Productivity

Some people might not understand why there is a chapter about productivity in a book about remote work. It would seem as if only your environment has changed, so your productivity should remain constant or even increase because you can control your environment to reduce distractions. But if we look at why people stop working from home, one of their primary complaints is that they just couldn’t get enough done. These aren’t lazy or incompetent people, yet their productivity dropped to the point where they were afraid and ran back to the office. What demons did they face, and how can we overcome them?

Working from home is harder for some of us than working in an office for many reasons. First, in an office, we pick up on the energy, systems, and schedule of those around us. Left alone, we can have trouble getting started or staying focused. There are fewer distractions when working alone, but it’s an adjustment. In an open office, the distractions are constant, so we learn to multi-task and work on things with a lot of noise around. But the quiet of a house can feel “too loud” to work in; we have to adjust to these large blocks of focus time by increasing our work endurance.

This is why working late when everyone is working late is easier and why sitting at home working late alone stinks. In addition, working alone feels very different, and you find that although you consider yourself a professional and diligent employee, your mind drifts towards procrastination when working with nobody watching. You have to battle this negative energy. Because of the additional needs of remote work, like spending more time building relationships and clarifying communication, you might need to get 110% more done, which is more difficult.

Working alone is quite hard. Without constant monitoring or micromanagement, your own standard of productivity is what matters. This can lead to dramatically different results. Left to your own devices; how much do you want to get done in a day? How will you judge yourself at the end of the day? You might be getting just as much done but feel that you aren’t, and then become less and less effective because of this self-imposed perception.

Productivity is Deeply Personal

Before we offer up advice, we should say that super-productivity, the consistent creation of those magical days when you seem to get a week’s work done in one day, is deeply personal. No general advice will work. You can’t pick up that kind of progress by reading some random article telling you to wake up earlier, use a journal, write out your goals, or focus on only three things a day. There is a huge industry of advice blog posts that tell us that this-one-weird-trick is the answer, but it never really does. Understanding the concepts behind productivity can help you shape it to what works for you. The good news on this front is that when you are in control of your environment, and can customize things to your personal preferences to help drive whatever results you need.

Professional athletes don’t just read up on what methods others are using and then try to do those things. They instead measure how they are doing and carefully try new things and see if they work. They use science to learn the basic rules that dictate what methods will work and which ones are snake oil. Whatever type of work you do, the kind of thinking that allows you to make real progress should follow the same personal improvement mentality and not just follow whatever articles are trending on Medium.

What we are trying to do here is to discover, through careful trial and error, a few set habits that work for you in this season of your life. Mining for these methods is worth it because once you find them, you can use them over and over to create good work no matter the circumstances.

Semi-Global Truths About Productivity

Even though productivity is personal, there are some universal truths that affect the type of mental work that can be done remotely. Whether you are a writer, programmer, analyst, blogger, or general manager, you will find that you can’t run from these realities.

Before we dive in too deep, we need to understand some global truths about productivity:

Semi-Global Productivity Truths

  • Truth 1: Energy Affects Everything
  • Truth 2: Momentum Matters
  • Truth 3: Do Work that Matters
  • Truth 4: Cultivate Systems not Goals

Truth #1: Energy Affects Everything

If you do most of your work on a computer, then you do most of your work with your brain, and it is easy to start to think that the rest of our body doesn’t matter. I’ve certainly fallen into this trap of thinking that how much I sleep, what I eat, and how I’m feeling doesn’t matter. All I need is some caffeine and an Internet connection, and I’ll be fine.

It doesn’t work this way. My physical energy affects everything I do, and as I tire, I lose focus, make mistakes, and forget important details. A tired brain is a weak brain. If we aren’t tuned into these small differences, it takes something big like eating a big lunch or losing sleep because of a sick child to notice that we can’t think as well when tired.

We may notice a dip in our performance at work, but we rarely sit down and assess our day-to-day health and how it affects how much we can get done. We need sleep and water every day, and not getting those can hurt us more than we think.

Physical Energy

I find that being in a good mood for creative work is worth the hours it takes to get in a good mood [1]. // B.J. Novak

We covered your physical state and mindset in the last chapter, Chapter 4: Mindset, but as a quick refresher: find your why, practice gratitude, and resolve your fears.

