The art of sustainable productivity
A comprehensive deep dive into being the right kind of productive, focusing on leveraging your time effectively while working with your natural resistance to change.
Hi,
For years, I’ve heard the same advice repeated in the entrepreneurship community: create more, ship more, market more. The modern world seems obsessed with churning out content at an ever-increasing pace. But after spending over two decades in this industry, I’ve come to realize we’ve been thinking about productivity all wrong.
When I talk about productivity, I’m not interested in cramming 200 hours of work into a 20-hour week. I’m focused on something far more valuable: leverage. What I mean by productivity is doing an hour’s worth of work in 10 minutes. I don’t want to fill up the rest of those 50 minutes. I just want to do the work efficiently so I can move on with my day and have more time for myself.
This perspective shift is crucial. True productivity isn’t about doing more, it’s about getting more value from what you do. Consider an email list: whether you have 100 subscribers or 1,000, you’re still writing one email. The leverage comes from having your same effort reach more people, create more impact, and generate more results.
Before we dive into productivity strategies, I need to address something vital. You don’t need to be productive to be successful.
I understand the many valid reasons why someone might not be able to maintain high productivity. Maybe it’s your day job, your health, or caregiving responsibilities. Perhaps it’s financial constraints or social obligations. Or maybe you simply choose to work at a different pace. Each of these is completely valid.
Understanding resistance
Your body doesn’t want you to succeed. I know this sounds weird, but evolutionarily speaking, your body cannot tell the difference between physical harm and mental danger.
Most productivity advice skips over the most fundamental challenge. Your body is actively working against you. This isn’t metaphorical. It’s biological. Your body cannot tell the difference between physical danger and mental danger. When you try to push past your comfort zone, your body interprets that like it would interpret being chased by a lion.
When you’re going into mentally dangerous territory, like a place outside your comfort zone, your body wants you to stop. It wants you to stay in the safe space because if you stay in the safe space you know, you won’t die. We haven’t evolved past this primitive response, even though the “dangers” we face are more about ego than survival.
What makes it harder is that everyone around you also wants to stay in their safe space. They have all evolutionarily been brought up to be in that place too. So, you have to break through a lot to do this work.
When we try to level up, push into new territories, or put our work out into the world, our bodies start throwing up warning signals. Your brain is screaming “DANGER! RETREAT TO SAFETY!”
And it’s not just your body. Everyone around you is hardwired the same way. When you try to do something risky or different, you’re not just fighting your own evolutionary responses. You’re fighting against a whole society of people whose bodies are telling them to stay safe, stay small, stay in the known territory.
This is why it’s so hard to build a career. Every time you sit down to do something new, every time you try a different genre, every time you ship, you’re going against millions of years of evolutionary programming telling you to stick with what’s safe. Your body wants you to stay in your comfort zone because, historically, that’s what kept our species alive.
Successful entrepreneurs are good at pushing through this biological resistance. The best ones have broken through hundreds of these internal blocks. Each time they pushed past their comfort zone, they expanded what their body considered “safe territory.”
This is why positive self-talk is so crucial. Your body is already telling you negative stories about danger and safety. You need to actively counter those stories. You need to remind yourself that stretching beyond your comfort zone is how you grow, that the discomfort you’re feeling is the sensation of progress.
And this never fully goes away. Even after building successful businesses, I still feel this resistance. The difference is that now I recognize it as a signal that I’m pushing into new territory, that I’m growing, that I’m doing something worthwhile.
Understanding this biological resistance has transformed how I think about productivity. It’s not just about time management or launch techniques or business strategies. It’s about learning to work with, or despite, your body’s primitive survival instincts.
The resistance you feel is natural. It’s biological. It’s human. But it’s also outdated. Your body thinks it’s protecting you, but it’s actually holding you back from the very things that will help you grow and thrive in the modern world.
The cost of context switching
Research shows that every time you switch between ideas or tasks, you lose about 40% of your productivity. That’s not a small number. Lost productivity due to context switching costs the global economy an estimated $450 billion annually.
This is why finishing projects is crucial. If you just complete the thing you’re working on, you’ll be 40% more productive than if you keep jumping between projects. That doesn’t even include all the time you’ve already sunk into the current project.
Even if you don’t love what you’re working on, figure out a way to finish it. You learn so much from just finishing something. The last 10% is often where a piece becomes exceptional.
The middle isn’t sexy. After the initial rush dies down, when no one’s cheering you on, staying with a project is hard. But that’s exactly why finishing is so valuable. Each completion teaches you something new and builds your creative resilience.
Remember: the hard thing about hard things is that they’re hard. That’s their defining characteristic. You cannot build businesses or have success if it’s not hard. And if it’s going to be hard, we have to accept that it’s hard and push through anyway. Because that’s what professionals do.
The ONE thing principle
Let me tell you about my favorite concept in all of productivity. It comes from a book called The ONE Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, and it’s about unlocking the one thing that will take your career to the next level.
