Let me define productivity first, and then tell you why I’m so excited about it, and why you should be as well.

What is productivity?

There are 5 ingredients to being a world-class maker: deep thinking, attention to detail, skills in your craft, focus, and fast pace.

All of these determine your output, whichever way you define it (affecting change in the world, making money, creation of lasting value).

It takes a lifetime to hone your professional and thinking skills. These determine your potential at any given point.

Productivity is how much of that potential you’re putting to use at the moment, and is mostly determined by the depth and steadiness of your focus, your work habits, and other productivity skills.

Corollary: low productivity wastes your potential.

Worse yet, your output compounds. As you do stuff, you get better at doing stuff, get noticed, and start getting better opportunities. So as you lose out on focus and pace right now, you’re not just robbing yourself in the moment, you also lose out on ever-increasing benefits those would bring over the lifetime.

Best part that makes me super-excited: it only takes months to overhaul your focus and work skills, with a huge impact on your life.

But!

You might be thinking of many objections to a very productive lifestyle. These mostly boil down to one of three things:

1. Wanting to live a balanced, full life.
2. Desire to avoid a robot-like grinding daily existence.
3. Your supposed incapability of being much more productive with reasonable effort.

Myth: Bland grinding existence with little joy

Somehow people tend imagine a productive lifestyle as a big sacrifice, as trading sanity and humanity for more professional output in a robot-like state.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. People who get more efficient find that:

1. It’s the most fun way to work.
2. It’s by far the easiest way to work. Personally, I used to spend so much more effort to get much worse results.
3. It gives the best work/life balance. Naturally: you can do more within the same time, or can do same in less time, and you also get rid of the stress.

It does require pushing yourself, though. Getting to know yourself in a new way, sticking through multiple new practices and finding your optimum is a challenging task. But it’s a rewarding journey.

It’s also a personal one. Nobody is asking you to give up an important part of your life. You’re the one building your new lifestyle, so you get to mindfully fill it with good stuff.

Myth: I’m incapable of better focus

I am an ADHD person myself, and I suffered through procrastination, total lack of discipline, and inability to get myself to do things. At some point, it would take me months to change a lightbulb.

You’re probably imagining productivity work as a some sort of application of discipline. If that was true, it wouldn’t really work for anyone; few people have much discipline.

Truth is, the work is really about subtly changing your environment (in a broad sense, including the one inside your head and the one inside your computer) and routines/habits.

Personally, after getting everything in place, I was surprised to discover that I do actually have some discipline, and I even started to trust myself to use it.

So how can I help you?

Short-term, I want to talk to you and share what I know. Would love you to subscribe and be active in my community of makers who want to do their best work.

…As soon as I figure out where and how to start such a community. Suggestions are welcome.

(subscribe CTA goes here when I’m ready)

Longer-term, my superpower is building awesome apps, so I probably want to make a coaching app that gently guides makers towards better productivity skills.

As a tools junkie, I’m building my own tools all the time anyway, so I’ll probably release some apps way before there’s a coherent coaching story behind them.