't quit something because we've already dedicated time, money, or effort into it. But it is a really silly and time wasting fallacy because that time, money, and effort, it's already gone. [00:14:00] Like whether we continue with the project or not, it's already gone.

  An example that has nothing to do with school or work is this idea, I think actually on one of my podcast episodes, I did dive well. I talk about cognitive, um, biases a lot, and I can't remember the episode off the top of my head. You guys, whenever I'm doing my podcast and I say, go check out episode, like, you know, 37 or whatever.

  
  It's 'cause I did my research ahead of time and I checked my, like I have like a sticky note over here that says what episodes that I'm gonna refer to. This one's just occurring to me right now, so I can't remember what it is. I can leave it in the show notes, but I do talk like a list, a whole bunch of cognitive biases and how damaging they can be. And I think I've given this example before, but let's say that we have spent a hundred dollars on jeans and later we realized that we hate the jeans and we never wear them, but they remain in our closet for several years untouched because we just can't let them go because we spent a hundred dollars on them.

  But how silly is that? Like the a hundred dollars is already [00:15:00] gone. We can't get it back. It like holding onto the jeans isn't gonna give us a hundred dollars back. Like we, we know that, right? So you might as well just get rid of the jeans, earn the space back in your closet. 'cause the cost is already paid.

  Now, let's say that you're starting a new book and you're a third of the way through, and you realize like you don't like the book, but you force yourself to continue reading it because you already started it. Well, yeah, the, the several hours that you've already dedicated to the book aren't coming back.

  They're already gone with the a hundred dollars you spent on the jeans. But if you don't like the book, stop reading the book and spare yourself from losing more hours. Right. And here's how this relates to productivity. The more things we quit, the more we can focus on the right things. Because if we keep spreading our time and our energy and our effort on things that we know aren't quite right, and they're not quite like moving the needle or you know, putting us in the direction of our goals, then that's time we're robbing ourselves of spending on the things that are right.

  
  So today's the day I am giving you permission to quit the book. [00:16:00] Start the essay over. Choose a different paint color even though you've already painted half the room. Scratch the slide deck. Just quit the thing already. It doesn't matter how much time or energy you've already spent on it, because that's focusing on the wrong thing.

  That's asking the wrong question. Now it becomes a matter of what are you gonna spend your future time and energy on? And that is the core of good productivity.

  
  All right, the sixth piece of bad productivity advice I want to throw out the window. And it's this, that the gold standard of email management is inbox zero.

  Nope. No thank you. Inbox zero is the idea that you maintain essentially zero emails in your inbox at the end of every day, or sometimes even at the end of each week. And I mean, hey, if, if you like that and you do that and it works for you, then by all means continue with that strategy. I'm not here to say that if you're using that strategy and it works for you, then it's not good, right?

  But if that is not your method of email management, I want to let you know right here, that is not something I think anyone [00:17:00] needs to strive for. I think it's kind of a silly idea. Now, I do have an episode about email management, episode number 15, and if your email management is a little non-existent or could use some improvement, I do really wanna direct you to that episode.

  Also, all the episodes that I mentioned are linked at Learnandworksmarter.com. And if you want the specific place to go, learnandworksmarter.com/podcast/96. Okay? But if you just go to learn and work smarter.com, you'll see all my podcast episodes there, and that's where I include the links and the transcripts and everything that I mentioned on the show.

  
  Okay? But in a nutshell, good email management doesn't mean you have no emails in your inbox. It means that you have a good grasp on the emails that are in there, on the emails that you do have. It means you have a good process for extracting information from those emails and doing the appropriate thing with it is perfectly fine to store emails in your inbox.

  
  Okay.

  
  Some people choose to archive them, which just [00:18:00] removes them from the primary view that you see every day, but it doesn't delete them and they still appear in your search. So if you're like, oh, I got an email from this company, you can still search for the company name or a person's name, and it will still appear, but it's not like in your primary inbox.