Professional athletes warmup before games: mentally and physically. You might need to also establish a mental warmup routine that works for you. We covered how to establish a starting and stopping routine in Chapter 2: Clock-In Clock-Out and how important it is to maintain our physical health in Chapter 4: Mindset, but I’d like to add another element that affects productivity, your mood.

Getting into a good mood is just a good life skill, and the good news is that you don’t really have many limitations since you are working from where you wish. You can’t blast music and dance for 20 minutes before starting your day in a cubicle farm, but you certainly can from your home office.

Truth #2: Momentum Matters

Getting started on a task is many times harder than making clear progress on a task. The difference is even larger when you work alone. You were driving in traffic before, and it was easier to keep going, now it might feel that it is easier to stop more often. There are a few things that build or maintain momentum.

Changes Build Momentum

The Novelty Effect [2] states that sometimes a change of some kind, even things that you don’t think matter, can lead to increased productivity.

Now that you know this, you can use it as a weapon. Feeling like you can’t get any writing done? Move your desk around, change your font, start listening to music, stop listening to music, change clothes, work standing up, work sitting down, etc. This seems so simple that it wouldn’t work, but it is very effective, especially for those with certain personalities.

It is the reason I own about 14 writing apps for my Mac and have logins to a dozen other ones. It is also the reason that I own two desks, three monitors, and a standing desk extension (which is actually a coffee table), and my office is constantly changing and shifting in various small ways throughout the years.

Ambitious Work Builds Momentum

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. // Mark Twain

Occasionally setting time aside for one particular task can build momentum. Think of some of the constraints you are typically up against, and tweak them for a set period of time. For example, only work on one task until you are done, or take a weekend to finish a big project. Or remove all distractions in a way that you can only do temporarily. Rent a hotel room and work from there for a bit. These big grandiose gestures to the productivity gods can pay off.

On a smaller scale, if you front-load your hardest tasks, this ambition can build momentum. Let’s say you have a very difficult task in front of you: tackle it first. Even if you don’t fully complete it but just make progress; this can greatly reduce your stress and get your day off to a great start.

Reflection Sustains Momentum

How we feel about how well we are doing matters. In the heat of work, we can sometimes perceive that we aren’t making progress when we are actually doing well. I’ve found that taking time to make a few quick notes helps to sustain the momentum that you have built while working. A Done list is a record of all the things that you did on a particular day, no matter how mundane they were. Moving things from your todo list to done feels good, but reading all the things you did on a particular day of the week feels even better.

Much of our advice in Chapter 2: Clock-In Clock-Out about starting and ending your day using set routines are all just sophisticated ways of building and sustaining momentum.

Small Wins Build Momentum

I have a few things that I try to get done every day. I don’t always do them first thing in the morning, but rather I save them for when I’m stuck or need to build some momentum. These tasks are normally pretty short in length, are productive, and can help me get out of a rut if needed.

Some examples:

  • Drink a glass of water and take vitamins.
  • Meditate for 10 minutes.
  • Check our finance app and categorize all the transactions into our budget.
  • Exercise.
  • Read.
  • Do ten pushups.

These small daily tasks are small daily small wins, and ticking them off my todo list is something productive that I can do. It helps to have these at the ready.

You can also use this same technique to get something done. If you are stuck, don’t waste time, instead step away and do something. Clean your office, do some pushups, take out the trash, do the dishes, anything that is in any way productive and needs to be done eventually. The idea is to do something so that the next 45 minutes or however long of potentially wasted time won’t be completely wasted. Do something useful, even if it’s the wrong thing.

The funny thing about this is that sometimes this exercise pulls you out of whatever is going on; it feels good to get things done, even if they are things that are so simple it doesn’t take much skill. Checking off things on your todo list builds momentum, even if the things are near the bottom of the list. Depositing a check via a mobile app and writing an email to a family member are things you could do at any point and not really think are a big deal, but in the midst of the fight to stay working can make you feel a little better and let you move onto more important things. Now when you return, you have those achievements bringing the productive momentum back with you.

Real Breaks Help Sustain Momentum

If you are managing your home office well, you won’t get distracted as often as you would in an office, but this can work against you and make you work too hard. You need to rest and recover. You should take real breaks to better allow yourself to endure. Always know when you are on a break.

