In the early 1900s, in America, a car was considered more of a luxury than a household item. If you had about $7000 ($265,000 today) lying around, you could get the Great Arrow, the Packard Model L, or the Rolls Royce Ghost.

The business model was sound: build expensive cars and get higher profits per vehicle. Henry Ford also believed in this philosophy and had built models such as B, F, K, N, R, and S that were exclusively for the rich.

However, in 1908, the Smithsonian would write about the resentment ordinary people had towards automobiles because they were economically distant.

Ford would read the article and realize there was an opportunity in the market that no one was considering seriously - building a cheap car that the ordinary person could own.

How do I take something that is exclusively for the wealthy and make it ordinary?

The Model T was the answer to this question.

It was an automobile that was simple, durable, easy to own ($825 when it was launched), and suited to the terrible roads.

Then orders started flooding in and demand exceeded production.

“Within months, demand is so high that the company puts new orders on a hiatus.” the PBS would write.

Now, Ford was staring at another problem.

The current system they used to manufacture cars at the factory was manual. A car sat in one place and teams of workers came to it. They kept moving up and down the factory, retrieving parts, and making decisions on what to assemble next. Coordination was a problem.

With so many orders coming in, Ford’s problem wasn’t how hard he could get his workers to work and produce cars, but how he would ensure the same human effort produced more output.

Henry was stuck.

The company had so many orders but the current system they used for producing cars wasn’t scalable. Relying on human effort wasn’t working when mass-producing cars.

However, he got inspiration from the Chicago meat packers as he wrote in My Life and Work when he observed how a carcass was suspended from an overhead conveyor and each worker only did one specialized thing as the carcass moved.

One worker cut here and the next one cut there. It was the gradual disassembly that led to successful meat packing.

With his engineers, Henry Ford reversed the system and applied it to automobile manufacturing. Now, the car would come to the worker and they only handled one specific detail. Coordination was solved and decision-making eliminated in the factory.

With a conveyor belt in place, production gradually improved from 19,000 units in 1910 to 500,000 in 1916.

What’s more brilliant was how Ford addressed the problem of sustainable productivity.

He didn’t ask his workers to become better at starting - not get parts faster, be more disciplined - but redesigned the environment around them. The sequence was predetermined and the next task was already waiting when they got to the factory.

The moving line had now become an external source of momentum where although the worker still had to do the work, they no longer had to spend as much effort deciding what came next.

That’s the part of Ford’s story that interests me this week.

When we think about sustainable productivity - delivering high output reliably over time, rather than performing brilliantly today and struggling to show up tomorrow - we often approach the problem backwards.

We keep asking:

How do I become more disciplined?

How do I become better at focusing?

But sometimes you aren’t bad at starting but you have made starting too expensive for you.

Before you can begin, you have to decide what to work on, figure out where you left off, clear the distractions, and somehow convince your brain that it is now time to concentrate.

Ford’s conveyor belt suggests we ask a different question:

What if I redesigned my environment so that the next action was already waiting for me?

The best productivity systems don’t make you better at starting but make starting require less effort.

I’ve been experimenting with this idea in my own work and one of the simplest things I’ve done is create a consistent sound cue for focused work.

When I put on my headphones and start the same kind of focus session, I’m not trying to force myself into concentration. I’m giving my brain a familiar signal:

we’re doing this now.

I’ve found Brain.fm particularly useful for this because I can start a session without having to think about what sound to use or build the right environment from scratch.

Over time, the sound has become less like background music and more like part of the doorway into the work and that’s the exact principle I’m interested in.

I intentionally avoid finding another way to summon extraordinary discipline every morning.

What I have learned is that what works is building enough of the environment around yourself so that ordinary discipline is simply sufficient.

This week, try building one transition of your own.

It could be a particular playlist. A cleared desk. A specific document you always open first. A five-minute walk before writing. Headphones. Whatever reliably tells you: the next thing is here.

For me, sound became the easiest one to repeat, which is why I’ve kept using Brain.fm.

If you’d like to experiment with the same idea, Brain.fm currently offers a 7–14 day trial. I’ve also arranged a longer 30-day trial for Growth Mindset subscribers here:

Try Brain.fm for one month →

Don’t think of it as another productivity tool. Think of it as an experiment in making the transition into work a little easier.

Notice the difference in your workflow just like others.

Later this week, we’ll take this idea further in the paid tier.

The free piece gives you the principle: stop relying on extraordinary discipline and redesign the environment around you.

The paid piece turns that principle into a sustainable productivity system - one you can adapt to your actual work conditions, use on fragmented days, and gradually make good performance your default rather than something you occasionally achieve.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s productivity insights in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions - I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

In Birmingham, in the 1760s, a group of men began meeting once a month on the Monday nearest to the full moon, utilizing the extra moonlight to travel safely home in the dark.

They called themselves the Lunar Society.

What made them unique wasn’t that their brilliance but how mismatched they were.

Erasmus Darwin, a Physician; Matthew Boulton, an Entrepreneur; James Watt, an Engineer; Joseph Priestley, a Chemist; Joseph Wedgewood, a Potter.

None of them worked on the same problem and that was precisely the point. The potter could see something the engineer missed. The entrepreneur could learn from the physician’s observation of the circulatory system.

They brought different ways of seeing the world into the same room and valuable ideas that transformed the Industrial Revolution came from their meetings.

The problem with productivity advice

The problem with productivity advice is that it comes only from productive people, and that includes us. We have spent many years reading, testing, and writing about systems for knowledge work and we are confident in that lane.

However, it still remains a lane.

When we are helping a knowledge worker whose focus collapsed at 2pm, we can only reach for tools we know about; the attention architecture, the environment, your defaults.

A performance physiologist would see something entirely different. They could say that your focus never collapsed but you were running empty, without fuel.

They might even point out warning signs that showed up in your body several minutes before they showed up in your decision. And they would be right.

We, however, may not write anything about it because we don’t know what the expert knows.

This is the gap we want to close.

Introducing Expert Voices

Starting this September, one Saturday a month goes to an expert - a doctor, researcher, practitioner, or founder - who has spent many years practicing and building in an area that matters to how we work and live.

Someone who has insight into human performance that we don’t.

Not interviews or recycled parts from their books. Original pieces, written for our audience that helps solve their problem.

The expert voices will be free, in full. The whole point of bringing in an expert is to put ideas in front of people who can use them.

The experts don’t pay to appear here and we won’t accept payment for any editorial placement. We’ll only include experts who have something genuine to contribute to the conversation.

We are also not stepping back. Our voice remains the spine of the newsletter with expert voices adding to it rather than replace it.

If you are an experts collaborate with us here.

We will start slow - one Saturday a month - with the Q&A sessions remaining for the rest of the weekends, and always free. Gradually, we may increase the cadence.

What we are more excited about

When the expert voices resonates well with the audience, we will also welcome the experts back for live workshops and masterclasses.

You bring your actual circumstances - the 2pm collapse, the decision you keep getting wrong, the recovery that isn’t working - and you get an answer from someone who has spent twenty-five years on the question.

Paid subscribers will be able to attend selected live sessions at no additional cost while others have the option to purchase a seat.

Over time, we’ll also experiment with masterclasses, workshops, and practical products created together with some of these experts.

