The few best motivation, productivity and anti-procrastination hacks

I have seen over the years hundreds of articles and blog posts on how to be more productive, more motivated, manage time better, and how to combat procrastination more effectively. But most of these ideas are just too obvious to work. Like, "reward yourself" or "have a positive attitude". Everybody knows that. And let's not even get into studies that show how no controlled scientific study has ever found a long-term enhancement of the quality of work as a result of any reward system.

Here is a list of the best ideas I've culled over the years on fighting procrastination, being more productive, and becoming more motivated.

Physically spend time with people who DO stuff

There are multiple reasons for this:

  1. Physical proximity improves trust and cooperation (through a variety of psychological and biological mechanisms, such as increased oxytocin production). This is one of the reasons so much innovation happens in places like the San Francisco Bay area (and Silicon Valley in particular), even though the same smart people could in theory use video conferencing to get the same (software) things done.
  2. Brainstorming, even accidental (such as during an argument), can generate new ideas you can act on.
  3. Peer pressure. If others do work, and you're among them, you're less likely to idle or waste time aimlessly.
  4. Inspiration and motivation from others. Being directly exposed to actual people who achieve things (as opposed to those you'd read about in the news), shows you that real humans can do stuff.

It's easy to try this out. Go to a coffee shop where people work away on their laptops, and see if you get more or less work done than in your "favorite" setting.

Make decisions and take action

"Right or wrong action, they take it. Either way it's always better than making no decisions and taking no action at all. As Franklin Roosevelt said:"


-- from Why some people almost always are successful

Begin immediately

As soon as you've decided what is most important, get working.

-- from 15 Tips for Surviving a Task Explosion

Develop a sense of urgency

Have you noticed how accomplishments tend to happen in clusters? When you get something done, use the momentum, harness the joy of the achievement, and proceed to doing the next thing, right away. If possible, have high-BPM music in the background. If you need a break, take an active one.


Steve Pavlina explains timeboxing as allocating a finite amount of time for:

  • tasks where you may have perfectionist tendencies that would lead to too much time being spent on the task. Allocate between 30 minutes and 2 hours and do the most important parts of the task. The 80/20 rule (Pareto principle) says that you'll do 80% of what matters in that time.
  • unpleasant tasks. By allocating a short, finite amount of time for an unpleasant task (say 30 minutes), you're more likely to start doing it, because you know you'll end soon. Often, once you've made a dent in the task, you'll find that you continue working on it. Beginning is difficult.

Successful people do things even when they don't feel like it

I think this is a pretty huge factor. A lot of us back down when we don't want to do something, even though it may eventually bring us to a wonderful experience or goal. Successful people may not always like doing some of the things they have to do. But they do them anyway. And in the longer run that makes all the difference.

-- from Why some people almost always are successful

Successful people do the most productive thing right now

Instead of trapping themselves in doing productive but not so important tasks or projects they realize what's most important and do that. And after they're done with that, they do what's most important again. Instead of just doing a lot of things, they think and plan before they act, and try to focus as much as possible of their thoughts and actions on those few very important things.

-- from Why some people almost always are successful

Successful people do one thing at a time


See also the various research conducted on the impact of distractions and multitasking:

-- from Why some people almost always are successful

Specialize. Focus.

Think of a magician.

The psychology of impressiveness reveals that people are more impressed by someone who makes them ask "how did he do that?" than someone who has a sizable laundry list of standard activities. Achieving the former, fortunately, requires less time - and significantly less stress - than achieving the latter. [...] stress comes from having too many obligations pulling at your time. The principle of underscheduling prevents this situation from occurring.

-- from Cal Newport's How to Become a Zen Valedictorian: Decreasing Your Stress Without Decreasing Your Ambition

Successful people have redefined failure

Successful people tend to see failure as useful feedback. They may not like to fail, but they don't fear it - or at least they have little fear of it - and they know that if they fail they've been there before and they can start over again and succeed.

-- from Why some people almost always are successful

In the particular case of software development, it's known{{citation needed}} that rewriting from scratch a project takes an order of magnitude less time than it took in the previous attempt. Also, the code is much cleaner, because now the team already has a complete vision of the entire product before they even start writing the first line of code.

The Power of an Hour

Believe it or not, this was a lesson that I learned from playing the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game "Final Fantasy XI." I played FFXI an average of four hours a day for three years. The game kept track of the total "playtime" I collectively spent logged in. After three years, my total playtime value amounted to over 180 days.

It's difficult to explain the significance of how I felt when I realized how much time I had invested playing a video game. "Invested" is a sly word to use for this story - because a more accurate word would be "wasted."

I wasted 180 days of my life playing this video game.

180 days!? The things I could accomplish in that much time!

If I spent that much time exercising, I would be physically fit.
If I spent that much time learning a second language, I would be fluent in it.
If I spent that much time writing, I would have written a book.
If I spent that much time doing anything constructive, I would've improved my life.

