“Do the thing and you will have the power.”
– Emerson

My year’s been off to a stressful start, which I’ve largely dealt with by wallowing. With too much piled on, I was having a whole lot of trouble buckling down and getting moving on my most important projects, instead frittering away days working on less important tasks, scrolling through Twitter, and feeling sorry for myself.

This morning, however, having apparently reached peak wallow, I finally sat down and banged out a bunch of high-priority stuff on which I’d been procrastinating for weeks. And, as is seemingly always the case, none of it turned out to be so bad once I actually got started. Further, though I’m still neck-deep in disaster, as all of that work hasn’t really even begun to make a meaningful impact, I feel so much better.

I realize this is hardly profound insight; indeed, it’s simple common sense that I still somehow need to rediscover again and again. But I’m posting this as both an affirmation, and as a helpful reminder to myself:

Do the thing, and you will have the power. And you’ll feel pretty great, too.

With the start of the New Year, I’ve been trying to audit my approach to productivity, thinking about ways in which I can be more effective in the year to come.

I tend to tag my tasks with relative priorities, and I keep a log of completed work from each day. So, last week, I sorted through the log entries for 2016, to see if I could find any patterns to my efficiency.

In that analysis, something quickly emerged: my daily efficiency had a clear barbell distribution, with stretches in which I banged out huge volumes of work (including my most important tasks), and then stretches in which I barely got anything done (and what little I did accomplish tended to be menial, low-priority stuff).

Thinking back to the floundering, low-productivity days, I could highlight at least one obvious, unproductive behavior: I’d look at my list, feel overwhelmed, and then simply procrastinate by avoiding my list entirely for much of the day. Whereas on days in which I was able to get cranking, I’d simply hop in and get to work, moving directly from one task to the next.

The problem, then, appeared to be one of momentum. Once I was getting things done, it was easy to keep getting things done. But if I felt stuck, I had a hell of a time getting unstuck.

This morning, I was clearly in that ‘stuck’ mode. So, picking up an older idea from British productivity author and tinkerer Mark Forster, I set out to try what he calls the ‘random method.’

In short, I went over to the Random Integer Generator, and created a table of 100 random numbers from 1 through 16. (The 16 there being somewhat arbitrary – it’s my lucky number.)

The first number on the table was an ‘8,’ so I started at the top of my list, and counted down to the eighth task. Whatever it happened to be (in this case, processing a pile of paperwork), I hopped in, did it, and crossed it off the list. Then I went back to the table – this time a ‘6’ – and counted six more tasks down, and did that task next.

If my count took me to the end of the list, I’d simply loop back and keep counting from the top. And if I landed on a task that had already been crossed out, I’d ‘slide’ down until I reached the next uncrossed task.

In that way, I randomly looped my way through a first dozen tasks by noon, accomplishing more this morning than I thought I’d likely get done all day.

I’m not entirely sure why this works, though I suspect it has to do with removing the element of choice – if I had to decide what I wanted to do next, I could simply avoid making a decision and do nothing. But if the integers ‘told’ me that I had to do something, that was just enough external pressure to spur me into action.

Admittedly, this is a slightly ridiculous approach. I’m not sure if it will similarly be able to jump-start me on future ‘stuck’ days, and it’s certainly more cumbersome than simply trying to choose the next most important or appropriate task on days when I don’t need the extra push.

But it’s something I’ll certainly be testing out over the weeks ahead. On the chance that you, too, sometimes avoid your to-do list entirely in favor of scrolling through Twitter or diving into the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia, perhaps it’s worth similarly giving it a try.

Though you don’t hear about it much from new-fangled growth hackers, the old-school ad-men I know often discuss the concept of ‘effective frequency’: the number of times a person needs to be exposed to a marketing message before they respond.

The idea is a long-standing one, dating back at least to 1885, in Thomas Smith’s Successful Advertising. As he puts it:

The first time people look at any given ad, they don’t even see it.
The second time, they don’t notice it.
The third time, they are aware that it is there.
The fourth time, they have a fleeting sense that they’ve seen it somewhere before.
The fifth time, they actually read the ad.

Etc., etc. Smith goes up to the twentieth time, which is when he suggests that someone actually buys. Though, for a century and a half, business-focused academics have researched and debated the number of exposures needed, generally settling somewhere between three and seven.

I say this because, over the past decade, I’ve come across both Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages and Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal more than a handful of times each. But it was only this past week, rediscovering them both, that I decided to make the leap.

Last Monday, I broke out a Moleskine (A5, dotted) and a fountain pen, resolutely ignored my long-governing Todoist task list, and hopped head-first into analog life.

