A few years ago I was really interested in productivity hacking, that is, creating and sustaining habits that make one more productive. I’m thinking of productivity here not as making or creating stuff. Instead, I understand productivity hacks as ways of using time more efficiently, especially when it comes to boring routine stuff that enables more interesting stuff. If the routines that oil your life take less time out of that life, you win because you’ve more time to do all the other stuff.

My friends made a lot of fun of me when this interest of mine was at its peak and I look back and realise that I was spending a lot of time trying to become as efficient as possible at not actually doing very much. That being said, I did get some good habits out of my productivity hacking hobby, along with a really bad habit. I’ll write briefly about both of those.

The habit I gained was coming up with processes to handle boring stuff in order to offload it from my mind. A motivating reason for using systems like Getting Things Done, usually known as GTD, is that you get rid of any reason you might have to be anxious about stuff that you’ve got to do because you know that you have systems so that you’ll know that you need to do something when it’s time to do it. When you get a new piece of paper you just put it in an inbox immediately, and you know that you’ll process that inbox to zero well in advance of any deadlines for acting on that piece of paper. Then the mental debt of getting started thinking about the contents of that letter doesn’t follow you around for the rest of the day after you received it. That’s powerful and effective.

I’ve now got systems and inboxes like this all over my life. An example is receipts I get from shopping. There are a number of common responses to a cashier handing you a till receipt. Some people put it in their wallet as part of a big pile of receipts that is unmanageable and so basically useless. Some people make a decision on each receipt as to whether they need to keep it. Some people just immediately destroy almost every receipt because they don’t want to think about it. Some people scan and OCR all their receipts obsessively so they can use their computer to search up one that they might need. From my perspective the problem with all of these habits is that they are either overbearing and time-consuming or they take risks with documentation that might prove useful that one just doesn’t need to take. I put every receipt in my wallet without looking at it, and once per week I process the contents of my wallet: I discard most and store some of the receipts in my wallet. I also have this attitude with coins. In Korea coins aren’t very useful because of facts about the currency and the prices of most things you want to buy. So you could just throw them all away. I put them all in my wallet, and at the end of the week transfer them to a piggy bank. That way I get the financial benefit of the coins without wasting any time counting them out (which just annoys most shopkeepers here).

The bad habit that I’ve got is that I’m too interested in getting things done. I like ticking things off my todo list too much, and I look at my todo list too much (while not getting done very many things on it). Sometimes I manage to spend half a day just living my life, before I inevitably get stuck refreshing my todo list over and over again. Except for these brief half days when I escape it, my todo list is the centre of my life and I feel like it controls me. I feel as though if I don’t have things to get done I’ll have nothing. I’m not sure how to get rid of this illusion.