This isn’t productivity shaming. These thoughts will help you find time you didn’t know you had.

I feel pretty damn lazy most of the time, especially in 2020.

The couch, with chocolate, chips and a movie feels pretty good on most days. Thankfully I have a few friends who are highly productive. A few of them even create productivity products. They’ve spent a lot of time understanding how we think so they can understand how a person loses time.

Spoiler: subtracting things from your schedule holds a lot of gains.

A lot of my time gets wasted on social media. When my 9–5 job is out of control and I have no idea what to do, my brain turns to social media to numb the pain. A scroll or two helps me think about mindless activities to take my mind off the heart of the problem: usually, me, and how I’m looking at a situation.

Here’s what my highly productive friends taught me by giving up everyday traps. Some of these thoughts will help you win back extra time.

Give up Starting with ‘Yes’ to a Request of Your Time

If you’re not sure about a request of your time, start with no.

Yes is your default response when you feel guilty. It’s your time you’re giving up. Don’t feel guilty.

Will you remember this appointment you accepted on the final day of your life? If not, it’s probably not as important as the requester of your time is making it out to be. Every request you say yes to is time you rob from your future self. It’s okay to hoard your time and guard it.

Give up Overworking Yourself to Death

Inspiration comes from rest.

The work you do when you’re tired and pissed off from working too hard and aiming for productivity perfection will be terrible.

Overworking isn’t productivity.

Self-help expert and all-round-good-guy Niklas Goke reminded me that “Cognitive function and creativity deteriorate significantly after about 55 hours per week,” according to a Whitehall study.

Your work doesn’t get better when you overdo it. Your work gets better when you take time off.

During your time off your brain resets; your brain organizes all your thoughts and helps you reflect when you do menial tasks like washing the dishes.

Working hard is the least important thing. 10,000 iterations not 10,000 hours — Naval Ravikant

Give up Working Without a Deadline

Deadlines make you superhuman.

I write 10,000+ words in a day by sticking to a 6 PM deadline. I have to get every blog post written by then otherwise the idea is dead, and most likely won’t get picked up again.

Without a deadline, you’ll dream about your productive future and doing the task you’ve been putting off until “tomorrow.” Tony Robbins says it best: “When would now be a good time?”

Use deadlines to give yourself a sense of urgency about your work.

Give up Taking Calls While Sitting Down

Jump on a trampoline while you’re on the phone. Walk if you don’t own a trampoline. Movement is life. When you move, you feel good. You can make time to move (exercise) or you can exercise while doing tasks that must be done, like chatting to other humans.

Give up Preachers of Chaos

They can find a problem with everything. “The world is coming to an end.” We’ve heard it all before, pal.

Preachers of chaos take up your time because they haven’t dealt with their negative thoughts. There’s enough chaos without having more of it sabotage your desire to do your work.

Consuming chaos is anti-motivation.

Give up Focusing on Outcomes

(This one is Ryan Holidays’ religion.)

A process beats focusing on an outcome.

An outcome requires finite willpower. A process is a proven strategy you can follow that puts most of the tasks on auto-pilot for you. Writer, Nicolas Cole, has a writing process he has used to become one of the most-read writers on the internet. I used parts of his process to do the same.

Give up a Calendar Without Blank Space

Leave blank space in your calendar to think

Problems need time to air out.

“Don’t spend (free) time you haven’t earned. The disciplined earner can be a guilt-free spender,” says productivity expert and author of the book Atomic Habits, James Clear.

The goal isn’t to have a full calendar. The goal is to have a calendar that lets you read, learn, and speak to new people when you want.

Famous investor Warren Buffet spends a lot of his day reading. A blank calendar has partly allowed him that privilege. It’s the reason Warren doesn’t do podcast interviews. He’s too busy being old fashion and reading books.

Give up Chasing Grandiose Moments

Ordinary moments are a gift, says Ryan Holiday.

The grandiose moments you think about in your dreams, that will shape your destiny, rarely happen. One-off, big time, one-hit wonders are a fantasy. Chase small moments. Chase small actions, taken daily.

It’s the little actions you take every day that end up changing your life.

Give up Making Lots of Decisions Each Day

What do you eat today?
What do you wear today?
How will you get to the office today?
What route will you take to the supermarket?

These decisions take away energy from you.

Decisions are energy leaks.

Productivity that fuels a rock-solid process requires energy.

Give up Luck

You won’t get lucky and find time. The holidays are not the answer to your unfinished dreams. Retirement isn’t either.

Productive people don’t get lucky. No, they get intentionally lucky by doing the tasks that matter each day to them and what they want to achieve in life.

Give up a Full Email Inbox

Delete a message or archive it if you think you’ll need it later — you probably won’t. A full email inbox is a distraction. The joy you get looking at an empty inbox is worth every second of ruthless prioritization of emails.

Give up Having Too Many Goals

If you feel like you’re achieving nothing in your life, experiment with having less goals. Your heroes who achieve seemingly impossible goals focus on doing one thing when you look closely.

They’re not all over the place like a Tasmanian Devil, trying to be everything to impress everyone through the box-ticking of endless goals.

Give up Bad Productivity Apps

Ever used Microsoft OneNote? Kill me now.

It doesn’t sync properly. It takes a lot of time to load. The menu system is more counter-intuitive than voting for a dictator leader at the next election in your local state.

Hello Trello! Trello is a Kanban-style app your grandmother wish she had, rather than the old school Kanban boards productivity people like Jim Rohn used pre-computers. You can do more with Kanban.

Trello is where you can manage your projects and invite people to your board. The friends I have who are productive all use proper apps like Trello to manage their day. (This isn’t an ad for Trello. You choose what works for you.)

While you’re at it, get a notes app with a decent search function that you can access on all of your devices. I still use Apple Notes because I worship what Steve Jobs left behind. I don’t have loyalty to Jobs anymore, though. That’s why I’m considering using Roam Research. What does it do differently?

I like the Roam App because it does two things:

1. Each note is automatically linked to other notes.
2. Context of a note you take is the focus. Productivity expert, Nat Eliason, says “In the old system, the question is: Under which topic do I store this note? In the new system, the question is: In which context will I want to stumble on it again?”

Roam is one way to structure your thinking and have it be your second brain.

Give up Being an Asshole

Take it from a former asshole. It takes time to be rude, selfish, and play games with people’s lives.

Delete the drama from your life, and you’ll have more time to do cool shit.

Evil plans are exhausting. Revenge takes the focus off your goals, and onto meaningless goals. You can’t right every wrong. You can’t fix every broken person. You can fix yourself, though.

You’ll feel better about being productive when you release the anger. It’s nearly impossible to be simultaneously angry and productive.

These are a few of the things my productive friends have taught me over the years through giving up. I don’t follow all of them and you probably won’t either. But these thoughts acts as potential for future thoughts you might have. Being productive towards a goal you care about helps you find a meaning for your life.

Finding meaning in the work you do is the ultimate productivity hack.

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