That’s the part we are most excited about.

Because we don’t just want to introduce you to interesting people. We want to see what happens when we combine their expertise with the systems and practical approach we’ve been building here.

The paid tier now becomes more valuable

While we will continue to share ideas in our free posts (Mondays, free expert essay, and Q&A sessions), the paid subscribers will now get so much more value:

• All free posts

• The systems we build on Wednesday and Friday

• Preferred pricing on workshops and live sessions

• Selected live sessions at no additional cost

Because the paid tier is about to carry considerably more, a new monthly subscription goes from $10 to $15 on September 1st.

Annual stays exactly where it is: $120 a year - which is now four months free compared to paying monthly.

If you’re already paying $10/month, you stay at $10/month for as long as you remain subscribed.

I want to reward the people who took a chance on Growth Mindset early.

The price is changing because the paid tier is changing too.

You’re not just getting more essays.

You’re getting a growing library of systems and workbooks, deeper practical material, and access to a broader network of expertise through the people we’ll bring into Growth Mindset.

If you’ve been considering becoming a paid subscriber, you can still lock in the $10/month rate before September 1.

Upgrade to Paid

Expert Voices begins this September.

We are looking forward to introducing you to the first person. I think you’ll understand immediately why we wanted them in the room.

This weekend, review some of our past Q&A Sessions

I have to use social media for work but it makes me unproductive

I’m unable to focus

I fear I’m not being productive daily

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

You have probably experienced this.

It’s Monday morning, 9:30am. You just settled in your workstation and nothing is on fire. On the contrary, you have time to enter a deep work block.

You open the document and spend the next 20 minutes reading your own work, trying to remember what you were thinking on Friday.

Why had I decided this approach? Where was this argument from? Somewhere on Friday, you found a number that mattered and can’t find where it came from.

So, you look for it again. You find the source, then you reread the paragraph above it. Then another paragraph.

It’s now 10:00 am and finally, you are working.

Nothing is wrong. That is precisely the problem. Friday wasn’t a bad day. You focused and stayed in even when it got hard.

But Monday forced you to reconstruct the mental state that Friday had already paid to create.

You paid for Friday twice.

This is one of the hidden costs of knowledge work. We treat every day as a fresh start when our best work depends on continuity.

You can be disciplined, focused, and hardworking - and still spend a large part of every morning rebuilding yesterday.

That is the cognitive treadmill. You are moving, but your starting line keeps moving back with you. The alternative is to make your work compound.

That is the idea behind this week’s Compounding Horizon playbook. Five practical moves for making the work you finish today reduce the cognitive cost of starting tomorrow.

Because your freshest, most expensive hours should be spent moving the work forward - not paying the same cognitive bill again.

We continue.

Read more

What do you do when you have worked hard, completed all small sub-tasks, and spent the time, yet your goal is still as big as if you’d just started?

That was the same feeling Wilbur and Orville Wright had in 1901.

In their minds, they had the vision of building the first piloted flying machine. Like Ji Chang who desired to be a skilled archer, the brothers had mastered how to narrow their attention to smaller sub-goals while still keeping their big vision in mind.

Between 1900 and 1901, one of the sub-goals the Wright brothers focused on was building a glider and testing out their flight equations.

Yet after showing up, being focused and executing daily, they made no progress. It was two summers of genuine, difficult, well-executed work that bore no external fruit.

For a moment, they stopped flying. No new gliders were built or flights tested.

Instead, they remained at their bicycle shop in Dayton and built 200 wing models out of sheet steel that would be hammered on the back of a wooden box with a fan on one end.

To an external onlooker, there was nothing going on with the brothers. There was no machine, no new flights being tested.

However, for Orville and Wilbur, they were quietly mastering how to compound their narrow horizon as they collected test flight data from their models.

This, not more focused work, made the entire difference in whether the flying machine became a reality.

In 1902, a glider was built from those numbers and worked. By 1903, propellers of the flying machine were designed from those numbers without a single new experiment and it flew for 59 seconds.

On Monday, we learned how to use mind maps to narrow our attention horizon as we work on big goals. That is real, and it is necessary, and the Wright brothers had it in 1900. It kept them going for two summers and it did not get them off the ground.

However, what no one talks about is how to compound our attention horizon. Focused work doesn’t fix it and working on smaller sub-tasks isn’t it. Instead, a system does. We now build the Compounding Horizon system that you can use to help you achieve this.

This way you can answer this question:

“I focus and work so hard yet my desired end goal seems so far to reach as if I’m just starting out?”

Read more

If you asked any young man living in ancient China during the Warring States period (471-221 BCE) what skill they desired to learn the most, one that recurred was archery.

At the time, China wasn’t unified but comprised different states that were constantly at war with one another. If you were a skilled archer, then your social status and military value increased.

“When selecting officials, virtue and conduct were examined first, and only then was the decision made through archery.” The Book of Rites would reveal.

Confucius, in the Analects, would even consider archery the only way a gentleman could compete and show superiority in public. Being good with the bow meant that you had self-control, good timing, accuracy, and the ability to compete without being disorderly.

Seeing all these benefits, Ji Chang, a young archer in the Zhou period, desired to master his skill and approached his master, Fei Wei.

Excited, he thought to himself about how his first day of training would go. How he would hold the bow and release arrows masterfully in only a few months.

However, Fei Wei looked at him and told him to first learn how not to blink.

Chang went back home and now, had to learn to look at objects without blinking for 2 years. He would sit under his wife’s loom and look at the shuttle moving back and forth without blinking. He became so good at it that he never blinked even when objects were coming directly to his eyes.

Chang then returned to his master. “Maybe now I can finally hold the bows and arrows.” He thought to himself on the way there.

Disappointedly, the master looked at him and replied that this was not enough and now, he had to learn how to see. Fei Wei’s instruction was that Chang had to learn how to see “small things as large” and “subtle as obvious.”

For another 3 years, Ji Chang learned how to see a tiny louse hanging from a tiny shred of hair in his window until it appeared large enough.

Eventually, he returned to Fei Wei his master and told him that the louse now appeared as large as a cart wheel.

Waiting for another instruction, Ji Chang was surprised by Fei Wei who handed him the bow and arrows. And when he shot, the arrow passed through the heart of the louse without breaking the hair holding it.

Throughout those years, Ji Chang’s ambition had not become smaller. He still wanted to become an exceptional archer.

What changed was what he asked his mind to look at. He didn’t spend every day thinking about becoming a great archer. He spent two years learning not to blink. Then three years learning to see.

The ambition remained large and the horizon of his attention became small.

A similar idea that cook Ding adopted when butchering an ox for Lord Wen Hui with such fluency that it appeared like he was dancing.

When Lord Hui asked him how he became so extraordinary in his skill as a butcher, Ding would answer:

Takeaway This Week

This week, we learn from the Chinese masters who show us that even if we desire big audacious goals, how we get there is by approaching every day by narrowing our attention horizon to focus on only one thing and then the next.

Ji Chang trained himself not to blink and to see small objects as if they were large while still maintaining his big goal to be a skilled archer.

Cook Ding started by seeing the entire ox but gradually trained himself to only direct his focus only on the space where his knife went next.

