How To Get LESS Done In MORE Time

This video is entirely a self-roast

THE 9 STEPS:

1. Never be bored

2. Consume as much media as possible

3. Constantly switch focus

4. Time management not Energy management

5. Sleep less than you require

6. Have no clear priorities while judging yourself

7. Create a terrible environment

8. Minimise all movement

9. Believe you can never change


Video inspired by How to Be Miserable: 40 Strategies You Already Use Book by Randy J. Paterson and CGPGrey video of said book, which I wrote about years ago here

Thinking about doing the opposite seems to be a really powerful way of approaching behaviour change, which is why I made this video.


My productivity has been sucking wind as of late.


Talking about being productive, and productivity systems generally, is about the most boring topic imaginable - right up until you have that moment of “oh wait, I need/want to do more, but I’m not, sweet lord”

I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks devouring a few books on the subject, and a lot of them generally irritated me in that many of them boiled down to some version of “if you spend more time on the things that are important, and less time on the things that aren’t, you’ll get more done”. Money well spent?

Obviously many of these books have great insights, and some of them seem to work wonders for people given the Amazon Reviews, but it just seemed so short-sighted to me.

One book I quite enjoyed, despite the cheesy-american-self-helpy-coach style it was written in, was On Form by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. They present time management as really about energy management - which was a view I really liked.

In this lens, actually slowing down on some tasks might be a good idea, because it’ll leave you more emotional/physical/mental energy for other tasks. Video games and recreation becomes not time wasted, but part of you being happy and thus balancing out your capacity for doing work long-term.

It also is a much more compassionate (and realistic) view. People have complex, difficult lives. The non-nuanced turbo-charged hyper view of motivational content of “NO DAYS OFF” and “GO HARDER” is dumb and damaging. It’s not that people don’t care, they’re just carrying other burdens on their backs already. The deeper irony to all this is that these videos are usually shot with lots of footage of professional athletes jumping and throwing weights around etc. While this is visually appealing, most professional athletes aspire to a life of simplicity - train, recover, repeat - let nothing else get in the way of this process. Sleep and rest days are usually paramount to good performance.

All that being said, I have been spending some time putting together a mental ‘system’ for managing what I need to do - however I think this should all be secondary to the fundamental realisation that you can prioritise and task-manage all you like, but if you feel like garbage, you’re kind of losing?

Anyway, just some thoughts. Hope you like the video! I’ll probably throw together my splurged notes from the books on here soon in another post.

Jack LawrenceComment