If you are building a chair it’s pretty obvious when you aren’t building the chair. If you look down and you aren’t in your workshop or near any wood, then you probably aren’t building a chair.

On a computer it isn’t that obvious. You can be working along and suddenly find yourself reading an article on something mildly related to work, but not really. You were tired or hit a wall of fear or doubt or boredom and just opened up your web browser. You were on a mental break unintentionally. Instead, plan your breaks ahead of time and push through these times. In order to work all day and not have your concentration suffer, you need to take short breaks while you are still going.

The goal of a break is for you to not work for a bit and come back fresh to work more after. It’s a small investment for later clarity and endurance.

A real break:

  • Is away from the computer screen.
  • In some way takes your mind away from the immediate.
  • Occupies your mind in some other way by being an active, not a passive, activity.
  • It is of a length where you can come back and keep working easily.

A good break gets you away from the actual work, physically. For most this means getting away from your computer. Your eyes get tired, your brain gets tired, everything gets tired. Time away from the screen resolves this quickly. Moving away from the computer can help get your mind off of work, but it might not. I would not recommend thinking of work-related things as taking a break. Listening to a podcast about your work while you take a break is not as good as reading a magazine or playing pool on your break. Do something different.

There is this myth that you can veg-out in front of the TV or YouTube to unwind, but I question whether this is a productive way to break. People who watch TV or browse Facebook have been shown to be in a depressive state [3].

I’d recommend two types of breaks:

  1. One in which you use your brain in an active way, but it has little to do with work. Examples include reading, drawing, writing. You can also do things like running little online errands or reading at the computer, but I’d recommend stepping away from your desk and using another device.
  2. One in which you don’t use your subconscious brain only. These are rote tasks that you can do without actively thinking about them. You can let your mind wander: taking a shower, going for a walk, doing the dishes, sweeping the house, cleaning up your desk, making lunch.

The length of the break matters as well. If you take 4-8 a day, they should be short, just enough to catch your breathe and reset your thinking. A few times a day, I’d recommend a longer break which varies per person, time of day, and moon cycle, but for me, this is typically 10–30 minutes.

Using these criteria, here are some examples of bad breaks:

  • Building a barn. (takes too long even with help from the other villagers)
  • Going to see all the Twilight movies. (too long; I also doubt if these movies hold up to multiple viewings)
  • Opening up a new tab and randomly browsing Reddit or equivalent. (does not actively engage your mind, is at computer)
  • Watching YouTube videos at random. (at computer, soul-crushing)
  • Getting into fights about stuff over the Internet. (at the computer, does not occupy your mind, normally bad for the world)

Here are some example of good breaks:

  • Going for a walk.
  • Washing all the dishes in the sink.
  • Drawing a small picture of a tree with a monkey in it. The monkey has a telescope and is looking at you.
  • Smoking a cigarette. (unfortunately)
  • Brewing and then drinking tea.
  • Four minutes of deep breathing.

My personal favorite long-break technique is to read one short story [4]. These are typically 20 pages long and establish a character or idea in that length. They take about 30 minutes to read and completely take your mind away from whatever you are doing. I read them away from my computer but near it (sometimes it is necessary for me to keep headphones on in case there is an emergency). This technique meets all my requirements above and has lead me to read all sorts of great stories. By the time I’m done, I am “back”, my mind and eyes are rested, a good story will take you away like that, and I am ready to work.

Truth #3: Do Work that Matters

If you are working hard, you better be working on things that matter, or you won’t move forward despite your efforts. A real risk when working alone is just doing activities that feel like work, that don’t matter. Activity feels very similar to progress, sometimes it feels better. We have to measure to make sure we are doing what we need to do, and not just doing things.

Paul Graham calls activities that don’t matter Fake Work in his post on Self Indulgence [5]:

And yet I’ve definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I’d feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV. If I spent a whole day watching TV, I’d feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don’t go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I’m doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It’s not fun. So it must be work.

Emails and meetings can be good, but they aren’t always actually moving you towards what you are trying to do. They feel like work but are often fake work.

The properties of fake work:

  • It is less complicated than real work (this is why we prefer it).
  • It isn’t obvious to people that you are doing it (fake work is rarely shippable or publishable)
  • It is hard to measure how good you are at it, or being known for being good at it isn’t a compliment. “wow, she is really good at checking email and keeping her all her apps updated”.

