On personal productivity.

Three things are required for prolonged personal productivity. They are focus, creativity, and self-knowledge. 

They are like a three-legged stool. 

Focus without creativity is boring. You can make slow progress, but will miss the large strides that innovation brings. 

Creativity without focus leads to ambiguity, and lacks concrete results. Focus adds structure to creativity that brings solutions to life. 

If focus and creativity are a mixture that produces fuel, that fuel burns out quickly. Your self-knowledge is required to nurture both. You need to know how long you can count on your focus to work for you. You need to know ways to unlock your personal creativity when you need it. 

How do you do this? I don’t have it all figured out, but here are some ideas. 

1. Take advantage of your morning focus by tackling your biggest problem, and only get up from your desk when you get stuck. 
2. List out all your medium-low priority tasks that won’t take very long to do. When you lose focus, take a few minutes and cross some of those off. 
3. Creativity is tough to deploy when you are staring at a screen. Do some cleaning, grab a cup of coffee, even listening to a podcast - anything to let your subconscious dwell on the problem at hand will greatly improve your thinking power on a problem. 

I thoroughly enjoyed the book “Make Time” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, check it out.