Andrew Huberman suggests organizing your desktop in such a way that you have to look UP at your monitor. If you have to look down, you may get tired. He also advises that you should start work about 4-6 hours after you wake to hit your productivity max.
If you had to do all the stuff that you’re advised to do you’ll never get anywhere.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
I love “productivity hacks,”—that’s largely what my blog is about. But there’s a point at which you must relinquish some control.
Sometimes you need to embrace the rough edges of your process and gut things out. You won’t always feel like working on your passion projects.
By leaps and bounds sometimes and painful gradations other times, you will work and plod toward something impressive.
This is why I often encourage writers in my critique group to favor quantity over quality. You can be a terrible judge of your own work. Something you think is brilliant is usually crap. Conversely, the crap you dashed off without thinking turns out to be spun gold.
It can also be hazardous to read about the habits of famous writers you admire.
There’s a massive gap between you and your favorite writer. If you’re not a pro, you’re going to be fitting in bouts of writing between your day job, chores, and other responsibilities. That’s just fine—as it should be.
You’re not going to be crushing it all the time.
But what about productivity hacks? Aren’t they important?
I realized I’ve been doing this backward for years. If you have a day job, like I do, you have to schedule your day around it, so there’s no hacking to be done. Any commitment to prioritizing your passion project will likely be thwarted by some other mundane—but important—task.
Instead of trying to optimize my time spent on a passion project, I’ve found it helpful to optimize the time spent on chores and tasks I don’t want to do—so I can spend fewer minutes a day on them. This tends to free up the mental space necessary to cogitate on loftier things.
Most of the good ideas you’ll have for your passion projects tend to come when you’re doing something else: laundry, walking, food shopping, pumping gas, etc.
In other news…
- I have a new Emacs micro lesson video on the YouTube channel.
- Still working on a novella about a computer hacker.
- If you haven’t already, subscribe to my newsletter which I plan on actually using some time soon.
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