  Some people like to archive their emails and do it that way. Other people like to delete them. But more important than how many emails you have in your inbox is this question. Do you have a consistent and effective routine during which you are going into your emails, extracting information from them, and then putting that information where it needs to go.

  
  So if it's a task, it goes into your task management system. If it's some kind of date or time-based piece of information, it's going on your calendar. If it's a file you need to keep, great, download it and sort where it's supposed to go. I mean, you can keep it in your email too, but. You, you'd probably wanna download it and store it where you would naturally go to look for it.

  
  But inbox zero, I don't think it's necessary as long as you have good email management practices. Now, one thing to note about email [00:19:00] management is I don't think the opposite of inbox zero is very good either. I mean, I probably have, I don't know, 50,000 emails in my personal Gmail account, but none of them are unread.

  Yeah, every single one of them over the years has been handled. Okay. I have seen many adults, and I'm gonna say adults because most students haven't been managing one singular email inbox long enough to even get anywhere near the 50,000 email range, but I've seen many adults with 20, 30, 40, and even 50,000 unread emails.

  I love my husband dearly, but he is one of those people. And do I get an eye Twitch every single time I look at his phone with a little red notification bubble showing, probably not exaggerating, close to 30,000 unread emails. Now there might, in honestly, there might even be more than 30,000. It's probably 43 something tells me 43,000 unread.

  Yes, indeed, [00:20:00] I do get an eye twitch in both eyes. And the problem with this approach is that it's not necessarily bad to have those emails sitting in your inbox, 'cause like I said, I probably have close to 50 as well, 50,000. But when you have 50,000 unread emails, or even a hundred unread emails, or even 10 unread emails, it makes it much more difficult to identify and even notice when an important email comes in.

  So it's kind of like all of the hay you're piling on top of the needle, and if the important email that comes in is the needle, well, you don't wanna be searching for the needle in that haystack every day, so get rid of the hay. You know what I mean? I don't know if that analogy worked, but I think it did.

  
  Anyway, moving right along. Bad productivity advice number seven is if you can only find the right tool, then you can achieve perfect productivity. Nirvana, absolutely not. And to be honest, I used to think this too. I used to think that if I could just find [00:21:00] the perfect planner or just design the perfect planner insert, so find the right notebook or whatever, if I could just find the right thing, then good time management and good task management, and good focus and good productivity will just somehow appear.

  That is not how productivity works. We need to have systems in place first, and then we can find the tools to support those systems. All right? That's how it works. We need to find a rhythm, a predictable routine, a system, a standard operating procedure for the way we manage our time, plan our day, get our things done, study for tests, complete tasks, and break down long-term projects.

  We need to know the strategies behind these skills before we have the tools. Right. That's why in my program, school Habits University, I don't get into what the best tools or software or apps that students should be using to get better at note taking, studying, and time management. Yeah, I'm gonna say use a calendar, but it doesn't matter if it's Google Calendar or Apple Calendar, what's it called? I Cal, [00:22:00] or Outlook? It doesn't matter. You could have the coolest calendar in the world, but if you don't have a routine that involves adding things to the calendar, checking the calendar, and syncing the calendar, then your calendar tool doesn't matter. Right? You could have a really fancy notebook and you better believe I do, but if you don't know how to take notes then like what's the point of your fancy notebook?

  So the focus should be on the skills and the systems first, and then you can invest in the tools to support those skills and systems. And even going back to this concept, if there's one perfect tool out there, there isn't. In most cases, we do have to use a, like a mixed bag of things, like a cocktail of tools.

  
  Most of us are using some kind of digital calendar and some kind of note collection system. Maybe if you're a student, you're using a notebook on your uh, or maybe your iPad with something like Notability where you can write with your Apple pencil. If you're a working professional, you might be using Apple Notes, a physical notebook too, maybe Google Docs or Word.