-- from The Power of an Hour

Nutritional, exercise, and physical interventions

I've found that lemon juice with a teaspoon of instant coffee mixed in is an arguably strange concoction, but it plugs me in. Surprisingly energizing (if it makes you twitch or gives you goosebumps, you've got the right concentration), and get me crackin'.

Something else that works, though not as well as the lemon juice + coffee combo, is Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate-covered Espresso Beans. I'd have 5-10 of those in the morning.

Many people report that exercise makes them more focus and productive. I haven't been able to disentangle that from showering, because I shower after intense exercise, but showering alone also helps to "wake me up".

Earplugs also help me stay focused and "in the zone".


This is a recent discovery (Q1 2014): I've found that after attending a 2-hour comedy improv workshop, my brain stays primed for 12-24 hours to think more quickly, more creatively, be more productive, and also tackle tasks I had been putting off.

For example, I'd start writing that has been postponed for a week or more, and I won't stop for several hours. Code quality tends to be higher than normal too.

Criticism of productivity techniques

Rewards only work for mechanical or dumb tasks

How many times have you heard the productivity advice of rewarding yourself for getting something done? The truth (established by rigorous social science experiments) is that rewards improve productivity only for mechanical tasks or for tasks that don't require much cognitive ability. Various authors mention this as one of the most consistently reproduced finding of social sciences, and one of the most ignored. Indeed, businesses offer all sorts of incentives for high performance, but those incentive have been shown to reduce performance. See for details Daniel Pink's 2009 TED talk The Surprising Science of Motivation and Alfie Kohn's 1998 article Challenging Behaviorist Dogma: Myths About Money and Motivation.

This has been replicated over and over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators (if you do this, then you get that) work in some circumstances, but for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work, or often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.
-- Daniel Pink

Rewards narrow our focus, and that's why they work for mundane tasks, but for the 21st century, solutions (to the extent they even exist) are surprising, non-obvious and at the periphery ("outside the box"). Pink goes on to propose a solution, a new operating system for businesses:

It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation
Around the desire to do things because they matter,
because we like it,
because they're interesting,
because they're part of something important

Three elements [are required]:

Autonomy - the urge to direct our own lives
Purpose - the yearning to do what we do in the service of somethig larger than our selves

Time is not fungible

Fungibility is the ability of a unit of a commodity to be equivalent to another unit of the same commodity. One brick is pretty much always equivalent to another brick of the same type. One hour is usually not as productive as any other hour. This goes directly against "The power of an hour" above. Quote from Aaron Swartz's blog "HOWTO: Be more productive":

"With all the time you spend watching TV," he tells me, "you could have written a novel by now." It's hard to disagree with the sentiment - writing a novel is undoubtedly a better use of time than watching TV - but what about the hidden assumption? Such comments imply that time is "fungible" - that time spent watching TV can just as easily be spent writing a novel. And sadly, that's just not the case.

Time has various levels of quality. [...] And it's tough to focus when you keep getting interrupted. There's also a mental component: sometimes I feel happy and motivated and ready to work on something, but other times I feel so sad and tired I can only watch TV.


Why we avoid doing certain tasks

Again from Aaron's blog, under the heading "Procrastination and the mental force field":

What is procrastination? To the outside observer, it looks like you're just doing something "fun" (like playing a game or reading the news) instead of doing your actual work. (This usually causes the outside observer to think you're lazy and bad.) But the real question is: what's going on inside your head?


The mental block seems to work in the same way. It's not particularly solid or visible, but you can sort of feel it around the edges. And the more you try to go towards it the more it pushes you away. And so, not surprisingly, you end up going in another direction.

And just as you can't get two repelling magnets to sit together just by pushing real hard - they'll fling back as soon as you stop pushing - I've never been able to overcome this mental force field through sheer willpower. Instead, you have to be sneaky about it - you have to rotate a magnet.

So what causes the mental force field? There appear to be two major factors: whether the task is hard and whether it's assigned.

Aaron goes on about how to tackle hard tasks:

  • break them down into simpler pieces
  • start with something, because you'll get a better idea of where you're going, and because it's much easier to change something existing than to start from scratch.

As for assigned problems,



Create a false assignment

This presents a rather obvious solution: if you want to work on X, tell yourself to do Y. Unfortunately, it's sort of difficult to trick yourself intentionally, because you know you're doing it. So you've got to be sneaky about it.



Don't assign problems to yourself

It's very tempting to say "alright, I need to put all this aside, hunker down and finish this essay". Even worse is to try to bribe yourself into doing something, like saying "alright, if I just finish this essay then I'll go and eat some candy". But the absolute worst of all is to get someone else to try to force you to do something.

Make things fun

Hard work isn't supposed to be pleasant, we're told. But in fact it's probably the most enjoyable thing I do. Not only does a tough problem completely absorb you while you're trying to solve it, but afterwards you feel wonderful having accomplished something so serious.

So the secret to getting yourself to do something is not to convince yourself you have to do it, but to convince yourself that it's fun. And if it isn't, then you need to make it fun.


My tags:
Popular tags: