This is a personal curated list where I aggregate different methods, tips, techniques and concepts that I have experimented with and have contributed to making me more productive and achieve a healthier lifestyle.
Disclaimer: To meet different cultural and legal expectations, I ask you to consult a licensed Medical Professional or an equivalent authority before adopting any health, nutrition or substantial changes to your lifestyle. Please act, at your own risk if you choose to try any of these items further.
Note: This list was last updated in August 2024. It is intended as a perpetual work in progress.
I’m fairly convinced that people nowadays live and work far below their potential.
The gains in productivity we can achieve by understanding ourselves and experimenting with small changes can allow us to achieve what we set out for us – both in life and at work – and be able to dream beyond that.
While the digital age has increased the number of distractions, it is not the bottleneck itself but has simply made the bottleneck clearer. The right knowledge, habits, and triggers for change are the decisive factors in productivity and health.
If we can increase our daily output, our successes will grow over the years.
If we can incrementally increase it yearly, we’d be looking at even more exponential success.
While studying in college, I was involved in various clubs and organizations, so juggling multiple pressures was my first experience of trying to push myself beyond my limits. This is when I first started researching and experimenting with optimizing my routine and habits to service productivity.
Throughout the years I tried different techniques and models – some with more success than others. I’ve compiled my lessons into this list.
Guiding Principles
- You and your mind are central to most of the ideas you find here.
- The tips and techniques on this list aim to make it easier to achieve what I call “the stable-focused state“. This is a state of mind and body where you can work with focus and effectively manage the stress that comes from the process. This state is characterized by clarity and increased analysis, creativity, recall and stimuli processing ability.
- I encourage you to experiment with these tips using the empirical research method. Try to focus on studying the impact of one variable at a time. This allows you to evaluate the impact on your specific lifestyle and needs.
- We are a biodiverse and neurodiverse species. Published studies and anecdotal evidence are always based on a restricted sample of individuals and their findings might not apply specifically or completely to you. As such, what works for you might not necessarily work with others.
- Adapt and customize at your discretion. Some little tweaks might make it easier for you to adopt or make an idea work.
Health
- Being a healthy person and cultivating healthy habits are the most important aspects of productivity. The body and mind are one – an unhealthy body will cause stress and take resources away from your mental work.
- Many of our body systems, like the nervous system, are tuned to daily cycles (eg. the circadian rhythm, and melatonin-cortisol cycle that regulates sleep and alertness.). Disruption of these cycles might lead to dysfunctions in our systems, and that includes our brain. In some, staying late just one day might disrupt your sleep and energy cycle for the next few days.
- Brain fog, lack of energy, anxiety, and physical pain unfortunately plague many individuals, hindering productivity. These issues often stem from an unbalanced body, such as an inadequate diet, unhealthy habits, poor posture, and lack of physical activity.
- Blood and energy need to flow. Going for a 15-30 mins continuous walk, every day, ideally before you start your day, will ensure that you get the circulation going.
- Diet: a part of the population reacts to certain foods, however, symptoms might be hidden in the form of brain fog, mood swings, depression, and anxiety (1) (2). It is thought that for most of our history, people’s diets were stable, but in today’s world, you have access to a wide variety of foods, from different sources and different levels of process. Even though they might be digestible, they might not be optimal or beneficial for the body long term. You can learn more about your body with food allergen tests, and by paying attention to how your body reacts after ingesting certain foods.
- Sleep: getting enough sleep is crucial for a healthy day and life. Sleep disruptions have been associated with different chronic diseases (3).
- Water: Make sure you are getting an adequate water intake throughout the day. Drink before you are thirsty. Ask advice from a nutritionist to help you calculate your water intake, based on your lifestyle and diet. This is a hydration calculator that can give you some pointers into more variables (exercise, substances, type of beverages) involved in hydration, and help you calculate your adequate water intake.
General Day/Work tips
- Our spaces have a good impact on you. Keep your desk/work environment free of distractions, and clutter. You should even seek to leave more room and space available than what you need. This assures you have leeway to manoeuvre around.
- Keep your cell phone in a pocket or hidden away from your senses, in silent mode, if you don’t need it during working sessions. Seeing your cellphone or receiving a notification might make you check it, out of habit.
- The position of the room where you sit in an office might make you take in more distractions. Men, for instance, tend to be significantly more alert to changes in persons in the room or environment – it’s a biological adaptation to screening for threats.
- Before work, clear the desk/room of distractions, and clutter. The environment will affect you in subtle ways.
- Routine: Wake up early – before the noise. Allow the body to ease into the day, and not burst like a flash. The sun rises up slowly, not in a thunder.
- Identify which times of the day/week you are more productive for different types of tasks. (eg. Is Friday afternoon the best time to have an important meeting?)
- Have redundancies at hand for critical systems that affect your work (eg. have a spare computer, internet connection hotspot, mouse/keyboard).
- Use the first 15-30 minutes of your work day to plan your day. Go over priority and critical meetings and tasks that you have to do.
Procrastination & Staying Focused
- Procrastination starts as a feeling of pain, but it has been shown that it goes away after you start working. While it’s not the most actionable advice – starting anyway will help reduce the pain associated with procrastination.
- Break down difficult, complex tasks into small, approachable, and actionable chunks.
