5 Productivity Principles I Use That Actually Work

- Everyone and their mother gives productivity hacks on YouTube. - Productivity and motivation. .

. (Youtubers speaking on top of each other) - But nobody teaches you the actual principles of productivity. Because you can have tips, tactics, habits, hacks, tools, protocols, and apps until you're blue in the face, but until you understand the underlying principles of productivity, none of those are gonna matter.

I've had to figure out productivity the hard way. I've been self-employed my entire adult life. In that time, I've written five bestselling books, made a movie, built a company with millions in revenue, and traveled the world speaking with crowds of thousands.

I've tried every system, every hack, every piece of advice that you can think of, but here is what actually works. Here are the productivity principles that nobody ever told me, but my God, I wish they did. Principle number one: Work with your biology, not against it.

There is always gonna be some piece of common productivity advice that's not right for you, and that's okay. It doesn't mean you're doing it wrong or you fuck anything up. It just means you're built different, because we all are.

(speaker grunts) - I'm built different. - It's dumb to assume that what works for Steve Jobs or LeBron James or the fucking Pope is gonna work for you or me. Our neurology is different, we grow up in different homes with different schools and take different jobs.

It took me way too long to learn this, and I tried everything. I got up at 4:30 and went to the gym, (timer buzzes) I hated it. I prefer working out in the evenings.

I tried journaling every morning, (timer buzzes) I hated it. I prefer to journal through problems while they're fresh in my mind in the middle of the day. I tried blocking social media and distracting websites, (timer buzzes) I hated it.

I like rewarding myself for little breaks when I accomplish something. - It's like a reward. - Not only is everyone different, but you will also change over time.

I wrote my first two books mostly at night, sometimes staying up until three, four, five in the morning. Then suddenly, around age 35, I became a morning person. Why?

I have no fucking idea. Does it matter? Not really.

Now I get up early and I write in the morning, and it's great. I didn't plan it that way. I didn't train myself to be a morning person.

It just happened. Biology happened, so I listened to it. Your life is gonna change, the world is gonna change, your brain is gonna change.

Be open-minded about what might work for you. And if something doesn't, don't force yourself to do it anymore. Try something else.

Principle number two: The minimal viable action. The minimal viable action can be used with anything and is the single most useful mental hack that I've ever come across consistently to get things done. I don't care who you are, if you're human and working, at some point you're going to procrastinate.

Procrastination happens when something feels overwhelming in our mind. The task could feel like it's too big and intimidating so we avoid it. Whatever it is, the principle for beating procrastination is always the same and quite simple.

It's the minimal viable action. It's the smallest action that feels completely doable to you in this exact moment. Writing a memo feels intimidating?

Start with the outline. Outline feels scary? Start with the sentence.

Sentence terrify you? Just open up a document and title it or something. The minimal viable action takes advantage of a quirk of human psychology, and that is that motivation is not just the cause of action, it's also the effect.

So when you do the minimal viable action, it usually becomes more difficult to stop doing the task than to continue, so you continue. Principle number three: You only improve what you measure. It's human nature to wanna see numbers go up.

We're incredibly motivated by it. This is why tracking is absolutely non-negotiably important. If you don't measure something, it likely won't improve.

Whether it's the amount of sales calls you make each day, your response time with the emails, the satisfaction of your customers, or the amount of hours you put your ass in your trusty old office chair, the most reliable way to improve it is to track it and measure it. But be careful, because the number go up impulse is extremely powerful and its human nature to try to game whatever system you create for yourself. Let me give you an example.

When I first started writing, I set word goals each day. I decided I have to write 1500 words before I can stop for it to be a successful writing day. 1500 words is like the equivalent of maybe six book pages.

The problem is that within a couple weeks I was writing thousands of words of useless garbage solely in order to hit my word count goal. But by writing so many bad words, I was actually giving myself more editing work. I was making less progress on my book than I was before.

Another example, during the pandemic I started measuring my weekly hours work. I wanted to push myself and really clock the hours since, well, I had nothing better to do. After a couple months, I found myself working more hours than ever, but what I didn't realize at the time was that I was stuffing my weeks full of tedious, meaningless shit.

Pretty soon, I was draining my energy on inconsequential work, distracting myself from the most important work all to hit some dumb arbitrary goal of hours work per week. Incentives are powerful. Therefore, you have to be extremely careful how you choose to measure your success.

There are usually downsides to whichever metric you choose, and you will likely have to alter your metrics frequently based on the situation. But, here's the success story. The most success I've ever had tracking metrics was with my health goals, and that brings me to the sponsor of today's video, YAZIO.