It doesn’t pass the following gauntlet of tests:

  • If I did this all day, how would I feel at the end of the day? Does it feel good in the short-term only?
  • Can I justify it to a coworker? (“Well these files need to be organized by color name in Spanish so that we can get to them rapidamente next time”)
  • Is it something that anybody could do?

Here are some quick examples:

  • Your computer says it needs to install an update, and you restart it shortly after. “When it restarts I might as well see if any apps need updating as well on my phone”.
  • You know the hotkey for your “go get new emails” in your email client. (I mean really, who wants more emails)
  • Organizing your todo list.
  • Trying out a new application or messing around with new fonts.
  • Organizing your email, the ones you have already received.
  • Scheduling a meeting to talk about something that isn’t a decision or an announcement.
  • Reading blog posts, especially those mildly related to The Important Task That Must Be Done.
  • Anything that could be classified as a form of worry.
  • Over-formatting presentations, spreadsheets, etc.

The trick is to not let doing something that doesn’t matter ruin doing the one next most important thing that must be done.

System Measurement

All this talk of systems and only doing what matters is great, but how can you tell if your system is working or if what you are doing is leading to actual progress? If you don’t have any concrete goals, how can you tell if something is working? Some work is hard to measure objectively, such as software development, writing an article, or making music. In these cases how can we tell if our systems are working?

Even if there isn’t a clear quantitative measurement, your own expertise and instincts are normally good units of measure. Imagine yourself as a journalist reporting back to your desk about how things are going: “Had a setback today”.

Even in very complex fields, if you step back, you can see overall progress at a higher observation level. Sure, it is hard to judge software developers on lines of code written, but you can judge them on stories completed or by surveys from their peers, or by how they feel they are doing. In a few paragraphs, when we discuss a particular system to use for work, you will see that measuring pomodoros completed every day can serve as a good rubric for how much work is getting done.

We can’t give up on doing something well just because it might be difficult to measure. Most of the important things in life can’t be counted but can be measured roughly. Truth #4: Cultivate Systems

Traditionally, people think that you achieve your goals by setting an ambitious specific metric like running a marathon, telling everybody, and then getting to work on it. But the actual work part is where everything goes wrong. After all the motivation fades, you see it raining and you feel sick, your goal feels far away and your progress falls apart. Focusing on the goal does not allow you to see progress; it feels like you are moving slower. Focus instead on fitness and running as a near-daily habit, a part of who you are, and you will achieve more of it.

We shouldn’t try to get stuff done, we should get stuff done. Any attempts at productivity that rely on us wanting to work or push through the stuff that we don’t want to do, will ultimately fail because they rely too much on situational things like our mood or the work in front of us.

Instead, we need to establish a set of habits, techniques, and tools that form a work system that guarantee we will get stuff done no matter where we are or what is happening around us. Once you figure out what works and do it over and over, the structure it makes working easier and more automatic.

People that have super-productivity have developed tools and systems to do so, and they use them consistently. Getting a lot done is no accident. There are default systems established in a shared work environment help provide structure where isn’t one at home, so there are additional challenges here.

system: a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method

A system, in this sense, is an established way of doing something that you know works for you. In Chapter 3: Sacred Space and Chapter 2: Clock-In Clock-Out, we saw systems to start your workday, make sure you weren’t distracted in the middle, and helped you to cleanly end your day. Those techniques were automatic systems that help you.

Your goal should be to find other work habits that consistently work for you. You should be able to work anywhere using simple steps and repeatable practices. You should not work when you feel in the mood.

This system should replace your default system that you might have brought over from a traditional job. Let’s say you sit in a group of cubicles in a regular office. Your system for getting work done is that you start work with the following recipe:

  • You get up and drive to the office.
  • You sit down and after small talk ends you try to work until you are interrupted or have a meeting to attend.
  • Once it feels like everyone else is working, you start working.
  • If anybody talks to you, there is a fire drill, or you need coffee, you stop working.

Systems are better than motivation

Progress feels faster when you focus on the daily process of improvement and work. Imagine yourself driving to a nearby mountain. You can’t tell that you are getting closer, and staring at the mountain too much won’t work. Focus instead on looking at the trees go by, and you will realize you are going fast.