- Keep a sheet of paper on hand and write down any distractions. These can be ideas for other projects or things that you remember.
- If “it’s not working”, go out for a short walk. Walking encourages the diffuse mode of the brain (4) to take over. This allows the focused system of the brain to relax and recover.
Specific Organization and Analysis Tips
- Mind maps can help you deconstruct phenomena, problems, and scenarios and make it easier for the mind to grasp more complex subjects or detect nuances. By off-loading the “mind map” from your brain to paper, you get more energy to analyze it.
- Time-blocking encourages you to manage your calendar, time and priorities
- Task batching is grouping similar tasks to work sequentially. Switching between different types of tasks takes energy (eg. I only check the email box and go over pending emails twices a day, depending on needs.)
- The Pomodoro technique encourages short sprints of focused time. I often set “mini-pomodoros” but just looking at the clock (eg. “over the next 30 minutes, I will work on this nonstop”)
Software Support
- Some tools can automate, simplify, or even replace tasks that you do.
- For browser-based work, there are multiple Chrome Extensions that can make the work you do easier and faster.
- Briskine, for instance, allows one to load templates with just the push of a keystroke. This reduces the energy that I put into writing routine messages – as well as time.
- One should always keep an eye on the market for new tools that can improve efficiency.
- Caution: Regular use of these tools might reduce your ability to perform tasks manually, and critical thinking.
Electronics habits
- Social media is designed to be addictive. Its algorithms and UX is designed based on how much time it takes a human to stay on the platform. You can benefit by limiting use time. Some apps allow you to track and restrict the time you spend on social media.
- If you spend too much time on social media, switching your cellphone’s screen to grayscale will help reduce the attractiveness of social media.
- Use blue-light filters on electronic devices at night. This will reduce eye fatigue and improve your circadian rhythm. Blue light causes you to be more alert.
Sound
- In case you work around loud environments, it’s good to keep a pair of headphones around. Sound can act as a sound barrier.
- Listening to music has been shown to increase the productivity of software developers (5)
- Some classic video game songs are intentionally designed to make you more focused. Listening to classic videogame music playlists might brighten your mood and focus.
- My work is intellectual and creativity-based. Lyrics tend to distract me.
On Supplements, Substances
- Caffeine and sugar are substances that can cause the dysregulation of multiple body systems, addiction and are correlated with many chronic diseases. The fact that they are “socially acceptable” substances doesn’t warrant lesser levels of analysis if you are reviewing your food and drink intake.
- People often use these and others substances to compensate for metabolism shortcomings or needs in other areas: energy, being able to relax, appreciate, and comfort.
- Cravings for certain substances might indicate a need for micronutrients, and not the substance itself.
- Coffee speeds up your metabolism, which means it makes you consume energy faster. You might be trading energy that was reserved for other times of the day in a short burst. (I haven’t drunk a coffee in 7 years.). It also has been associated with a reduction in the gut microbiome, which disrupts the balance in your digestive system.
- Processes sugar are present in most processed food, to enhance flavour. Seek to avoid processed foods, and replace them with whole, minimally processed, organic foods.
- If you are a regular consumer of these “culturally accepted” substances, withdrawals can be difficult, painful and dangerous – so approach these issues with due consideration and planning.
- Some pills and supplements might contain allergens (eg. lactose is frequently used as part of pills). Seek allergens-free supplements and pills.
Other interesting techniques/concepts
- Cold showers/plunge: The reaction to sudden cold increases body metabolism. It essentially acts as a controlled shock to the body, waking it up to an alert state. Caution, there are dangers associated with it.
- Sauna: Regular use of a sauna has numerous benefits for the body and health. It essentially mimics cardiovascular exercise by putting similar stress on the body (6).
- Intermittent Fasting: This is a unique eating pattern that involves cycling between periods of eating and fasting. It is known to have several health benefits related to weight loss and metabolic health (7).
- Wim Hof Method: This is a combination of meditation, breathing exercises, and exposure to cold that can help you regulate your stress levels (8).
- Playing Tetris has been proven to increase brain efficency, memory capacity, among other benefits (9)
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming: It is an approach to communication, personal development, and psychotherapy which asserts that there is a connection between the mind’s processes, language, and behaviours learned through experience.
Caution and Critical Thoughts
- Productivity afficionados seek the most efficient and productive methods – but it might not always be desirable. When looking at life as a whole, some things are just not about efficiency and efficacy eg. you don’t “enjoy art at 100% efficiency“.
- While it may seem possible to operate at your max capacity, it might be a detriment to long-term success. Unpredictable things can and will happen – demanding more resources from you. Energy will increase to maintain your productivity and diminish your capacity to provide an adequate response to sudden issues that arise.
- The level of challenge is also a motivator for human action. When someone masters a task, that might seem dull and boring, creating less enjoyment, and less motivation.
- Focusing too much on productivity might lead to stress. This is what stressed people look like: they are overcompensating to maintain the same level of productivity over time. They do so by reducing the energy one can put into analyzing and responding to unexpected situations – leading to poor decision-making. If you do resistance training, you will see a physical representation of this: while you try to maintain a static position in the face of gravity, you will always subtly lose the position after being in it for too long. Naturally, our body and mind need some form of rest or reduced output.