However, I have found this difficult in practice. When the goal is sitting in my head- “increase revenue,” “finish the book,” “grow the business” - I don’t experience it as motivating but as a weight that makes me anxious.

What I have done instead is to start putting my big goal somewhere outside my head.

For me, that’s where a mind map inside ClickUp becomes useful as it narrows my attention horizon on the very next thing I needed to do. Then, weekly, I zoom out and assess how my daily actions have led up to my main goal.

Suppose you want to increase your customers and sales revenue. Rather than carrying this large goal in your mind daily, use a mind map to break it down and focus instead on a smaller action that leads to the main goal in these simple steps.

#Start by creating a free workspace by clicking this icon.

#Select the whiteboard menu

#Search for the mind maps template and apply it

#Begin editing your mind map

Adjust your main idea and how it will relate to smaller sub-ideas that you can focus on daily.

For example, if you want to increase your monthly revenue, you could have these sub-ideas:

• Acquire more customers

• Retain existing customers

• Introduce new products

• Collaborate with others

#Add these to your mind map and daily focus on each sub-idea

#Here’s the most interesting part

You can add daily tasks to each of your sub-ideas. E.g., if I wanted to add a new task under the new products sub-idea,

I simply click the input box next to it.

Then click “convert to task” where I select the list where the task will be added.

It now changes to a task.

When I navigate to my workspace, the new task shows up.

The point of the map isn’t planning and I'm not a better strategist for having drawn it.

The point is that once the whole mountain is in there, correctly, I am allowed to stop looking at it - because something reliable is holding it. Every morning I open the tasks I already decided on and I work on those.

The revenue goal still exists, it just isn't sitting on my chest at 11am.

It’s free to use ClickUp, click here.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s productivity insights in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The form is currently closed to allow us to address your productivity problems.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at a case where we go in too many directions and get little done by the end of the day.

A subscriber wrote in:

This is a really interesting problem because it mirrors what we have been focusing on with the paid subscribers: being productive in the rented room.

Subscribe now

In many cases, you will find yourself in a room/calendar that you have no control over. The boss wants X, colleagues want Y, and you still want to complete your own project Z.

How We Could Solve This

A. Internally

Be willing to intentionally disappoint some things on your to-do list so that others may succeed.

I like how Greg McKeown in Essentialism describes how the word “priority” evolved over time. In the 1400s when it was introduced in the English language, it was singular.

You could only have one priority.

However, by the 1900s, it had become plural. One could have priorities. This becomes a real problem when you settle at your desk and try to make progress in different things simultaneously.

The productivity hack is to be aware of your finite attention and to protect it ruthlessly. This means choosing one thing and focusing on it until you are done before starting the next one.

You don’t need a tool for this. Every morning, look at your to-do list and ask: “If I were to make progress in only one thing today, what would make the biggest difference?”

You will find that only few things come to mind. It might be completing a project that the boss keeps asking about. It might be meeting clients to get other projects started.

This also means you need a way to assess whether the thing you selected is really making the biggest difference for you. Feedback eliminates staying in the same direction for too long.

If you start with your project, do you have a more peaceful day? Do clients respond better? Does more money come in?

Keep assessing and adjusting to know what really deserves full commitment during your best hours and be willing to disappoint the other items as you work on this one thing.

B. Externally

Here, you now factor in that you are employed. You work based on the set schedule and do what the boss needs to be done.

Prioritizing one thing doesn’t work here because you can’t tell the boss to wait as you finish your project.

The way around this is to make trade-offs visible to your boss. If you were working on X and now they want you to start working on Y, you need to be vocal about the new change in direction.

How you do this is to accept the new request they are giving you but also mention the trade-off needed.

“Yes, I can start working on Y. However, this means pushing X to Monday afternoon. What do you prefer?”

This becomes a double win because you remain a good soldier and you hand back prioritization back to the one in authority and with the whole organization view. They know the cost of this trade off to the company.

In some cases, they will withdraw the request.

It takes a bit of courage and you need to politely communicate your workload and its impact on performance to the right authority. This way, you can retain your focus on what you are doing and get things done.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Even when you’ve chosen your one thing, the direction can still change not because your boss asked, but because something quietly arrived.

A marketing notification. A newsletter. A social request.

The problem isn’t that these emails exist. The problem is that seeing them makes them feel relevant. Your brain doesn’t know that the email can wait. It only knows that something new has arrived.

This is why I try to make my inbox quieter than the world around me.

I use SaneBox to automatically move less-important email out of my immediate field of attention. Newsletters can go somewhere else. Low-priority messages can wait. Emails I don’t want to see again can disappear altogether.

The point isn’t having a perfectly organized inbox but an inbox that doesn’t constantly hand you another direction to pursue.

Think of it as a small filter between what happens and what gets your attention.

That distinction matters.

If you’ve decided that the next two hours belong to Project X, you don’t want your inbox repeatedly asking whether you’d rather work on Y, Z, or something completely unrelated.

You want fewer things competing for the steering wheel.

My inbox this morning: ten emails. Everything else still exists and none of it is in front of me.

Here’s 14 days free access

Coming Up Next Week: Overthinking and Criticism

We look at a case study where subscribers are stuck overthinking and lack constructive criticism from their family members/colleagues.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

You have probably experienced a strange moment when focus disappears without you ever deciding to stop.

For the first few minutes, everything was seemingly going well. Your phone was on silent, the room was quiet and your task was already decided.

“You were in” and figured that you would complete the report you were working on by the deadline which was 30 minutes away.

Then a few minutes later, the work stopped paying you back. It resisted. The paragraphs weren’t coming in fast enough and calculations no longer made sense.

Questions flooded your mind: should I start again? Should I look something up?

As you deliberated, the clock ticked away and pressure mounted. In less than 10 seconds, your mind offered you a reasonable and polite escape to check your email.

You missed the deadline and could only complain that “you don’t work well under pressure.”

What’s happening to you has occurred before.

Auguste Escoffier encountered it at the kitchens in Savoy London where skilled chefs were overcooking meals because the pressure of the waiting customer got to them. Bill Walsh experienced it in the field as quarterbacks were unable to execute good plays because of the pressure surrounding them.

Yet Escoffier with mise en place, and Walsh with the first fifteen, found a way out to help their teams remain calm and focus under pressure.

This week, our Decision Line playbook installs a similar solution directly onto your desk. By the time you finish reading it, you will have the insight and practical steps to follow when work pushes you back.

This way, your hands will always keep moving, the cognitive panic never arrive, and your focus will hold even when you are under pressure.

We continue.

Read more

It was Sunday, January the 8th, 1989, the NFC Championship Game day. It would determine whether the 49ers or the Chicago Bears advanced to the SuperBowl XIII.

Joe Montana, the starting quarterback stood behind the center. All around him, 60,000 people were making noise.

Then the defense started moving and the clock ticking. Although he only had 4 seconds, he executed flawlessly, hitting Jerry Rice on a 61-yard touchdown pass.

“With Montana and the 49ers, the bigger the game, the cooler they got. While everyone else was having heart attacks, they were running a clinic.” Joe Madden would say.

What was more interesting was that the 49ers’ quarterbacks weren’t staying calm during the championships because they had unusually calm personalities.