Don’t rely on motivation or wait to feel inspired. Motivation fades and is hard to maintain, but if you develop systems that become habits that become who you are, achieving larger and larger ambitions just becomes what you do.

If we rely on us wanting to do work, or our work ethic, or our hustle, or any other emotional metric, it won’t work all the time. Willpower can be drained from you, as any parent can confirm. If you have to push through something or enforce some rule, or prevent yourself from eating melted cheese, or any other number of slightly negative things, you eventually run out of energy to do so. This is referred to as willpower exhaustion and can be reproduced in the lab.

Systems become habits become identity, and trump willpower, motivation, or luck.

An example system: Pomodoro Technique

Here is an example system that is used by many people around the world to help them study and work. It is a great system to start with and then customize over time to fit your working style and ability to focus. It is also a great training tool to increase your ability to focus and not get distracted.

The idea is that you work for a set amount of time on one task that you pick out, and you don’t stop until it’s done or the timer rings. In full detail:

  • Figure out what task you are going to do next.
  • Set a timer for 25 minutes and start on the task.
  • Work until the timer stops without working on other things.
  • If something interrupts you, write down what happened to distract you, but work as much as you can in the time.
  • Take a 3-5 minute break.
  • After 3-4 rounds of this, take a longer break (20-30 minutes).

This is a great system because it gives you an exact method to start: decide what you are going to do and then turn on the timer. It is also a great way to help you learn if you are doing well, and to improve your estimation. Because you need to be careful with picking your task, it makes you keep your priorities organized. The act of picking your next task means that it also helps you break apart larger undefined tasks into discrete do-able subparts.

During the pomodoro, if you get a phone call or are otherwise distracted, you write down what happened and keep going. For example: “Answered phone, talked to boss about upcoming project” or “Phone rang, ignored”. If you find yourself being self-distracted, write that down too: “Worried about upcoming project, performance review”. This system over time gives you valuable information on what you are doing and is simple to implement.

Warmup pomodoros are a great way to start your day with some structure is to start it with a warmup pomodoro or a planning pomodoro. Let’s say its a Monday morning and you don’t really know where to start. Well, take the first 20 minutes of your day to:

  • Write out and prioritize your todo list
  • Plan out your next 2 pomodoros
  • Get started

You can take this system and customize it [6] for what works within your role and personality: change 25 minutes to 45, or change your breaks to be more often so you can stretch your back. Pomodoro is only one system to try; there are plenty of others.

Systems and Techniques to Try

Now that we understand the basics of being ready to work physically and mentally, how to build and sustain momentum, and how to develop a work system that runs from anywhere, I’d like to throw out some random techniques and tricks that you might want to try. Productivity systems aren’t a static thing, we need to change and tweak how we work over time to remain effective. Not all of these things will work for everyone: your mileage may vary.

No Work is Sacred, All Work is Sacred

Not all work tasks are created equal. Doing an expense report is not the same as designing a new front-end architecture for your company’s top product. Writing a performance review report is not the same as debugging an infrequent performance issue in your system’s invoice engine. There are big scary tasks and rote tasks, and as we mentioned above, we tend to work on things that feel like good work but might not matter. Let’s talk about how to approach the Big Scary Task that you seem to put off and delay and can’t get started on.

Break it Down for Somebody else

If you aren’t sure where to start on something critically important, then pretend that you were unassigned this task and need to hand off notes to the person that will finish it. Write them up a project plan, notes on what you have done so far, and what you were going to do next. Pretend that they have no awareness of the background needed, and write up a primer on the approach you would recommend. This works for a few reasons. First, if you have been thinking and thinking about the task and aren’t sure where to start, it makes you write down all that analysis you did in your head and the act of writing it down helps to organize it. It might be that you had a debate in your head going on about the approach to take, and this will settle it. Second, if you break a big task into smaller steps it feels easier, because if gives you some initial task to go and do now.

20 Minute Start

When you work alone (and on hard problems), you have to hack your own mind to battle procrastination. One of my tricks is to start with what I’m going to work on but am having trouble making progress on for only twenty minutes right before something large is about to happen.

Example: I’m struggling to figure out a problem and have spent all morning doing other things while taking sideways glances at the problem. I sometimes refer to this as the Big Hairy Scary Problem: a problem that is large and you are unclear how to start on it, so you keep putting off doing something on it. Over time the BHSP gets bigger and scarier. It always has the same amount of hair.