  
  And then you also may have a project management system, something like [00:23:00] Notion or Monday or Asana. You probably have digital file folders organized a certain way, and then you might have actual folders in your backpack or your in your work bag. There is no one all encompassing productivity tool that handles all of your productivity needs because productivity encompasses time management and task management, and those require different tools, energy management and life admin and focus, and there isn't a single tool out there that just blanket handles all of that.

  Like those are different things. So if you're looking for a place to start, start simple. And I say start with task management and time management. Time management is probably gonna be a calendar, most likely digital. I recently got my family the skylight calendar and we are absolutely loving it. My two teenage kids actually have been great with it.

  And then task management can be anything in an assignment notebook, a regular notebook, or maybe an app or software. Start there, and then you can always add a tool onto it if you realize that like your notebook or your calendar just [00:24:00] isn't cutting it. You know what I mean?

  Okay. I have two more pieces of bad productivity advice, but before I get into those, I'm gonna take two seconds just to ask you a favor.

  
  If you're watching this on YouTube and you haven't subscribed, I would absolutely be so grateful if you could do so. Those engagement efforts, like liking a video or subscribing or leaving a comment, make such a difference to the growth of my channel. And if you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or Amazon or wherever you listen to podcasts, if you could be sure that you're following the show, that is awesome.

  
  Maybe share the show with somebody you think might benefit from one of these episodes. And then the Holy Grail would be to leave a review. Honestly, that is the best way that you can support me in all of the free content I put out into the world. So thank you so much in advance.

  Now the second to last piece of bad productivity advice, so this is number nine, is that if it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist.

  And again, that might sound like something I actually would say that if it's not on your calendar, it doesn't exist. And there is a little bit of truth to that. But hear [00:25:00] me out on this one too. I am a big fan of putting everything on your calendar.

  That has a date or a deadline or set time, like an appointment, a test, a, a meeting, a project due date, but not every task or thing you do deserves a date on the calendar yet. Sometimes we have like really cool ideas and projects we wanna do, and books we wanna read, and, you know, visions we have for ourselves or maybe a, a vacation that we wanna plan, but we haven't booked the tickets yet or even figured out which week we wanna take the vacation.

  
  Yet those things don't necessarily have a date attached to them, but they, they still need to go somewhere. I just wanna make the point that they don't belong on your calendar. The calendars for things that are really happening, like they're happening on this day and this time. Those other kinds of things, like future vacations, shows you wanna watch, projects, you wanna start someday, they go somewhere else.

  Personally, I use Google Keep to manage this kind of information. You might use Apple Notes or a notebook. Some people call it a [00:26:00] commonplace notebook. Maybe I'll actually do an episode on that someday, it's kind of a cool concept, a commonplace notebook. But anyway, maybe you could just store them in, in a journal, right?

  But you wanna be careful not to overcrowd your calendar with things that aren't actually happening, because just like having thousands of unread emails hides the important ones, having a ton of things on your calendar that aren't actually connected to a real date or time can make it harder to see the things that actually are happening in certain dates in certain times.

  I am not saying kill your dreams. I'm just saying don't put 'em on your calendar. All right, and the last piece of bad productivity advice, we've made it to number nine, is that you just need to manage your time better and you can get more done. I mean, low key kind of, but saying something like, you just need to manage your time better, and even if you're saying this to yourself, it's just too simplistic. So many adults say this to young adults or to their kids too, and I know that teachers say this to students, but sometimes [00:27:00] we say this to ourselves in a kind of demeaning way too. We say like, oh, I just need to manage my time better and everything will be fine.

  We are so drastically oversimplifying the complex executive function challenges that are involved with actually managing time.

  And managing time, i'm using air quotes here, It is such an abstract concept. In some cases it may be even too abstract for people to understand, like, what does manage time mean? Like pause the episode, think that through. What does that mean? It's true that many of us need to get better at managing our time.

