Thread by @jeremystan

1/ Productivity is a skill.

It requires as much study, experimentation, introspection and experience as any other complex skill.

2/ First, we must clearly define productivity.

Value = Effort * Productivity

Where value is something that *really* matters, like happiness, wealth creation, or community impact.

3/ You can double your effort, or you can double your productivity. Both yield the same increase in value.

Guess which one is easier to do.

4/ This means productivity is Value / Effort — or how much value you create with a given amount of effort.

Productivity is not working harder, it’s being more effective.

5/ There are sprinters (fast twitch muscles) and endurance athletes (cardiovascular efficiency). Both are genetically predisposed to their specialty.

You must study yourself to learn what sort of intellectual athlete you are.

6/ Paul Erdős (Hungarian mathematician) often worked 20 hour days (fueled by amphetamines) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%…

Henri Poincaré (French mathematician) worked 4 hours a day en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Poi…

Both created 100x more value than most of their contemporaries.

7/ Productivity is driven by:

. what you work on
. when you work
. how rested you are
. how self-controlled you are
. your skill at a task

You can make step-change improvements in every one of these.

8/ The rate at which you improve your productivity is driven by:

. how self-aware you are
. how much flexibility you have to work where & when is optimal for you
. how much you care about your productivity

9/ Most of these factors are self-evident, or thoroughly covered elsewhere.

But one of my favorites is optimizing *when* you work.

10/ In Why We Sleep, @sleepdiplomat states that 40% of us function optimally around dawn (morning larks) and 30% of us are best in the evening (night owls).

Understand yourself, and then shift your most important work to the time of day when you are most effective.