Real Work

02 Feb, 2025

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always struggled with staying on task (likely in some part due to my undiagnosed ADHD). Nowadays, it feels like this is true of more people than not given the attention shortage crisis. After somehow beating my TikTok, IG reels, and YT shorts addiction, I dove into the world of productivity. From podcasts on time management to trying out just about every tool under the sun to “organize my personal knowledge” only to not build any real knowledge. This journey has shown me two things:

1. It’s rarely about the tool.
2. It takes just as much effort to tread water as it does to swim.

In all the time I spent learning about how to build Atomic Habits and manage my already limited time, I could’ve instead been working towards making progress on those goals. Instead, it was much easier to defer the act of going to the gym for reading another page on how I could break down the task of going to the gym. This isn’t to shit on self-help books like Atomic Habits, but instead is a reminder that these books should be used like tools. When’s the last time you read the instruction manual for your thermostat? My new thesis on reading self-help books is that they ought to answer a specific question I have in mind. Go into reading self-help books like a researcher trying to get to the bottom of things, not an aimless wanderer hoping to stumble upon life’s great answer. In fact, in retrospect it felt somewhat like the scene from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

“Er... Good morning, O Deep Thought, […] do you have... er, that is..."
"An answer for you? […] To Everything? To the great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything? [...] Yes, forty-two”

What was perhaps more dangerous than the endless loop of reading self-help books, was thinking that the perfect tool(s) would solve my problems. I jumped from Obsidian to Logseq to Routine to Reflect to Obsidian (again) to AnyType to Pile to Obsidian (again) to now landing on Capacities. Through out each of these switches I wasted precious time reconfiguring my brain and life around these tools, and building elaborate systems to import data from various sources, but never actually found any value. This experience is perfectly encapsulated by the meme below:

Ultimately, my advice to someone who wants to be productive and accomplish their goals is to do everything with specific goal. If you’re trying out a tool (all of the ones listed above are great), choose it with a problem in mind you are trying to solve and use it to that end. Don’t switch unless that problem isn’t solved or a new bigger problem arises. Also don’t waste your time with the self-help books. If you’re curious read a summary online, and if you feel like it could help you solve a problem you are actively encountering jump into it like a researcher. It’s much to easy to fall into the “productivity flytrap” only to not actually accomplish something.