Productive Capacity

Work at 85% Capacity with 100% Focus

The key to doing great creative work over the long-haul is to work at 85% capacity with 100% focus. Save a little every day so you can do more over the course of a week.

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Effectiveness Is All About Managing Your Time, Energy, and Attention

I bet you think you’d be able to do a lot more if you had more time. If so, you’re probably wrong. Having more time is only a piece of the puzzle. It’s not so much just the quantity of time that we should consider, but the quality of time, too. This is largely the [...]

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The Key To Consistent Creativity and Productivity

How long can you concentrate and focus on one thing before your energy and attention begins to falter? How long does it take you to engage in a particular thing to make the effort of engagement worth it? The answers to those two questions make up (what I’m calling) your engagement threshold, and figuring out [...]

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Time, Creativity, and Metaprojects

One thing we often forget when we make new commitments is that time is only one of the various factors to consider. Because we’ve been taught to think about time quantitatively rather than qualitatively, we mistakenly assume that we can handle more because a proposed commitment will “only take a few hours a week.” The [...]

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How Creatives Make Money

Odds are, if you are reading this, you make money by leveraging your creativity. You write, design, create, or do something such that your ability to make money depends largely on your ability to be creative. I’ll pause and let that sink in for a minute. I said in passing last week that your productive [...]

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How to Stifle A Good Idea

Or: Why You’re Probably Not Using the Productivity Planners (This post is a case study in how to stifle a good idea, using my own products as an example. It ends with a general take-away, so feel free just to skip to that.) Laurie, my good friend and neighbor, provided some of the best feedback [...]

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Know Thyself and Become More Productive

How productive have you been today? There are many ways you can answer that question – but there are two different perspectives to think about when you do. One perspective depends on how much you actually have gotten done. Another perspective depends on how much you could actually do. I favor the latter perspective. When [...]

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Redesigned Productivity Planners Available (For Free!)

I finally got unblocked and finished up the redesign of the Weekly Productivity Planner and the Daily Productivity Planner. Pick them up here: [Instead of updating this post every month, I'm sending you to the place where I keep all the planners up to date. The link will send you to the "Free Planners" page [...]

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The Daily Productivity Planner: Plan Your Day By Your Productive Capacity

Update: The most current version of this aid is available on the Free Planner page. This post references an older version. Hot off the press!: the . This aid is a companion to the Productivity Heatmap and allows you to plan in detail how you’re going to execute the tasks for the day. I’m taking [...]

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