how to be genuinely productive

look at the ticking clock.

yes, please do, if you haven’t already.

if you don’t have one around, go to a room that has one.

it has been ticking for a while. as it keeps ticking, seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass, days pass, months pass and years pass. you keep growing older.

if you are 18, you are at the right place, at the right time.

if you are 25, you have already lived more than 9,000 days. at 30 it is almost 11,000. at 40, more than 14,000.

if you feel you have not made it yet, look at where those days went. had even a part of those hours gone into learning something, you would be further along than you are today. that is true for most of us, me included.

you can’t control the past. the best part is that you can always control what you do with the next hour.

at any given point in time you have two choices. you can start on something that takes effort: learning a skill like reading, writing, coding, marketing, or learning to use ai. or you can do something that takes none, like binge watching a web series, listening to music, or using your phone mindlessly.

both of those are an evening. the second one never asks anything of you, which is why it is so easy to choose again tomorrow.

if you choose the first, and you keep choosing it again and again while keeping track of the number of hours, you are on to something. you are learning. your brain is slowly picking up the skill.

it will not feel that way. the first hours of anything feel like nothing is happening, and that is exactly why you have to write them down.

log as you work, not at night.

this is the part most people skip. don’t wait until the end of the day to remember what you did. the moment you sit down, note the time. the moment you stop, note it again. one line each. it takes ten seconds.

logging as you work gives you something a diary at night never will: a sense of hours. after a few days you start to know what one real hour of work is, and how different it is from an hour at the desk. you feel the clock while it is still running, when you can still do something about it.

at night you remember the day as a feeling, and feelings round up. the break, the phone and the settling in all get counted as work.

effort plus a sense of hours.

that is my measure of being genuinely productive. effort plus a sense of hours. you need both.

effort without the hours is a feeling. you were tired, so it must have been a productive day. hours without the effort is attendance. you sat there for eight of them. being busy is neither of the two, and that is why it never adds up to a skill.

how to do it this week.

1. 1

   pick one skill.

   one. the thing you would be glad to be better at a year from now. reading, writing, coding, marketing, using ai.

2. 2

   give it the same slot every day.

   an hour after dinner, or the first hour of the morning. a fixed time means you don’t have to decide again each day.

3. 3

   note the start and the stop, as you work.

   what you did, when you began, when you ended. if the phone took over for an hour, write that down too. it is part of the day.

4. 4

   on sunday, add it up.

   look at the week as hours. how many really went to the skill, and how many you only meant to give it.

a week like that is not a failure. it is the first honest number you have had. now you know what to change: one hour of the phone, moved to the skill, every evening.

then keep going, and look back.

anything you are doing, you have to document, so that you can reflect. the notes are how you see the improvement, because improvement is too slow to feel from one day to the next. set four weeks side by side and it is hard to miss.

nothing about that person changed except where the hours went. same job, same evenings, same phone. by week four the skill has eight hours a week and they can feel what eight hours is.

why i built an app for this.

i used to do all of this in a spreadsheet. it worked, and i could never keep it up for long. noting the time is easy. adding it up every week, by hand, is what makes people stop.

so i built think in numbers. the cards on this page are what it does. you write a line the way you would text it, or you say it out loud, as you work. it turns each line into hours, adds up your week, and shows your weeks side by side. whatever you never mentioned, it shows as unaccounted, so the day still adds up to twenty-four hours.

so here is my question to you. what skill are you picking up now?

and when are you starting? not someday. which hour, today or tomorrow?

write the answer down in one line: the skill, and the time. “python, 7 pm.” that line is your first entry. put it on paper, or put it in think in numbers. either way, when the hour comes, note the time and start.

the clock is still ticking. it was ticking while you read this. pick the thing, note the time, and start.

try it at thinkinnumbers.co.