Productivity is effective movement.
It’s running in the right direction for the longest distance.
It’s about making the greatest progress towards your goals in the shortest amount
of time.
And the key to productivity can be boiled down to a simple equation: distance equals
velocity multiplied by time, which equals another set of variables.
In this video, I’ll explain all of the variables, giving you the ultimate guide to productivity.
Let’s start by analyzing you.
You’re an organism with a limited amount of energy that you can spend each day.
As you go about your day—moving, thinking, acting—this energy bar is slowly draining.
And if you’re mindless of how you spend this energy, you’ll end each day with nothing
left to show for it.
So learning to use your own internal energy is critical to being productive, and the best
way to leverage your energy is by performing what I call Sprints.
Sprints are time-bounded work sessions that require intense focus, active participation
in an activity, and pushing yourself beyond your current limits.
Working sprints, the ones I’m talking about in this video, are just like real sprints:
a strenuous and intentional use of your energy.
If you’re a student, sprints are when you study at your desk with no distractions, and
you’re actively working on homework problems, recalling flashcards, deconstructing a text,
writing an essay, or doing practice exams—not reading over your notes or highlighting.
If you’re a hockey player, it’s intentional and strenuous practice on your conditioning,
puck handling, passing, or shooting, not idly skating around and shooting on the net for
fun.
If you’re a writer, it’s hammering out your words and performing surgical revisions.
The purpose of a sprint is to make effective progress towards your goals by focusing your
energy on a singular task that challenges you, and this brings us back to the key formula:
d= vT.
Every sprint has 3 key components: distance, velocity, and time, and I’m going to break
down each one, starting with distance.
Distance is the measure of your productive output.
If we’re running, it’s the literal miles or kilometres we’ve travelled.
If we’re writing, it’s the number of words or pages we’ve written.
If we’re studying fluid dynamics, it’s the number of practice problems we’ve solved.
Distance is the measurable fruits of our labour, and it shows us if what we’re doing is effective.
Our goal is to increase the distance we run with each Sprint, and there are two ways to
do this: increase our velocity or increase the time we work for.
Let’s start by analyzing time.
Time, with a big T, can be broken down into two smaller components: time (with a little
t) and N. N is the number of sprints we decide to do in a day, and t is the length of each
sprint.
For example, when I write, N is four and t is thirty minutes.
That means I do four Sprints a day that last thirty minutes each.
Thirty minutes is how long I can successfully stay intensely focused in a single Sprint,
and after four sprints a day, I’m pretty mentally exhausted.
You can experiment with the number of sprints you do in a day and how long you do them for
until you find a mix that works for you.
The goal is to get both variables, N and t, as high as possible but in a way where you
can stay consistent.
Going back to my writing example, I can consistently do four sprints a day for thirty minutes each
without fail.
Keyword: consistently.
Consistency depends on discipline, not motivation.
Here’s what happens if you work off motivation.
You’ll get excited and do four sprints for one hour each on the first day and exhaust
yourself.
You’ll probably do one sprint for one hour the next day, fifteen the next, and then you’ll
give up altogether.
But here’s what it looks like if you work off discipline.
On the first day you work for fifteen minutes, and you still feel like you have energy in
the tank, but you wait.
The next day you do two sprints, and you still have more energy in the tank, but you wait
again.
On the third day you do three fifteen minute sprints, and on the fourth you do four, slowly
ramping it up.
But on the fifth day, you try working twenty minutes each sprint instead of fifteen, and
you still have some energy left over.
So on the sixth day, you try working for thirty minutes, and you realize that you’re a little
tired this time.
And in fact, that tiredness spills over into the next day, so you only do ten minute sprints
now.
Now you’ve successfully found your limit, and on the eight day, you revert back to twenty
minute sprints—which you consistently maintain going forward.
Discipline, not motivation, leads to consistent results, and discipline depends on thoughtful
experimentation, self-awareness, and self-respect.
We have to discover how much we can push ourselves, finding a healthy balance between being too
hard and too lenient.
When it comes to productively managing your time and energy, one of my favourite pieces
of advice comes from Hemingway: You write until you come to a place where you still
have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through
until the next day when you hit it again.
Hemingway didn’t work until his tank was empty, like many overly-motivated, eager beginners
tend to do.
He kept a consistent regimen, and he always ended his work day with some energy left in
his tank, when he knew how he would continue his story the next day.
By ending in a place where you know what step to take next, you’ll build anticipation
that will let you hit the ground running on the next day.
Productivity, when it comes to the things that matter, is always a long-term marathon,
and to run the marathon, you have to learn to manage your time in a way where you can
make consistent daily progress, and managing your time comes back to two factors: the number
of sprints you do (n) and how long they are (t).
But time is not the most critical factor for being productive for 3 reasons.
(1) Your upsides are limited.
Once you’re working around 60-80 hours a week, you’re reaching the maximum of what’s
probably possible for the average person.
The rest of your gains in productivity will come from your velocity, not your time.
(2) The returns are diminishing.
Once you’re working 80 hours a week, you’ll probably burnout and become tired, reducing
your long-term productivity.
(3) And the final reason, time is an imprecise metric.
When some people say they worked for sixty hours, what they really mean is they sat in
an office for sixty hours, doing a little work here and there.
Or think about a college kid who says he was studying at the library all day, when really
he was just sitting in the library with his books open, chatting to a friend.
Time passes regardless of what you do, so it becomes a very easy metric to fool yourself
with.
Now let’s move on to the more critical factor when trying to be productive: velocity.
Your sprint velocity is made up of two key components: direction (D) and stride (R).
Let’s start with direction.
Obviously, before you get moving, you have to decide which way you want to sprint.