The secret was what was happening a few days earlier, in a quiet room, with a pencil. Coach Bill Walsh was scripting the opening plays in advance, a practice that came to be known as the first fifteen. He didn’t do it to help the quarterback but to help himself to stop thinking.

Walsh knew that in the heat of the moment during a high-pressure game, he couldn’t trust himself to make the right decisions. So, he moved them somewhere else, in the quiet and unhurried rooms, the very conditions that made good calls possible.

When he arrived at the stadium, the good thinking had already been done.

The quarterback didn’t need to stand there thinking: “What should we do now?”

He executed fast against a defense that was mounting against him.

Yet, there’s a version of this that happens at your desk every day. A meeting ends early and a 25-minute gap emerges before your next one. You run the focus ramp and get into deep focus mode in only 5 minutes.

For the first nine minutes, work moves easily. Then friction hits and you stumble upon something you don’t actually know how to do. It may be the paragraph that has stopped arriving. A bug that isn’t resolving.

Pressure rises from the looming deadline and 15 seconds later, your focus state is broken. You are now looking somewhere else instead - checking your threads, notifications, and opening new tabs.

“I can’t work under pressure,” you say to yourself.

What no one has told you isn’t that this is the wrong diagnosis. You entered the window with the first twenty moves prepared and you knew the task, roughly.

What you did not prepare was the move after the work resisted and so at minute nine you started thinking, expensively, in the one place where thinking costs your focus.

This week we develop the Decision Line playbook, a guide that helps you continue being focused even when work resists. This way, no matter how much pressure builds when you hit a wall, it never affects you and you continue to perform calmly.

Let’s get started.

Read more

Before Auguste Escoffier took over the kitchens of London's Savoy Hotel in 1890, the kitchen was a chaotic and toxic environment.

The preparation for an order only began after it was placed, and in most cases, only one cook was responsible for preparing it from start to finish.

That meant butchering the raw protein, chopping the vegetables, reducing the sauce, and assembling the garnish in real-time, all as the customer waited.

Because the kitchen was located in a windowless basement, directly above the coal and wood stoves, temperatures often exceeded 50ºC. Some of the chefs believed that to avoid dehydration, they needed to keep drinking alcohol throughout the day.

However, violent tempers, swearing, and constant fistfights were the norm.

Escoffier looked at this and saw that the problem wasn’t with the cooking but the organization.

He understood that relying on human endurance - working in the heat all while enduring insults and fear from violent colleagues - wasn’t a system that could scale. Especially during rush hours when cooks were constantly anxious about delivering good quality meals.

Escoffier understood one thing: during the high-pressure rush hours in the kitchen where everyone was waiting on the line cooks to prepare a quality meal quickly, a rush of words wasn’t the solution.

Shouting at the cooks to move faster or fist fighting them wasn’t it as others before him had done. Removing the chaos from already overwhelmed cooks was.

Auguste did something about it. He threw out the entire system and introduced mise en place, a system that translated to “everything in its place.” In place of chaos, was order.

Before any service began, Escoffier required all cooks to prepare every ingredient and position every tool. Now, during rush hour when 40 tickets were flooding into the kitchen, a line cook wasn’t frantically remembering where they kept the sauce pan because it had been organized in its place.

He went further. He banned the shouting. He banned the swearing. He moved his cooks off alcohol and onto barley water. And he split the kitchen into stations - the brigade - so that no single person was ever holding an entire dish in their head.

The secret to eliminating the anxiety during service was the meal preparation done quietly and unhurriedly a few hours before. This preparation was a non-negotiable because any service without it was simply unsurvivable.

Escoffier understood something that applies far beyond the kitchen; that the best time to make a decision is often before you are forced to make it.

Now think about a working parent at 6:30 p.m who is holding too much in their mind: dinner that needs to happen, a child who asks for something for school tomorrow, work emails yet to reply, appointments that they need to book.

Yet, in the middle of all of that, you’re expected to make good decisions - patient ones, the kind you’d be proud of. That’s hard, and not because you’re bad at organizing your life but because you’re trying to prepare and execute at the same time.

The kitchen solved this by refusing to do both at once. Prepare when you have room; execute when the pressure comes.

I keep thinking about this principle when I look at how working parents manage the invisible mental load.

Most systems ask you to become better at surviving chaos better at remembering, better at multitasking, better at holding everything in your head at once.

But what if the answer isn’t to become better at endurance? What if it’s to remove the chaos before it arrives?

I’ve been exploring this idea through something called the External Brain System, developed by BloomParentify.

What struck me wasn’t that it was another planner or productivity hack, but that it treated the mental load of family life as a preparation problem, not a willpower problem.

The idea is to give working mothers specific places to put the things they’re otherwise forced to remember, anticipate, and decide in the middle of an already busy day-a command center, structured planning tools, routines that front-load the decisions so they don’t have to be made at 6:30 p.m when everyone is tired and hungry.

The point isn’t to do more. It’s to carry less.

Get started here

Escoffier didn’t make the kitchen calmer by asking cooks to become better at surviving chaos.

He prepared the kitchen before the chaos arrived. Maybe we can do the same with our lives.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s productivity insights in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The form is currently closed to allow us to address your productivity problems.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at a case where our subscriber feels that they aren’t being productive enough.

A subscriber wrote in:

How We Could Solve This

A. Begin by defining what “enough” looks like

With physical labor, defining “enough” is easy. A bricklayer knows that the finished wall is his definition of enough. A carpenter knows this as a completed chair.

However, for knowledge work it becomes difficult.

You could always improve your document, reply more emails, or think more ideas. There’s no finishing line.

This is what leads to the annoying paradox because although you have spent so much time working on your goals, you feel that it’s still not productive enough.

A good place to start is to just define only 3 things to do for the day, not more, and focus only on completing them.

Every end of the day, assess whether you completed these 3, not what else remained undone.

This is the sense of progress you are looking for and what will give you the confidence to keep showing up.

B. Adopt a progressive mindset

I love how author Ryan Holiday approaches auditing his productivity. Rather than asking “was I productive or not today,” he instead asks “Did I make a positive contribution to my writing today?”

Every end of the day, ask yourself, “did I make meaningful progress on what mattered today?”

This is because all days aren’t created equal.

During some days, you will build the house and during others, you will only sweep it. Both are important to what you are doing.

However, be cautious not to use this as an excuse to produce little work during some days. Keep focusing on the results you produce, not what remains undone as Peter Drucker tells us, “knowledge work is defined by its results.”

How We Could Leverage Tech

Leverage tech to help you develop a sense of progress.

Let’s see how we could leverage dashboards in a free tool like ClickUp to help you get this done in only a few clicks.

This way, you will feel proud of yourself when you check your dashboards.

As an example, we can consider a case where you want to manage your clients and grow a side business in the gig economy. Daily activities keep you busy but you feel that you aren’t making any progress.

Dashboards help you see everything in a snapshot. What’s to be done, in progress, and even done, alongside priority tasks.

Start by creating a free workspace by clicking this icon.

#Create a list of projects

Create a new list.

It will contain lists of tasks related to client work and personal projects.

#Create client projects

Create client projects currently working on.

We assume you are handling client A and client B work. We create a list for each.

Next, we add personal gigs as a new list.

#Add daily activities

In each of the Client projects, add related activities that you handle on a daily basis.