It is now time for lunch or a meeting in a few minutes, so I set a timer and tell myself I’m going to “get a twenty-minute head start” on the problem and I work for exactly twenty minutes until I leave to go eat. This dead time right before lunch has no expectations and I’ve only got ten minutes (how much real work can you really get done in that time anyway?), so I’m not under pressure or feeling like I’m “behind” in any way.

And then the magic happens:

  • I work for more than 20 minutes and more casual conditions allow me to build some momentum.
  • I waste twenty minutes and enjoy my lunch.
  • I work hard for 10 minutes, and then my subconscious mind spends my lunch break fussing over the problem while I think about how good Italian Herbs and Cheese bread is from Subway I mean how does the cheese always have exactly the right consistency.

In all of these cases, I return from eating without guilt and ready to go on the problem. In the one case in which this trick failed I took a shot at it and nothing came of it, so we need to try some more tricks in the afternoon.

Use Obstacles, Even if You Have to Create Them

We have all worked very hard to get stuff done right before a vacation. The deadline hanging over us made us reach a level of productivity and decisiveness that was clarifying. Create a more interesting situation by creating a false obstacle.

For those of us with focus-based work, an empty calendar is very powerful but also demotivating at times. You get back from lunch and have a number of things that you want to get done but don’t know where to start and feel like it is going to be a long afternoon. Just because you don’t have a number of things that will interrupt you doesn’t mean you can’t create some. I set a deadline of 2:00 PM when I will go do a certain task: I am going to go get the mail or get a coffee, so let’s see what I can get done before then.

I stumbled upon this silly idea after a sick child ruined my day completely. I didn’t try to work while watching them but only worked while they were (finally) napping in the afternoon and then for a few hours after they went to bed for the night.

Once the day was over and settled, I realized that although I had spent most of my workday with her, I had gotten as much done in the few hours I did end up having for work. This has happened a number of times to me intentionally or not over the years and the formula is the same:

  • You are working very hard towards a goal
  • You hit an obstacle that prevents you from work.
  • While you are distracted your mind has some time to rest and your emotions create a I want to work tension
  • When you get back to work you get a ton done.

Well, there is no need to wait for an emergency, just go watch a movie. Not working when you should be working might be just enough of a I-shouldn’t-be-doing-this break that you need.

Music, Noise, and Concentration

My relationship with music has completely changed since I became in control of where I worked. I used to never wear headphones in an office or at a coffee shop and instead just half-listened to what was going on around me. Now it is either too quiet or much too loud around my home office, so I listen to music or white noise on noise-canceling headphones. I’d suggest experimenting with all of these and seeing what works for you.

There are a few truths to know about how to use them that might surprise you. First, listening to music while working doesn’t work for everyone. There is some evidence that listening to music without words can help drown out other sounds and not distract, but there is also evidence that doing so might lower your creativity [7]. In addition, listening to music that you have heard a million times can help train your body to get into a work rhythm, and even strange things like listening to foreign-language podcasts (in a language you do not understand) can sometimes help provide some natural background noise. One additional caveat is that absolute silence provided by earplugs or high-level white noise headphones can increase your stress in the same way that the woods suddenly becoming quiet does. Try a few techniques out and see what works for you.

Dream a Little Bigger, and Just Work

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses. In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging classes. [8] // Derek Sivers

When you work from home you can dial in what works for you and get a lot more done. Don’t limit yourself once you realize that you are getting more done than you would in an office. Many people who work remotely own their own businesses or are consultants: both situations in which you only eat what you kill, so there are direct rewards for working as hard as you can.

But if you are an employee somewhere, because there is no speed limit, this might mean that you work less than eight hours a day. This is the unspoken secret of remote work: there are days that you get just as much done and then go see a movie, take a nap, go for a long run, and then show up again tomorrow. There are days when you get eight hours of work done in a productive morning, and you keep going and work the equivalent of two days in a day. Then maybe you go for a bike ride and take a nap. Or more likely, you work some more.

We have covered what is universally true about productivity, how it applies to working remotely, and what we can do to improve our own personal productivity. Let’s close this chapter with a reminder that even with all these sophisticated tools, mind games, techniques, and systems, there will always be a time when you simply have to sit down and work.