The direction you run in is often more important than how hard you run.
Consider this example.
Two mechanical engineers take jobs in different industries, one in the oil industry and one
in HVAC.
Assuming they work with the same intensity, the engineer in the oil industry will likely
make more money based purely on the direction he chose.
Or consider this.
If you invested $100 in apple on January 1, 2002, you would have $34000 today.
But if you invested $100 in Netflix on January 1, 2002, you would have $48000.
I pulled these numbers off an online calculator, so they might be inaccurate, but the underlying
point remains true: where you invest your energy is more important than how much you
invest.
But how do we decide which direction to run in?
The direction we choose is based on our values.
The HVAC engineer, for example, might value environmentalism more than money, where as
the oil engineer values money more than environmentalism, which is why they chose their specific directions.
Of course, this is just an example, I’m not saying all oil or HVAC engineers have
these values.
So how do we find our values?
If you ask people what they value, they’ll say things like “love, kindness, honesty,
and service,”
then they’ll rage the next time someone cuts them off in traffic.
Values are what we act out, not what we say, and often times, we’re not even aware of
our own true values.
But you might be able to discover some of your values by reflecting on your past experiences.
Think about a time someone made you very envious or angry.
That probably gives some insight into your values.
Or think about your idols.
Who do you admire?
That might give you insight into your values.
And don’t lie to yourself.
Ask yourself if you would trade places with your idol.
Paparazzi and business man.
Would you rather be Kim Kardashian or Mother Theresa?
Jeff Bezos or Gandhi?
This might give you some insight into your values.
But our values aren’t set in stone.
As we collect more varied life experiences, our values can change.
We discover our values through experiences and reflection.
Reflect on what experiences you truly want, don’t want, and what values will take you
there.
Once you determine your values and direction, it’s time to work on the next part of velocity:
your stride.
Your stride is the actual action you take to make effective progress towards your goal.
You have to identify it for yourself.
If your goal is to write a book, then your stride is actually sitting at your desk and
writing the words.
If your goal is to become a pianist, then your stride is sitting down to play the piano.
Your stride is the next action you can take to move towards your goal.
Your stride is made up of two components: stride length (L) and rhythm (Y).
Stride length is the distance between each step, and rhythm is how often you take each
step.
To improve your stride, you can work on either of these two components.
What does it mean to improve your stride length?
Stride length is a measure of how effective the action you take is with respect to your
goal.
In other words, it’s a measure of your skill level.
What’s the difference between me sitting down to write and Hemingway?
Stride length.
Give us both the same amount of time to write and you’ll notice a disparity between the
quality of our work.
If you give me and Steph Curry the same amount of time to shoot hoops, he’s going to sink
a lot more in.
So how do you improve your stride length?
Through deliberate practice.
How does deliberate practice work?
It’s pretty simple.
There are two components to deliberate practice: action and feedback.
If you wanted to improve your weight lifting form, you could film yourself lifting and
then compare it to the footage of a professional.
The goal is to take action and then get feedback by comparing your action to the ideal action.
Or in other words, take action and compare your action to those of someone who’s more
skilled at what you do.
Alternatively, instead of filming yourself, you could hire a coach, and the coach has
an understanding of the ideal, and so he or she gives you feedback to help you move closer
to it.
If you wanted to learn how to produce music, you might try to recreate your favourite beats
or music that you hear on the radio.
Again, your taking action and comparing it to an ideal to correct your action.
When we start something new, the ideal is often way beyond us.
Comparing ourselves to the best pianist, for example, may be discouraging and unhelpful,
so we might compare ourselves to lesser versions of the ideal instead.
We can imitate people who are just beyond us in skill level, slowly inching ourselves
towards the ideal.
Deliberate practice usually begins with imitation, but as your skills grow, you develop a stronger
relationship to the ideal archetype or idea itself, and you shed the need to imitate.
You learn to act on your own instead.
Now, after stride length, the final component is rhythm: how often you take a stride.
The key to rhythm is creating the right conditions to allow yourself to enter a state of flow.
Flow is a state where your focus is pointed, singular, and unbroken.
The key to creating a state of flow is to remove things that break your focus.
There are two ways to do this.
(1) Remove all external distractions from your environment.
For example, your phone, the internet, music, other people, so on and so forth.
Remove whatever might create sudden and unexpected distractions.
(2) Work on something in alignment with your highest value.
The more meaningful you find the work you do, the more important you feel it is, the
less likely you are to let things pull your attention away from it.
Its very hard to ever live a life free of distractions and obligations to others, especially
if you have kids or a large family.
But if you can work on things you find deeply meaningful, you’ll be less likely to have
your attention suddenly pulled away from the task at hand.
For example, when people play video games or watch TV, they can keep their focus glued
to their screens if they really need to, even if there are other distractions.
That’s because they find the activity more meaningful than everything else going on.
The same thing can happen when you’re reading a gripping book or sending an important message.
So, let me summarize everything.
Productivity is movement, and one of the most effective ways to make successful movements
is by performing Sprints.
A Sprint is a highly-focused, intentional, engaged, and time-bounded work session that
pushes you beyond your current limits.
The goal of each Sprint is to travel the greatest distance towards your goal as possible.
Distance is equal to velocity multiplied by time.
The total time you Sprint for each day is dependent on how many times you Sprint a day
and how long you Sprint for.
Velocity is a function of the direction you choose and your stride.
Your direction is based on your values or goals.
Your stride depends on your stride length and your rhythm.
Use deliberate practice to enhance your skills, and subsequently, your stride length.
Learn to keep imitating people better than you until you surpass them, developing a direct
relationship with the ideal itself.
Remove distractions and create the optimal conditions for flow
to maximize your rhythm.