The Productivity Playbook

Evolving

The Productivity Playbook

Write out your goals. It’s amazing how few people do. By writing out your goals, you prevent a random walk through life. So many people just wander through life.

I always have a broad mission or direction, and everything I learn gets mapped onto it. My brain has sort of a single-threaded worldview, which is a funny thing to say because you might think I hop around a lot. But it all has context. If I can't fit something in, I tend to not remember it. I have this mental “clothesline” where I hang ideas among each other. It helps me remember them too, like data compression.

Doing more than one thing is very hard. You can do one big thing, and you can attach lots of subroutines to that. But if you're trying to do more than one big thing, you have to decide every single moment of the day, am I spending time on A or B?

I lie awake at night and think, Okay, here's what I've learned today. How does that fit into my broad collection of ideas? Where are the contradictions, overlaps, and so on? Most people do not do this. They just compartmentalize. They'll learn something, but they won't try to propagate it through other things they know to see if it conflicts with other ideas.

Economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes said, “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” Meaning, if you don’t know what intellectual software you’re running, you’re running something subconsciously.

Your email inbox is a to-do list other people write for you. Task length and importance are not related to recently received.

As individual productivity rises, the amount of consensus needed to build something falls. Today a few people (or even just one) can prove a crazy idea works. Increased productivity leads directly to increased individual independence. Higher productivity means smaller groups. Smaller groups means less averaging. Less averaging means higher variation in outcomes.

Higher productivity also means quicker failures. Quicker failure means you can create more trials. More trials means you have more chances to find your comparative advantage. Iterate.

With the internet, your life can begin much earlier than it could twenty years ago. You can fast forward through the demo and tutorial levels to start playing the real game.