Productivity "Hacks" Won't Help You

There's only one way to actually be more productive, and it's not what you think.

When I started working seriously on myself, one of the first areas of improvement I focused on was productivity. Mainly because it was clear from looking around at my peers in college that most young men were expert procrastinators, I recognized this was a huge paint point in the lives of many, and set out to learn as much as I could about productivity so I could conquer procrastination and laziness, as this was also something I had been struggling with.

I dived deep into the rabbit-hole —the goal at the time was to write a whole book about productivity for young men—, so I studied more than I studied for my actual college classes.

I came across many well-marketed concepts, methods, and productivity “hacks” that promised an increase in performance and the overcoming of procrastination if put into practice.

It was a bit overwhelming. Apparently there were 20 different solutions to the problem of productivity.

You had the Pomodoro Technique, the Eat The Frog Method, the Don’t Break The Chain Method, the GTD framework, Time-Blocking, Kanban, checklists, multiple softwares, post-its, tips, hacks, tricks… An ocean of information.

And while those methods look and sound cool (good marketing), they end up being really a bandaid for deeper symptoms, and usually don’t work in increasing productivity over the long term.

You can’t fix chronic procrastination by implementing hacks and tricks. A long lasting solution requires a deeper analysis and a clear understanding of the underlying reasons for it. I saw firsthand how inefficient these methods really were during the time I was writing the book: I tried them, and while some of them worked for a bit, over the long-term, they made zero difference in my overall work ethic and productivity.

What I found out, and I’ve proven this to be true time and time again both in my own life and in the lives of many men I’ve worked with and helped, is that, if you find yourself procrastinating frequently, letting laziness beat you, and all-in-all wasting time in meaningless stuff, you will not fix yourself with any trick, but with a complete mindset and perspective shift.

Chronic problems require high-level solutions. You can’t attack the symptom, you have to attack the source. And procrastination is a symptom of something deeper that is wrong.

Care to guess what it is?