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The reason is because we all have a tendency to bullshit ourselves. We say, "You know, that really wasn't that much cheese," when in actuality it was like 400 calories worth. Well, with a meal tracker like YAZIO, it keeps you honest, on track, and always aware of the progress you're making towards your goals.

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Principle number four: Don't fight your emotions. Leverage them. - Let the heat flow through you.

- Most people's concept of productivity is like this perfect robotic execution of a million tasks in succession without a lingering doubt, a distraction, or an impulse or an emotional outburst whatsoever. The truth is that optimal productivity is a highly emotional process. We become good and work hard on things that we like and care about.

Brute forcing your way through misery is always going to fail in the long run. When you're excited about your work, you will do more of it. You will tolerate more setbacks and be more motivated to overcome obstacles.

And when you believe passionately in what you're making or doing, you will naturally fall into a flow state more easily, getting more done with seemingly less effort. Passion is a cliche. We've all heard it.

Everyone tells you to love your work 'cause then you'll never work a day in your life, or you'll be self-actualized, or live happily ever after. (magical music) (record scratches) But look, that's bullshit. Even your dream job is going to suck some of the time.

But what nobody tells you is that passion is actually incredibly practical. Passion is what makes you actually excellent at your job. Passion is what gives you the energy and motivation to work a 12-hour day and then go back for more before bed.

Passion is what makes you excited to get up in the morning before the alarm goes off. A huge part of that is finding a sense of mission or purpose, and that gets talked about a lot. But what gets talked about less is simply finding good people that you like being around, or finding what's fun, or finding something you're good at and that you get socially validated for it.

I've often found that people who are obsessed with productivity, it's because they actually hate what they're doing and they're trying to compensate for it. These people tend to hate the passion as practical advice because it's the exact advice that they don't wanna hear. Well, fuck you, I'm right.

- Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. - You give someone who loves their job, no productivity habits, no hacks, no books, no systems, no secrets, put them up against a person who hates their job and has all of the tricks and tactics, and I guarantee you the person who loves their job is gonna go further and last longer 10 times outta 10. Don't at me, bro.

Principle number five: More is not always better. We have a tendency to assume that the amount of time and energy we spend working is directly proportional to the output of that work. Like if I spend twice as much time writing a YouTube script, I will produce twice as many videos.

But that's only true for mindless repetitive tasks. If you're doing knowledge work, like most of us, the relationship is not linear at all. It's actually diminishing returns.

Twice the effort will produce twice the output for a few hours, but beginning around hour four or five, it will quickly begin to level off. And by hours 10 or 12, it's almost completely flat. The value of an extra hour past 10 or 12 hours is basically nothing.

But I would argue that it's actually worse than that. Because depending on your job, working more hours might actually, at a certain point, create negative returns. Let me explain.

Let's say I sit down to write YouTube scripts. I write the first two in four or five hours and they're good. I write the third in the next four hours, but by the end, my brain feels fried and I'm kind of exhausted.

But fuck that weak ass shit, I'm a grinder, hustle's my middle name, I'm gonna keep going, motherfucker. By now, I'm 12 hours in. I'm delirious and I'm just vomiting words onto a page and I can't even read anymore.

But, I don't give up and I finally finish that fourth script. "Wow," I think to myself, "what a productive day," as I pass out face down on the office floor. This is the stuff that productivity porn is made of.

It's the stuff that guys post on Twitter about to get their dicks hard. But then, something strange happens, something that nobody ever tells you about. See, what happens next is I wake up and I realize something.

That entire fourth script I wrote is hot fucking garbage and I have to spend multiple hours attempting to rewrite it before I finally decide that it's not salvageable and I'm better off just tossing it. (appliance crashes) That's two hours of work I just created for myself for no reason on top of the four hours I wasted the night before. So not only were those extra late hours counterproductive, they were actually anti-productive.

There are plenty of ways that this could play out that aren't unique to writing as well. Your late night programming session could be riddled with bugs, causing you to spend extra hours finding and fixing those bugs that otherwise wouldn't be there if you'd just fucking gone to bed. The truth is that pushing yourself to work insane hours is often going to backfire, and even when it's not, it's highly likely going to make you miserable.

Because when you don't get enough rest, guess what happens? That's right, your emotions go to shit. You're in a bad mood all the time, stuff stops feeling exciting or important, and not only does the quality of your work go down, but your co-workers don't wanna be around you and you start to get burnt out.

So your work starts slipping. You get more stressed. You feel like you're falling behind.

So what do you do? You get online, you hook up some productivity hacks. Maybe it's your morning routine, maybe your afternoon smoothie doesn't have enough protein in it.

Maybe you should try only answering emails after you microdose in vape and do your lunchtime sound bath meditation. (chuckles) Yeah, that's probably it. That's obviously the problem.

Or, maybe you're just human and you need a fucking break.