  
  Yes. But to do that, we need to get better at addressing all of the smaller components of time management. And once we get better at those, well then we get better at time management. Now, a good example is from last week's episode, episode 95, about estimating time. Now I begin that whole episode by saying that time management can't exist if we don't estimate time, well that's one place to start. If we don't have a calendar system or a way to make time visible, then we're never gonna get better at time management. So making time [00:28:00] visible is another more practical, less abstract place to start. We can't get better at something when we don't even know what that something entails.

  And this is a warning I'm always giving to parents and teachers too, people who well meaningly tell students, study more or pay your time better or get more organized, when in reality, students don't even know what that means because you can't do more of something if you don't know how to do it in the first place.

  
  And this advice applies to everybody listening to the show today. If you are, even if you're a full grown adult, shaming yourself into thinking, I just need to manage my time better really oversimplifies what's actually involved in doing that. Especially if you have ADHD. There are significant executive functions attached to time planning and initiating, and they can't be ignored.

  And that's true not just for time management, but for all those other sort of vague bits of advice we give ourselves. Like I just need to be more productive. Yeah, okay, sure. Probably. But what does that mean? Or I just need to focus more. [00:29:00] Mm-hmm. Probably true, but again, what does that mean? No matter what you're telling yourself, you need to do more of or telling someone else that they should be doing more of, it's really important to understand what that actually means, because often there's a series of smaller, concrete components inside that big abstract idea that need to be addressed first. So in terms of productivity, well, which is what this whole entire episode is about, you can't just tell yourself to be more productive without knowing what that really means.

  So what does it mean? Well, it means getting better at time management by making time visible and getting better at estimating time. It means getting better at task management by creating a task management system that works. If you're a student and you don't have a task management system, 100% my Assignment Management Power System is for you, and you can find that at assignmentmanagementsystem.com.

  
  Yes, I got that uRL, assignment management [00:30:00] system.com. That's my brand new program and it's really awesome. If you're a working professional, that means getting a task management system that works for you too. Maybe you also need a project management system. It means knowing what you're working on and when are you gonna do it.

  It might also mean creating some SOPs, some workflows, some templates to make your daily operations run smoother, right? We can't just tell ourselves to be more productive without fully understanding what that really means and without having systems that support us. Okay. Let's do a quick recap of everything we covered today, because this episode was packed with a lot of bad productivity advice and hopefully some better replacements for it.

  So number one, the point of productivity is not to do more. The point is to do what matters efficiently so you can move on to the other parts of your life, whether it's rest or movement, or time with people you care about. Number two, you do not have to wake up early to be productive.

  I want you to prioritize sleep and respect your natural energy rhythms instead. Productivity is [00:31:00] not clock based. It's more tied to your energy and your focus. Number three, you don't need big chunks of time or perfect conditions to get work done at all. Short focus sessions, 25 to 45 ish minutes can be incredibly productive when you have good task management in place.

  Number four, you don't need to plan everything. Over planning is just procrastination and disguise. I say plan a few steps ahead and then start, and then let the path reveal itself as you go.

  Number five, don't buy into the idea that you should never quit. Quitting the wrong things actually helps you focus on the right things, the ones that really move the needle.

  Number six, inbox zero is not the gold standard of email management. What matters more is having a clear process for handling your emails, knowing what to do with them, where to put them, and doing that consistently. Number seven, there's no perfect tool out there that's gonna solve productivity for you.

  It's systems and skills first, and tools second. [00:32:00] You find the rhythm and then you pick what supports your rhythm. Number eight, not everything needs to be on your calendar, your calendar's for things that are actually happening, not for ideas, future goals or projects that don't have dates assigned to them yet.

  Those can definitely and should definitely live somewhere, but probably more like a notes app, Google Keep or a notebook.

  
  Number nine, the advice to just manage your time better, oversimplifies everything that goes into time management. True productivity comes from understanding the smaller pieces, like estimating time, making time visible, creating systems for task and project management.

  So those are your nine pieces of bad productivity advice and hopefully few better ideas to help you replace some of those if you've fallen into the habit of doing them.

  Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions and never stop learning.[00:33:00]