A week in, I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it. The Morning Pages take a full half-hour of scribbling; more than long enough to cramp up my writing arm and shoulder, and to make me wonder if I’m pissing that time away with nothing but three ramblingly scrawled pages of daily nonsense to show for it. Similarly, I’m not sure whether I’m getting more or less done with the Bullet Journal than I was before.

But I do think that, with the Bullet Journal approach, I feel a bit less weighed-down, less put-upon by my to-do backlog than I do when using Todoist. And I’ve found that, if I hop into a meditation session immediately following the Morning Pages, the cloudy surface of my brain settles a bit faster, let’s me more easily reach a point where I feel like I’m looking down through the clear, calm waters of my mind, into the depth below.

So, for the next week, at least, I’m sticking with it. If nothing else else, it leaves me covered with all kinds of interesting fountain-pen ink smudges. And I have a vague sense, perhaps without enough marketing exposures to yet bring it to top of mind, that indigo blue is the new black.

Don’t check email in the morning. Only check email twice a day. Turn off all of email notifications.

That’s increasingly standard productivity advice these days, and for good reason. We’re at our most productive when we proactively choose the things on which to focus. But email is entirely reactive – it hands control of our to-do list to anyone who happens to send a request our way.

For a while, I tried to follow that advice, cutting back on my email checking frequency. But I quickly ran into a problem: many of my proactive tasks involve sending email. Or searching through my email history. And as soon as I opened a Gmail tab, I’d find myself inexorably drawn into processing and responding to the latest messages, even if that wasn’t what I had set out to do.

So, a month or two back, I hit upon a simple solution. I set up a folder called “Incoming”, and a filter to send all of my new mail to that folder. And then I hid the folder from the label sidebar, so I wouldn’t get distracted by the unread message count.

Voila. Problem solved. Now, I can load up Gmail, send or search as needed, and still only see new stuff coming in when that’s actually what I want to do.

For bonus points, I also set up a single “Robots” folder, to hold all incoming promotions, mailing list messages, social media updates, etc.

Now, a couple of times a day, I can process the “Incoming” folder to to respond to real, from-a-person emails. And, once each day, I empty out the “Robots” folder, to see if there’s any wheat in that sea of chaff.

It’s completely changed my experience of email, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Here’s how to set the same thing up yourself:

First, copy this string into your Gmail search box:

category:(forums | updates | promotions | social)

Then click the downward arrow at the right side of the search field, and choose “Create filter with this search” on the bottom right of the pop-up. On the next screen, select both “Skip the Inbox (Archive it)” and “Apply the Label” for whatever folder you’d like to route incoming junk into.

Then do the same thing with this string:

!from:j@outcap.com !category:forums !category:social !category:updates !category:promotions

For this one, you’ll need to replace my email (j@outcap.com) with your own, and choose a label for incoming ‘real’ messages.

Finally, hover over the names of each of those two labels, click the downward arrow that appears, and select “In Label List: Hide”, so that you don’t have the sirens’ call of unread messages perpetually in your sidebar.

Try it yourself. Seriously, this one changed my life.

Here’s something I’ve been playing with lately: blocking my days into three big chunks. I have a Focus chunk from 6am to 12pm, a Buffer chunk from 12pm to 6pm, and then a Free chunk from 6pm to 11pm.

When I wake up, often while I’m still in bed, I immediately start working on my most important project. Literally, immediately. Somewhere in that chunk, I go to the bathroom, drink some coffee, and walk the dogs. But, otherwise, working on that project is the only thing I’m allowed to do.

At 12pm, unshowered and with glazed-over eyes, I usually walk the dogs again, head to the gym, shower, eat lunch, and then spend the balance of my Buffer block on all the other tasks I’d like to accomplish. Getting to inbox zero (in email, on my phone, with my paper in-basket), blogging, and banging out all the other work and personal tasks that aren’t part of my One Big Focus Project.

And then, at 6pm, I close my laptop, and try to spend the evening enjoying Jessie, friends, family and NYC.

Obviously, this only works because I have the luxury of working from home. But I’ve found that, at 6am, I’m basically still too asleep to creatively procrastinate; by the time my brain gears up all the way, I’m neck-deep in my most important stuff, and carried forward by the momentum. Whereas, before, when I’d try to work out and shower and walk the dogs and prepare for the day a bit before opening my laptop, I’d be in prime procrastinatory mode by 8:30 or 9:00am and manage to instead just tackle small unimportant tasks, telling myself I was clearing the deck for a deeper focus session later on that, on too many days, never seemed to actually arrive.

I’m not sure this would work for anyone else, but it sure as hell is working for me.