We assume meetings, updating products, and regular contact with the client.

You would have these tasks.

#Assign status of each activity

Allocate each activity to its respective status - To-Do, In progress, Done.

Also, assign client work to have a normal priority.

#Change task priorities

For the personal gigs, assign activities to have an Urgent priority.

#Create a dashboard and add widgets

Here’s where we now get clarity using dashboards.

Navigate to the dashboards menu icon.

Create a new dashboard and add several cards (widgets) by clicking +card at the top right.

You should see this when you click the button.

Add the following cards:

• Tasks list

• Priority breakdown

• Workload by status

• AI Brain

Our dashboard will now appear as follows.

The “My Dream” card exists by default as a quotes widget. Rename it to “My Dream.”

Now, when you click your dashboard, you can see what tasks are in progress, what is urgent, and

#Leverage AI Brain

You can query AI Brain to give you any update on your projects.

ClickUp, is free.

Try it, see how dashboards can help you get clarity on how much you are actually completing daily and weekly.

This is how you will feel that you are really productive.

One more thing worth checking…

If you do all of this - define the three, complete them, watch the dashboard fill - and the feeling still doesn’t lift, then it was never a measurement problem.

Notice we just put an AI Brain card on your dashboard.

Most of us now work beside AI all day, and it produces a specific kind of tiredness where you finish the work, the record proves you finished it, and your head still feels foggy, scattered, oddly forgetful.

That’s not a productivity gap. That’s cognitive residue, and no dashboard will clear it.

If that’s the version you recognize, the AI Brain Fry Recovery Protocol is the diagnostic and the 14-day rebuild for it.

Get the full bundle here

Get the cheaper PDF and Workbook here

Coming Up Next Week: Going too many directions

We look at a case study where a subscriber is unable to be productive because they are going in too many directions.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

As a young man, Marcus Aurelius had been educated by some of the most distinguished teachers of his day in Rome.

He studied rhetoric with Fronto and philosophy with teachers including Junius Rusticus in quiet spaces where he mastered how to think in long, uninterrupted arcs, wrestling with logic and digesting complex texts.

Then in 161AD, the world turned over its head. Emperor Antoninus Pius died and now, Marcus inherited the imperial office and insisted that his adoptive brother Lucius Verus rule alongside him.

The quiet spaces where he once thrived were replaced with crisis. Suddenly, he had to command Marcomannic wars in military camps along the freezing river Danube.

Time was no longer entirely his. Messages, military decisions, petitions and the machinery of government constantly competed for his attention.

Yet during those campaigns, he continued writing the private philosophical notes that became Meditations, some of them explicitly dated to military camps on the Danube frontier.

Marcus Aurelius had learned how to stop searching for a world without noise and instead, adapted his philosophy to function inside it. He could not wait for the conditions of his youth to return. Whatever time remained had to be enough.

Today, you are no different.

On the calendar, your workday still appears as a day. However, psychologically, it’s a collection of fragments.

Writing a report at 10:04 and answering a Slack message at 10:15 before a meeting at 10:20, only to return to your desk at 10:51.

Before you blame your attention span or discipline, consider whether your method still fits the shape of your day. You are still using a playbook designed around finding an uninterrupted block and protecting it.

This week, we’re building a different way in.

The Focus Ramp is a playbook for entering depth inside fragments for moving from wherever your attention happens to be toward wherever the work requires it to be.

Not by pretending the fragmentation isn’t there but by learning how to climb back into the work.

Let’s continue.

Read more

If you asked a Cistercian monk from the 12th Century to describe what it took to copy manuscripts of the literature from the ancient world, they would probably reply,

“It requires deep focus and total concentration to avoid any errors.”

Yet, the Divine Office never handed them a three-hour focus block. No one told them when the next interruption would come.

Fragmentation was the rule of the day.

The monks had to work on the farm while writing manuscripts within the same workday. They never owned their schedule and every few hours, the bell rang and they had to drop whatever was in their hands for the fixed hours of prayer that punctuated the day.

All this interruption was supposed to have produced nothing. Instead, a paradox of sorts emerged. The workers with the most fragmented workdays were the very institutions that copied the surviving literature of the ancient world, ran sophisticated agriculture and hydraulics across Europe and kept scholarship alive through centuries when almost nothing else did.

Their solution? They had mastered the art of transitioning from a scattered to a focused mind in between the cracks of their fragmented workdays.

Today, the workday is no different. Your calendar (schedule) belongs to someone else and no one tells you when the disruption from a colleague or Slack notification will come.

If you only have fragments of 18, 20, or 25 minutes between meetings, phone calls, and answering Slack messages, how then do you enter into a deep focus block in such a short time?

Elite performers like Tiger Woods spent up-to 45 minutes in their warm-up sessions before they ever touched the driver.

Yet, as a knowledge worker, you don’t have the luxury of 45 minutes, let alone 10 minutes to transition into a deep focus state for only 20 minutes.

This week, we develop the Focus Ramp. A playbook that helps you compress your cognitive warm-up session into seconds.

That way, you only need a minimum sequence of actions to move your scattered mind that was just from a meeting, towards useful concentration.

Let’s get started.

Read more

How do you prepare for a crucial performance?

What exactly goes through your mind when everything is at stake in your next performance?

For Tiger Woods, the September 2018 Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, Georgia was that ‘one’ crucial performance.

He had been going through a championship drought.

It had been 1,876 days (5 years) since his first win of any kind since the 2013 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational. In that period, he faced multiple health setbacks, including a spinal fusion procedure in 2017. By the end of that year, Woods was ranked 1,199th in the world.

His performance at the Tour Championship in 2018 would be the one moment that would determine whether he made a comeback as champion.

But then how did he prepare for it?

It was a paradox of sorts.

Journalist Kerr-Dineen documented the Hero World Challenge on 29 November 2018, two months after East Lake minute by minute later that same year and noticed how he followed a gradual progression.

Putting → chips/bunker → pitches → 3-wood → driver → back to wedge → driver → back to chipping → putting.

He eventually walked to the first tee and hit his opening shot.

This was peculiar because for most professional golfers, the driver gets more focus.

Golf Digest analyzed 256,064 tracked range shots from 228 PGA Tour players across events including the Masters, the Players and the US Open.

The finding was that pros spend about 10% of range sessions on driver, and more than 55% on wedges and short-to-mid irons inside 190 yards.

Tiger instead was following this approach:

1-handed putts → wedges → 8-irons → driver.

He only used the driver (used for maximum distance) at the very end of the warm-up session.

Before we brush this off as a one-off occurrence, we need to switch back 10 years earlier in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics.

Michael Phelps was attempting to win 8 gold medals in a single Olympics event, trying to break the 1972 record by Mark Spitz where he had won 7 in Munich.

Each race was crucial to breaking this record.

Yet, before each race, Phelps adopted a peculiar preparation sequence. He didn’t start by sprinting as he was expected to do during the race.

Instead, he started with 800m mixed swimming, 600m kicking, 400m pulling, 200m drills, and finally followed by short sprints at race pace.

“Once I get to the competition, it's like I'm in a cage. I know exactly what to do.” Phelps would say.

Neither Tiger nor Phelps treated focus as a light switch. They didn't demand peak, high-intensity performance from a cold start. They engineered a ramp.

