Productivity systems are procrastination tools for slow decision-makers.
Everyone knows a version of the unproductive guy with an intricate arrangement of digital notes, task-management tools and flash-cards. We also know counter examples of highly effective people who “just use Apple Notes” or write everything by hand. What’s going on here?
I’ll be the first to admit that these things are powerful. The first month I religiously followed GTD I got more done than in the last 12 months combined.
However “setting up systems” is almost always a distraction for the people who think they need them. At least initially. Most people haven’t done Step 1 and systems are Step 3.
Today I want to explore the raw intentionality of the high-performing Apple Notes-using CEO. I’ve met him many times. He’s insanely busy, mostly unsystematic, tool-averse — yet highly effective. He actually gets shit done.
People like him have tacitly internalized a white-belt of productivity fundamentals. Skills that elite positions select for.
So this will be a multi-part series on the basic principles. The endlessly deep rudiments that come before the tools and systems. The steps you don’t want to skip.
I call it Minimum Viable Productivity.
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Minimum Viable Productivity (MVP)
“Build your empire on the firm foundation of the fundamentals.” — Lou Holtz
Before we begin I want to manage your expectations with some design constraints.
Minimum 👌
This won’t be perfect. This won’t stop your brain from taking back the job of remembering tasks. This won’t guarantee that 0% of your responsibilities fall through the cracks. You won’t “scale your knowledge products” or learn fancy keyboard shortcuts. “Minimum” means some disorder and inefficiency is acceptable.
Viable 🌱
“Capable of surviving under particular environmental conditions”
“Able to germinate”
MVP is for your worst week. The true environmental conditions of your life. Not the idealized platonic form of your life. It also needs to generate greater sophistication as needed (see Gall’s Law).
Productivity💪
Being productive means “moving the things you want to move in the direction you want to move them.”
I like the corporeal, spatial metaphor because any truly productive day is physical. There’s no productivity in the theatre of your mind. Productivity always entails physical change in the real world.
Combining these constraints we get:
A good enough 👌 practice that helps us move the things we want to move 💪 even on our worst days, while providing a foundation for more sophistication 🌱 across time.
With that out of the way here’s today’s principle.
High-velocity Decision Making
80% of productivity is fast decision-making.
In order to move things, we need to know:
What those things are (roughly)
The direction we want to move them in (roughly)
“Roughly” because you don’t need 100% certainty. Good enough is better than perfect.
In fact, if you’re certain about 100% of your decisions you're taking too long to make them. An error rate of zero is a meta-error.
This is arguably the most foundational principle of productivity. Make fast decisions with limited certainty.
Famously, Jeff Beszos mentioned this in his 2016 Amazon shareholder letter. Say what you will about Jeffrey, but he’s productive.
“Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.”
- Jeff Beszos
I start with this because it cuts through everything else. There’s no such thing as 100% certainty.
I repeat. There’s no certainty in this life. Don’t look for it.
✍️ Practice 1: What do you want to move?
Stop gathering information and do this 1 minute exercise:
Grab a pen and paper (or open Apple Notes) and ask yourself: What might be the most important task(s) today?
Don’t look at your systems, tools or notes. Write down 1 to 5 bullets with ~70% accuracy. Your gut reaction to the question. For example:
If you did the practice you might have noticed some discomfort. Maybe it took a second to get your mind going. Maybe some “what ifs?” came up.
“What if emailing Sandra is more important than editing this week’s podcast episode?”
“What if booking flights to Portugal will be more expensive in 2 months? Should I do it now?”
Productive people are defined by their ability to regularly face this emotional discomfort.
That’s because every decision is a micro leap of faith (more on this topic here). It’s a subtle manifestation of the heroic. Courage is needed. You’re choosing ONE timeline from a branching distributary of infinite possibilities.
Practice this skill before you introduce tools and systems. Building a knowledge graph in Obsidian or setting up a PPV in Notion is a pointless side-quest if you’re fundamentally a slow decision-maker.
✍️ Practice 2: Where do you want to move it?
Look at your list of tasks from before.
Go through each item and ask yourself: What do I want here?
To summarize: quickly, roughly decide what needs to be moved and where it needs to go. Only use physical paper (or Apple Notes). Over time you’ll train your intuition to naturally focus on what really matters.
Important Caveat ⚠️
A very small subset of your decisions are one-way doors. Non-reversible portals into bad realities. These ones should take you more time. They require more information.
But don’t worry too much about this. These choice-points are often big and obvious (e.g. having a kid, quitting a job). Also the best way to get good at recognizing them is by practicing fast decision-making like we discussed above.
If you like charts, here’s a great one from Shopify’s Brandon Chu that explains all of this in one image:
So practice making fast decisions. Accept the risk and emotional labour involved in doing so. Course correct when you make mistakes and don’t get pregnant unless you really want to.
Next time we’ll discuss what to do with your choices and how this all relates to the body.
— Daniel
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For the GTD fans: you can think of today’s exercise as a version of David Allen’s Capture and Clarify steps.
Step 3 in GTD is Organize. This is when all the tools and systems come in. This is what messes most people up. I’ll share more about this in future posts.
For the GTD fans: you can think of today’s exercise as a version of David Allen’s Capture and Clarify steps.
Step 3 in GTD is Organize. This is when all the tools and systems come in. This is what messes most people up. I’ll share more about this in future posts.