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Leverage your peak productivity hours
You only have 3-4 hours of peak cognitive productivity per day. Identify when you feel most focused and protect that time for demanding tasks. Batch easier activities during lower energy periods. Tracking energy levels, prioritising tasks, creating routines, taking breaks, and guarding peak times can help maximise your limited productive hours.
Productive workflows
Look for opportunities where one piece of work becomes a foundation for other outputs. For example, a faculty development presentation can be converted into a blog post, which might include an annotated bibliography, which can form the foundation for a podcast. Try to coordinate work into phases, where adding a bit more effort at each…
Increase your writing output with distraction free text editors
Increase academic writing productivity by using quick capture tools. Many academics only write when they have large blocks of uninterrupted time, waiting until there’s an alignment of optimal conditions. This results in sporadic batches of writing that can cause writer’s block and stunted productivity. You can avoid this outcome by writing in short, consistent batches…
Using Obsidian for academic writing
In this conversation with David Nicholls, I describe how I use Obsidian to support my academic writing and creative process, in response to Dave’s question: Is the effort you need to put into Obsidian worth it? I explain how I’ve set up different vaults in Obsidian, depending on what it is that I’m trying to…
Ideal habits and routines
Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good enough’. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with different habits and routines and have settled into one that works well for me. It’s not perfect, but I know what ideal looks like in my context. However, knowing what works best means that I can feel despondent…
Sustainable productivity
Long-term, sustainable productivity is about establishing habits and routines. This kind of productivity comes when you decouple the feeling of being busy with the long-term, incremental changes to habits and routines (Young, 2023). This feeling of being busy is what most of us associate with productivity, even when the work isn’t leading towards a high-value…
Fixed schedule productivity
Decide up front when you’re going to finish your day, then work backwards and allocate time to every task on your list. We’ve all been in situations when we’re under pressure and we need to do a little extra work in the evenings or on weekends, just to get over the hump. And this is…
Increase your resources
Free up time to increase the resources you have available to you, and reduce stress. Stress comes from an imbalance between the pressures you experience and the resources you have available to deal with them. It’s not hard work that causes stress; it’s hard work without the resources you need to do the work. While…
Design your academic workflow to do less
Design your workflow so that you spend more time, doing less. Academics are constantly under pressure to fit more work into the time we have. So when we find ourselves with more time, for example, during a relatively quiet semester, we tend to shift our attention towards trying to fit more in. The purpose of…
Weekly review: Using Obsidian to close open loops
In this video, I do a walk-through of the weekly review that I do every Friday afternoon. The weekly review is a sweep through my entire personal and professional life, where I try to wrap up everything that might cause me any worry after I leave work. I call this a process of closing all…
Write every day
Write every day. Once you commit to writing every day, the question shifts from, “Will I write tomorrow,” to, “What will I write about tomorrow?”
Consistency is underrated
In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency. Intensity is overrated. Consistency is underrated. Shane Parrish The Calm Productivity courses aim to help you establish sane defaults around consistent workflows that are sustainable over the long term.