The Lie of the “Binary” Brain

This week, we look at Tiger and Phelps, elite athletes in their unique sports.

What struck me was that before crucial performances, neither treated focus as a binary state.

They didn’t go from:

Distracted → Deep Work

They had a progression. They gradually moved themselves toward the state their performance demanded.

For the rest of us, this might look something like:

Scattered → oriented → engaged → specific → absorbed.

This is easy to forget when we’re sitting at a desk. We open a blank document, look at the difficult thing we need to do, and expect our minds to immediately produce their best work.

Perhaps that’s the equivalent of asking Tiger to walk onto the first tee and hit his driver without warming up.

I’ve started experimenting with a small cognitive warm-up of my own.

Before a demanding block of work, I put on Brain.fm, close the things unrelated to what I’m doing, and spend the first few minutes simply getting oriented.

I ask myself:

• What am I working on?

• Where did I leave off?

• What is the next question?

• What would a bad answer look like?

None of those is the work. They’re the wedges.

The only thing I hold constant across them is what’s in my ears. I start a Brain.fm track before the first question, and it’s usually still going by the time I’ve stopped noticing it.

It isn’t what makes me focus (the questions do that), but how I know where I am in the sequence.

By the time I get to the writing, it isn’t a cold start.

I don’t expect those first few minutes to produce my best thinking. They’re there to get me into the work.

The music has gradually become part of that transition; a small, repeatable cue that tells me I’m moving from everything else into this particular thing.

Then I begin.

Tiger doesn’t begin with his driver. Phelps doesn’t begin with a sprint.

Why should we begin our work by demanding our deepest thinking?

If you want to experiment with this yourself, Brain.fm currently offers a 7-14 days trial.

I’ve arranged a longer one-month trial (30 days) for our subscribers here:

Try Brain.fm for one month →

You can simply use it as part of your own warm-up and see whether it changes the way you enter your work.

Notice the difference in your workflow just like others.

If you enjoy Monday’s posts, then the paid tier is just for you.

Rather than collecting occasional productivity articles, build a cognitive momentum system directed to help you improve your performance as a knowledge worker.

Join us

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s productivity insights in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in this form.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

Past Solutions

Some problems are also recurring. Here are some simple tutorials you can follow to solve your problems:

I wake up early intending to work but only end up scrolling social media

I have challenges making progress in high-pressure environments

I struggle with brain fog after using AI for only a few hours in the day

I have a problem with procrastination.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at a case where we get stuck with feelings of dread that we ruminate and are unable to make any forward progress.

A subscriber wrote in:

How We Could Solve This

This is an interesting and relatable problem. One moment you sit down to get to work and the next, your mind has ran wild, thinking about everything that needs to be done.

As a result, you end up being trapped in rumination and only get a few things done.

Begin by changing your mindset before touching any productivity tool in these 2 ways;

A. “I have to finish everything” → “I only have to do what’s in front of me”

Rumination kicks in whenever you start thinking about Monday’s problem on Saturday morning.

The wisdom of Marcus Aurelius in Meditations helps here.

“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.” Book VII

Remind yourself that you will meet Monday’s problems with Monday’s self who will have Monday’s energy and Monday’s information.

At the operating table, surgeons know that extreme focus and suppressing mental rumination are essential to their success.

Rather than maintaining everything in their mind, they use standard checklists. A simple to-do list that offloads everything they need to think about when performing surgery.

This way, they aren’t stuck ruminating about whether they forgot something at the end of the surgery.

Adopt a similar approach.

Reduce the list of tasks you need to do to only 3. Offload them to a system such as a notebook.

Only circle the first one and work on it until it’s completed.

B. “I need to feel ready to start” → “I can act even when it’s uncomfortable”

What you soon discover is that if you can only work when certain ‘ideal’ conditions are available such as a quiet room, then your system is fragile.

This is because the ideal conditions aren’t always available. It might be your office moving to a different floor or when you join a different team that’s a bit too chatty.

You train yourself to work even when conditions are not ideal, even when you are feeling uncomfortable.

Hence, shift from always seeking the perfect still conditions when you can work.

Embrace going to work even when you have feelings of dread.

This way, you shift from:

• “I need to feel calm → then I can work”

to

• “I still feel dread → but I can begin working now.”

You will be in a position to always show up and do what you need to do even when conditions aren’t perfect.

How We Could Leverage Tech

To help you overcome this rumination problem, you could opt to remain using pen and paper. However, you are forced to carry the notebook with you everywhere and might also lose it. Privacy might be another issue when it gets into the wrong hands.

Instead, choose a free tool like ClickUp which you can sign up free here. It gives you access to so much more including Super Agents that assist you, automations, and templates to solve your productivity problems.

This is how you can leverage it to focus on only one thing.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - My Workspace.

Create a new list - Inbox - by clicking the “+” sign.

#Step 2

Dump all tasks that you are thinking about, both personal and professional.

Assign these to yourself but don’t add any dates or priority.

#Step 3

Dump all tasks that you are thinking about, both personal and professional.

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• Inbox - for all issues you are thinking about

• Do Now - for issues you can handle today

• Do Later - for issues you can handle at a future date

• Ignore - for issues beyond your control

#Step 4

Assign a status to each of the tasks as you sort them.

Simply select it and assign the status.

You should have this now.

#Step 5

Select a task in the “DO NOW” category and focus on it.

Use Brain.fm to transition into the task you must do, especially during the first ten minutes where your mind keeps sliding back to your personal issues.

Select deep work mode and press play on a track with a high neutral effect (works best to get you focused).

You clear one task at a 119% focus state.

This simple routine does what your motivation can’t and the dread, still in the room, quietly loses the wheel.

The mantra you can adopt is “I am not okay but I need to keep making progress.”

Don’t demand that you feel focused.

Intentionally lower the bar to only one bounded block: a single 30–45 minute window, one small task, nothing heroic.

This way, you can stack the momentum to keep going until the fog lifts.

Here’s Brain.fm 1 month free access for you.

You could also add journaling here when you need to reflect.

Coming Up Next Week: Worried that I’m not Productive Enough

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels that they are worried that they aren’t being productive enough.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

In March 1997, video businesses received the same exact news. The DVD format, sharper than VHS tapes, was now mainstream.

Blockbuster, a massive global movie and video game rental chain, read this and acted correctly.

For them, DVDs took less space, were cheaper to stock, and had higher profit margins. They named their capacity dividend as ‘a better product’ within their same business.

Two brilliant men, Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings in Santa Cruz saw something different entirely. They ran an experiment where they bought and shipped a used CD to Hastings address just to see if it would survive the mail.

The CD arrived the next day intact, at only the cost of a stamp. Because discs could travel, there was no need for physical stores and a geographical location.

Every rental now ran through their system and they began accumulating something no competitor could purchase; what their subscribers liked.

Both experienced the same change in the substrate under their work. Blockbuster reclaimed the dividend as speed and a better product within the same business.

Netflix converted the dividend into a form that it compounded, and that made the entire difference in their business models.

When the substrate beneath your work changes, “faster” is the default setting that keeps you average.

Instead, here’s how you will convert your efficiency gains into a permanent advantage that compounds.

Read more

Before 1785, textile mills across Britain grappled with the same problem.

