A lot of the problem is gone after realising that productivity has little to do with efficiency and almost everything with prioritisation / focus. As soon as you become aware of your "attention flow" (what your attention span is spent on, like cash flow) it becomes hard to justify reading stuff like that.
Productivity porn
311–320 of 430 posts
Re: Productivity porn
#312Hustle and grind. Create 7 streams of income. Work 18 hour days - anything less and you're a loser destined for mediocrity. Read 5 books a week. Start trading stocks and crypto. Take cold showers, hit the gym. Optimize your schedule, log every minute spent. Ditch your loser friends and only hang out with likeminded - success breeds success. Sigma grindset. Moon or bust. If you're not worth $1 million liquid before 30…
Fitter happier More productive Comfortable Not drinking too much Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week) Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries At ease Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats) A patient, better driver ...
This song is literally what came to mind as well.
Re: Productivity porn
#313I really don't get any of those "be more productive", book, video, course and so on. Every single person I know just wastes their time with that. Usualy they work long hours and still don't get much done. But hey, they have Zettelkasten with things the never read. A to do list with stuff they never do. And they go out in the morning at 5 for jogging, while gulping down a liter of coffe or energy drinks which results…
I used to devour this stuff in the beginning of my career, because I always felt like I was drowning in a job that was asking too much of me. Eventually though I got to a place where I no longer needed anymore of these tips. These productivity systems and life hacks are useful, so it is not bad to explore what is out there, but they are tools and tools are not useful unless they are set to a purpose. Also, it is easy to hit a point of diminishing returns, so in hindsight I kept looking after these life hacks for too long.
Ultimately, for me (and everyone is different) it took an inversion of how I looked at time. Before I had a fixed set of things I wanted to cram into available time, and never felt like I managed this well. Realizing two things changed that: (a) work is effectively infinite and (b) the things worth doing or seeing exceed the capacity of a human life. This made me allocate my time differently: professionally I started radically prioritizing what I worked on and how I worked on it to dig up the most useful work from the infinite backlog (techniques: inbox zero, ooda loop, deliberate pauses for contemplation, job crafting). For my personal life I gave up on trying to keep up and spend my time doing things I enjoy, even if ultimately pointless (like reading HN), without feeling guilty to myself for the things not done. I also turned off notifications for almost everything, so I can choose what I spend time on instead of having it chosen for me by my masters in the cloud.
Still, life has a way of getting in the way, so I’m trying to have a more mindful approach to life, accepting what happens instead of forcing it to be different. This is a work in progress.
Re: Productivity porn
#314"We need to go deeper". Many people substitute lack of meaning with "productivity". Reason being that you cannot be truly productive long-term if you don't have a why.
Therefore, people copy attributes and behaviour patterns of productive individuals, but meaning is not possible to copy, so all of it is a sweatfest.
Re: Productivity porn
#315Hustle and grind. Create 7 streams of income. Work 18 hour days - anything less and you're a loser destined for mediocrity. Read 5 books a week. Start trading stocks and crypto. Take cold showers, hit the gym. Optimize your schedule, log every minute spent. Ditch your loser friends and only hang out with likeminded - success breeds success. Sigma grindset. Moon or bust. If you're not worth $1 million liquid before 30…
Fitter happier More productive Comfortable Not drinking too much Regular exercise at the gym (3 days a week) Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries At ease Eating well (no more microwave dinners and saturated fats) A patient, better driver ...
Still cries at a good film.
Still kisses with saliva.
That song was so good at making what generally reads like a healthy lifestyle seem hollow and pointless. I love it, even as I question whether its effect on my teenaged self was a good one, or maybe just fueled my neuroticism. It makes me look at life a little bit more like an opportunity to be creative and make risky, weird choices and less like a continuous process of self improvement, for better or worse.
Re: Productivity porn
#316I really don't get any of those "be more productive", book, video, course and so on. Every single person I know just wastes their time with that. Usualy they work long hours and still don't get much done. But hey, they have Zettelkasten with things the never read. A to do list with stuff they never do. And they go out in the morning at 5 for jogging, while gulping down a liter of coffe or energy drinks which results…
Who gets really rich if you follow the "Buy all your personal Guru's stuff"? "Buy a new course if you struggle with task X" is a simple mantra. The only way to boost productivity is to hire people. That's what these gurus usually do: hire stuff and let marketing (again: other people) spin it, like the single guy does all the work alone.
Easily one of the best get rich quick schemes is to create some overly complicated workflow (doesn't need to actually work) to get rich quick, and sell that to people.
I once had the idea to write a book about it where the first page just says "write this book" and then 500 blank pages
Re: Productivity porn
#317Cigarette packets carry grotesque images of disease caused by prolonged use of the product. Likewise, I think social media apps should be forced to periodically display warnings like, "This app is designed to make you feel inadequate, addicted, and lonely. Please don't think its real - that's how we make our living".
Banner blindness is real. You'll ignore this message after it was shown three times.
Re: Productivity porn
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fun. The answer is fun. But obviously, it's not that you have fun eating because you're unhealthy, it's that you're unhealthy because you eat stuff for enjoyment. Similarly, being unproductive isn't fun in itself, but having fun means almost by definition not being productive. If a hobby is productive, it's not really a hobby.
What is fun these days? Maybe fun is being productive, working out, and making money. How many hobbies really beat the dopamine hit of ADHD-tweaked TikTok?
"Fun" is a too short termed word i think... "happieness" would perhaps be better:
Riding a sailboat hard on the wind, watching the foam of the waves splatter onto the deck...
Reading a book in a comfy chair, only accompanied by the sounds of a fire...
Learning something new that changes your worldview completely...
Cooking together with your partner...
Watching your children grow...
"Fun"... "fun" is short lived like the buzz you get from a glass of good whiskey, i would say its better to strive for happieness
Re: Productivity porn
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are forgetting to factor in risk, Those paths are much more risky, a few make it big most don't. But that's the trade off people willingly make, a small shot at making it big, or living a normal upper middle class fully employed lifestyle. The way I think about it is, if you are on a deserted island, but you have made a nice life for yourself, shelter, water, food. Do you risk pulling it all down to make…
But that's never how it's sold - "do all these things and maybe increase your chance of becoming phenomenally successful by 1%". Almost by definition a tiny percentage of people will ever be "phenomenally" successful. And the ones that do probably would do so with or without these sorts of "tips".
And most people that do then look back on their lives and point to certain things they did that sets them apart. Like an old person healthy at 100 saying they studiously avoided beans and that's the sole reason they're still fit and well.
That's not to say the advice isn't sound, maybe it is, but if it's advice based on N=1 I'm not about to change my lifestyle.
Re: Productivity porn
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
New pick ups are pretty expensive, at least from my perspective. A baseline F150 starts at 40k-ish. A decked out one could run you near double that I believe. Compare to a baseline Civic at around 23k.
Wow. People are really paying $80k for an F-150? Every time I think I can't get any more cynical, life throws a curveball like that.
A long time ago, just about the time short after the 9/11 attack i joined the german army. In my platoon there was a guy my age who drove a f...ing Dodge Viper.
You need to know, german conscripts were not really well paid back then, so it totally baffled me, especially after hearing that his family is from a blue collar background.
It turned out, that crazy guy somehow convinced a bank to give him enough credit to pay the deposit so he could get the credit from the dealer... and after this, every month his whole pay went into the payment of the credit(s) and the fuel.
People do... crazy stuff