Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You

This is a well-studied phenomenon; one that scientists call ‘uncertainty paralysis’

Burnett’s design mindset offers an unusual way to answer the question. He invites you to reflect on: Your Current Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you continued down your current path. Your Alternative Path: Write out, in detail, what your life would look like five years from now if you took a comple

We get procrastination wrong. All too often, we approach procrastination by treating the symptoms rather than the underlying causes. And all too often, those causes relate to our mood: when we feel bad, we achieve less. So the unblock method is about establishing what’s really blocking your good mood – and finding a way to eliminate it.

Enactive mastery is the flipside of the vicarious mastery we’ve just encountered. According to Bandura, an enactive mastery experience refers to the process of learning through doing. Learning through doing is one of the most powerful forces in human psychology. It’s the second key strategy if we’re to build our sense of power.

The first way we can reduce the power fear holds over us is by gaining some perspective. One of the reasons fear is so paralysing is that we tend to catastrophise.

Controllable: We want to focus on goals that are within our control. ‘Spend eight hours a day on my novel’ probably isn’t something you can actually do, since many external factors would have to come together for such an input to be possible. Setting a more genuinely controllable goal (like allocating twenty minutes per day to the task) is far more

But the truth is, structure gives you more freedom, not less. By carving out specific chunks of time for different activities, you’re ensuring that you have time for everything that’s important to you: work, hobbies, relaxation, relationships. You’re not just reacting to whatever comes up or gets thrown at you during the day. Instead, you’re design

Imagine it’s one week later, and you haven’t actually started the task you intended to. What are the top three reasons why you didn’t get to it? What can you do to help mitigate the risk of those top three reasons derailing you? Who can you ask for help in sticking to this commitment? What action can you take right now that will help increase the o

According to the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced ‘chick-sent-me-hi’), the biggest difference between climbing and, say, football, is that most climbers are completely immersed in the process (climbing the wall) rather than the end result (winning the game). The pioneer of the study of ‘flow’ – that state in which