Producing cloth from yarn was extremely slow and not scalable because a weaver had to tend to the machine.

Then in 1785, the power loom was patented. By the 1890s the automatic loom could stop itself when a thread broke and the mills answered by raising looms-per-weaver.

Workers named the practice: the stretch-out.

The improvement was sold as a way ‘to make the work lighter.’

Except, it never did.

Technology had removed the extreme physical exertion of weaving and rather than make the weaver’s work lighter or shorten their hours, the mill made the same move.

The capacity dividend that the mill had introduced, it also took away.

Now, a weaver who was tending two looms was given four, and then eight. The hours remained the same, only stretched out and quietly loaded with more.

Today, you know this arrangement, even if no one has ever handed you a power loom.

A report that took you two days now takes an afternoon, yet your calendar is exactly as full as it did before. No one sent a memo raising your quota. It raised itself.

There’s nothing wrong with you. The playbook you are using only told you that the efficiency gain you obtained from leveraging technology tools was speed. The same work, done faster.

However, what the system sees, it also reclaims automatically. Now, your calendar is still full as before.

This week, we resolve this. We help you identify all your efficiency gains from leveraging AI and show you how to convert them into a form that can’t be taken away from you.

This way, you become more competitive.

Let’s get started.

Read more

Sometime in the 3rd century BC, King Hiero II of Syracuse desired to project his wealth and power in his kingdom through an ambitious project.

He commissioned the Syracusia, a ship so stunning that the material used for its construction equated to that used in 60 regular ships. It housed a temple to Aphrodite, grand gardens, and had a capacity of thousands of passengers, horses, and soldiers.

Hiero was struck by amazement on seeing the huge completed ship. However, this soon turned into desperation after realizing that the ship was too heavy to launch.

The Syracusia sat stubbornly on the dry docks. No amount of raw muscle power could move it, not even the screaming thousands of laborers who tried to pull it together with ropes.

In the face of crisis, a predominant question lingered:

How do we move this huge ship to the seas and onto the docks over and over again?

Brute force and sheer muscle power wasn’t working.

Archimedes, the scientist who had overseen the construction of the ship, was deep working on theoretical geometry and mechanics and wrote to King Hiero, confidently boasting that he could move the ship and any other weight including the entire world.

To emphasize the absolute truth of this math, he famously proclaimed that if there were “a second Earth he could step onto, he could move our current world entirely.”

The King accepted, although he believed that Archimedes was trying to trick him.

Archimedes went straight to work and built a polyspaston (a complex system of compound pulleys and windlasses).

He knew instinctively that force and distance were interchangeable. If you increase the distance you apply a force, then you can lift a heavier load by using only a small force.

On the demonstration day, Archimedes instructed the ship to be filled with cargo and passengers to make it as heavy as possible. The gathering crowd now expected him to fail.

Then he sat comfortably a distance away on a bench and pulled the single rope connected to the pulley system using one hand.

To the astonishment of the crowd and the King, the ship glided smoothly towards him.

Takeaway This Week

Looking closely, we see two different groups who tried to accomplish a heavy task of moving the ship.

First, were the thousands of laborers. They tried to use sheer muscle power to push the ship and afterwards, their effort was fully spent and couldn’t be available for subsequent tasks.

Second, was Archimedes. He knew that effort is always consumed at the point of use and instead, built an apparatus: the polyspaston. Now, instead of always working hard to lift what was heavy, he used leverage.

Both were disciplined but only one of them refused to start from zero every time.

Today, you are no different. If you take time to think about your work, you will realize that some parts always repeat. The brief you are writing to your team for the fourth time is 80% identical to the last three you sent last week.

The launch checklist you are writing from a blank page today is similar to the last two sitting in your completed tasks list.

The bottleneck isn’t thinking about the process but the actual typing. Instead of asking how to do the work faster, reflect on why you are building rather than assembling.

Like Archimedes, I’ve learned to build an apparatus that stands ready for the next ship. For me, that apparatus is built using ClickUp not as a place to log more frantic hours, but as a system of leverage.

For example, when I write client reports every Monday morning, the format never changes, only the data does. Staring at a blank page every week is the knowledge-work equivalent of being a laborer straining against the dry docks. It invites procrastination.

Instead, I spend a few quiet minutes setting up a digital pulley system so that the work slides forward effortlessly.

Here is how you can set up your first one:

Establish your bench

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - My Workspace.

Setup the line

Create a new list - Inbox - by clicking the “+” sign.

Automate the momentum

Create a recurring task that happens every specific day. E.g., Monday for meetings.

Simply click date and select custom recurring.

Forge the template

Create a client report template in docs. Open a document and add the different headings you need. Save it as a template.

Engage the pulley

Apply the template to the task by clicking the … at the top right.

I save the new report by giving it a title.

Now, a new report shows up next to the team view menu. I navigate to it and simply continue working.

When next Monday arrives, you won’t need to summon massive activation energy to begin. The document will already be waiting next to your team view menu, fully structured and ready for you to simply fill in the details.

Don’t pull harder against the weight of your workload. Build the apparatus, sit back, and pull the rope.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s productivity insights in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Welcome to this week’s Q&A session.

We are excited to have you in our community.

On the weekends, we dedicate a post to help you overcome your personal productivity problems.

Here’s how it works

1. Simply describe what’s affecting your productivity in a form we share.

   (No emails or personal details asked).

   We keep it anonymous so that the focus is only the productivity problem.

2. Every weekend, we select one response and dedicate a post on how to solve the problem all free.

The form is currently closed to allow us to address your productivity problems.

The Productivity Problem

This weekend we look at burnout arising from the structural nature of the work.

A subscriber wrote in:

“Burnout - I work 70hrs a week and rarely get any “time off”

In most cases, the assumption is that when we are burned out, we have stretched ourselves thin by extending the hours we put into the work.

However, sometimes, we will find ourselves in environments we can’t control and the schedule set involves no time off.

How then do we build a sustainable working pace when there’s no time-off to avoid burnout?

How We Could Solve This

Here, the solution is structural rather than relying on willpower to work in a sustainable pace.

We look at the marine environment to understand how we can solve the problem. In the high seas, they also were stuck answering the same question:

How do we keep the vessel sailing 24/7 without killing the crew from exhaustion?

A traditional maritime watch system was introduced. Watch for 4 hours on and 8 hours off, and rotate it among the crew.

During your 4 hour watch session, you were on deck, navigating the ship and during the rest of the 8 hours, you ate, handled your personal hygiene, and had a solid block where you slept.

Between 1600hrs and 2000hrs, a 4hr watch session was also split into two (dog watch) to ensure no team was stuck permanently in the graveyard shift. It made the number of daily watches odd, so the rotation shifts every day and nobody is permanently stuck on the 0000–0400 mid-watch.

This way, the clock was now changed to suit the work rather than follow the traditional one adopted by everyone else.

However, when the crew in ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) submerged deep in the ocean tried to follow this approach, it failed. There’s no daylight beneath the ocean, so a traditional watch system couldn’t work.

Instead, they devised the 6-12 watch system (6hrs on, 12 hours off) that repeated every 72 hours. However, it broke them and they updated it to 8-16 (8hrs watch, 8hrs duties, 8 hours sleep) to mitigate fatigue. They could now work for 70 days straight, 12 hours each day, and with more rest than they needed.

The answer isn't a heroic custom schedule but a normal-length day with one block that is structurally untouchable

These 2 moves will help you avoid treating treating rest as something that happens only after work and something that’s part of it.

A. Stop budgeting hours and start budgeting load

The marine experts knew something. That you could only watch for a maximum of 4 hours as a sailor and 6-8 in a submarine.

They ruthlessly protected these hours by allowing the crew to rest in the other 8-16 hours.

The same holds true for the modern knowledge worker as Newport tells us as he cites Ericsson’s work on Deliberate Practice. You can only do a maximum of 4hrs deep work while the rest is just shallow work.

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance. Performance, health, and happiness are grounded in the skillful management of energy.” Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz add in The Power of Full Engagement.

The idea here is that when you assess your work day - 11.5 hrs each day for 6 days - you will see that you only engage in deep work for a maximum of 4hrs. The rest is just spent doing support work.

Like the marine experts, focus on protecting these 4hrs where your energy is highest and doing the most important work here rather than trying to protect the entire 11.5hrs.

A rhythmical work approach can help you here. For example, blocking mornings and scheduling meetings and administrative work in the afternoons.

It is during these afternoon hours when you are doing shallow work that you incorporate micro-pauses, such as between-block resets, to rest even while working. You could still integrate these during your deep work sessions.

B. Identify your most expensive hours as those you have no control over

In 1997, Michael Marmot and colleagues published an interesting study in the UK Civil Service.

They looked at stress-induced illnesses such as coronary heart disease across the civil servants from low-level clerical staff to the high-ranking administrative executives.

The argument was that, if workload and pressure were the lead causes of the coronary heart diseases, then the workers in high-status such as the executives managing budgets should have been getting sicker.

However, results showed something strange. The senior people, the ones with the longest hours, the biggest portfolios, the most demand, were the healthiest.

The explanation had existed from as early as 1979, in the Demand-Control Model by Robert Karasek. This is an example.

The model showed that if your job was in the High Demand-High Control quadrant, such as a CEO, you could work 80 hours comfortably because you had high control. You could make pivoting decisions, choose your environment etc. Control was what made this possible.

However, for workers in the High Demand-Low Control quadrant such as telephone operators and garment stitchers, then they were at risk of higher stress-induced illnesses because they had low control over their time.

The underlining idea here is that if you have to work for 70 hours a week, assess how many hours you have autonomy or control vs those you don’t have.

Your most expensive ones are those where you have to work based on the set machinery in the company. The hack is to try and increase the hours when you are working with authority during your work day. This way, you will work sustainably.

How We Could Leverage Tech

Let’s see how we could leverage a free tool like ClickUp to help you develop a sustainable working pace.

The most effective approach is to use automations that remind you to take micro-pauses in between your work sessions.

What we want is when the status of a task changes such as “In Progress” to “Done”, an automation fires up and sends an email reminder to take a break.

#Step 1

Once you signup, click the spaces icon (looks like Saturn 🪐).

Create a workspace and name it - My Workspace.

Create a new list - Inbox - by clicking the “+” sign.

#Step 2

Add your daily schedule of tasks that you are required to complete.

Try adding them by voice using Wispr Flow (2 weeks free here).

Here’s an example.

#Step 3

Create new statuses in the Inbox list.

• Inbox - for all tasks you want to do during the day

• In Progress - tasks you are doing now

• Completed - tasks you have completed

#Step 4

Assign a status to each of the tasks as you work on them.

Simply click and assign it in a bottom bar that appears.

You will have this:

#Step 5

Create a new automation when each task is done to help you take a break.

Click the lightning icon at the top right corner and select “create automation.”

We want the trigger to be “status change” for any action.

When a task is set to “done” → send a message remind you to take a micro-break.

As you embrace micro-breaks, you will gradually build a sustainable working pace.

It is easy to get started with ClickUp, sign up free here.

Is this bigger than a single fix?

The Navy didn’t end exhaustion by telling sailors to be more disciplined. It published a watch bill then spent fifty years revising it.

Not a book you finish. A system you keep revising.

The Saturday Q&A always stays free but gives you only one fix.

Build your own compounding operating system as an AI-era knowledge worker.

Start building your Momentum OS.

Coming Up Next Week: Trapped in Rumination

We look at a case study where a subscriber feels an overwhelming feeling of dread by perseverating on everything that needs to be done. As a result, they end up stuck in rumination.

That’s it for now.

Watch out for next week’s Q&A session in your inbox.

As always, fresh ideas are welcome. Please feel free to send in your feedback, thoughts, questions, and suggestions—I read them all!

​If you want to pass this newsletter on to a friend, here’s a link to make it easier.​

Catch you again soon.

Have a great day :)

Back in the mid-1400s, how you tracked your financial accounts as a trader was through a linear approach.

You monitored the visible execution through single-entry bookkeeping.

On one column, you tracked how much money came in and on the next, you assessed how much went out.

And it worked. It felt complete.

However, as trade expanded into global routes during the Renaissance period, this system broke because it concealed an invisible blindspot.

A merchant was now no longer only exchanging cash for goods, but also, incurring long-distance debt across multiple credit lines.

The merchants who continued to use this single-entry accounting system were now flying blind. Although they could see their wealth grow as more money came in, they were also quietly accumulating debts and obligations that ruined them and had no way to track this. Eventually, they collapsed.

They weren’t bad at counting. Their mistake was only that they were only counting one side of the ledger: the visible execution.

However, Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar and mathematician saw this and introduced a double-entry accounting system. For every asset, there was a matching liability.

What was invisible now finally appeared on the page.

Today, you might observe that even when your to-do list is clear, your calendar light, and task manager free, you still feel exhausted and are unable to bring yourself fully to your present task.

“I sat in meetings all day and produced nothing and I'm completely wrecked.” A knowledge worker would complain.

This week, the Silent Burnout playbook helps you name the invisible loads you carry that you aren’t tracking. This way, you can manage and discharge them.

In part 1, we began by looking how every visible task we logged, either on our to-do list or calendar, had an ambient liability tied to our cognitive capacity.

The clearest example was the domestic environment in the 1980s where although work was split on a 50/50 basis to ensure equality, women were still becoming more exhausted than men.

On paper, both were working equal hours.

Read more

You know that feeling.

You feel completely exhausted but can’t point out why.

Your calendar is light, you slept fine. Actually, you haven’t had any all-nighters or marathons at work. Your body feels fine and you even delegated grunt work to AI to automate and clear off shallow tasks from your to-do list.

But why do you still feel hollow anyway?

There’s nothing wrong with you, it’s only that the old Burnout 1.0 playbook you are applying doesn’t work.

The playbook that told you that exhaustion only came from the crushing weight of an 80-hour week, back-to-back scheduling, and physical fatigue from constant manual exhaustion. It told you that you stretched yourself too thin and all you needed to do was rest to recover.

However, this is a different wound and what no one has told you is that your exhaustion is coming from an invisible load you carry. A load no one showed you how to audit and manage because there was no gauge for it.

This is Burnout 2.0 and this week, we learn how to build that gauge in our productivity OS.

Let’s get started.

Read more