So often, we’re scattered through 100 different things. But if we just take that same energy and line it up the right way, we can use it to create a domino effect. There’s one task that, if you finish it every day, you will knock down the big domino. It’s about finding these little dominoes that lead to the next domino.
A domino can knock over another domino 1.5 times bigger than it. Stack them right, and after 10 dominoes, you’re knocking over something enormous. That’s what we’re talking about here — little, continuous tasks that compound into something huge.
For me, at different times, it’s been writing 5,000 words a day, editing 25,000 words a day, getting people on my mailing list, or running ads. Whatever your goal is, if you work backwards and say, “I’m going to expend all of my energy on this one task instead of across 50 tasks,” you’ll see exponential results.
Instead of starting 10 social media accounts, start one on a platform you love. Once that’s up and running, do the next one and the next one. Take all of the energy you have and condense it. You’ll not only save that 40% of productivity lost to context switching, you’ll also be able to push progressively bigger and bigger dominoes over with very little effort.
Think about what you’re trying to achieve. What’s the one thing that would make everything else easier or unnecessary? That’s where you need to focus. Not on doing everything, but on doing the right thing consistently.
Every time you perform an action, it should get more and more powerful. That’s how you build true momentum. That’s how you create lasting change. That’s how you transform your career - one focused action at a time.
The beautiful thing about this principle is it simplifies everything. You don’t have to worry about a hundred different tactics or strategies. You just need to identify and execute your ONE thing. Everything else becomes secondary.
I know it sounds too simple. That’s why most people ignore it. But in my experience, the simpler the strategy, the more likely you are to actually do it. And doing it, consistently, day after day, is what really matters.
Time blocking your way to success
If you’re trying to avoid context switching, then the best method I have found is called time blocking. It’s something I learned in my old school sales days, and I still use it today.
First, I block out every day as a specific type of day. Then I define what green time means for that day.
Green time is sacred. These are the things that will directly lead to me making money. That might include working on a launch, doing sales calls, running ads, taking meetings, doing coaching calls. The key is that doing coaching calls on a product day isn’t green time because it’s taking away from the main focus. Green time is immovable. Nothing else goes where green time goes.
Then there’s yellow time, which is the ancillary stuff that relates to your job but doesn’t directly make money. Answering emails, doing promotion on podcasts, writing blog posts, PR activities, etc. are all yellow time activities. These activities might lead to money eventually, but they’re not direct revenue generators.
Finally, there’s red time. These are the things that have nothing to do with making money. Picking kids up from school, having lunch, doctor’s appointments. You’re not going to make money picking your kids up from school. I’m sorry to tell you.
Time isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s about how you use it. Sometimes taking a nap is more valuable than a sales call. Sometimes eating lunch with your child is the most important thing you can do that day.
I love my green time activities because they’re focused and productive, but I love my red time activities, too. The yellow time activities? Some I like, but there’s a lot of administrative stuff that at this point I probably should offload.
The goal isn’t to eliminate red time or even yellow time. It’s to be intentional about how you use each type of time. When I’m in my green time block, I’m fully focused on that revenue-generating activity. When I’m in red time, I’m present with my family or taking care of myself.
This system works because it acknowledges reality. You can’t be in revenue-generating mode all day. You need breaks, you need administration time, you need life time. The trick is to stop pretending all time is equal and start being strategic about how you use each type of time.
Remember, some days I don’t have any energy, and taking a nap is more valuable than anything else I could do. If I don’t do something with my hands during yellow time, I’ll start thinking too much, and my brain will start associating or dissociating things I don’t necessarily love.
Additionally, not everyone has the same amount of time, despite what cheap gurus and trite aphorisms tell us. A single mother with two kids working three jobs does not have the same amount of time in a day as somebody who is a full-time entrepreneur with a supportive wife who makes enough money to support the household.
Even if we did all have the same amount of time, that time would be disbursed differently. That mother would have considerably more red time than somebody in good health who has no kids because they are juggling three schedules instead of one.
The power of this system isn’t in maximizing every minute. It’s in being honest about how time really works and using that understanding to create a sustainable schedule. Because at the end of the day, productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing the right things at the right time.
Building sustainable systems
When I was younger, I thought productivity was all about speed. Now I understand it’s about building systems that grow stronger over time.
I think about my body like a computer with a specific amount of RAM. When you’re a novice at something, it takes up 80-90% of your bandwidth. You’re learning the basics, figuring out what works, making all the rookie mistakes. You can barely think about anything else when you’re working on it.
But over time, as you become a pro, that same task might only take 1-10% of your bandwidth. Keep going, become an expert, and it drops to a tenth of 1%. I’ve been doing this so long that giving presentations takes very little of my bandwidth. It still takes energy, but I can do it while managing other tasks because I’ve mastered it.
The trick is understanding that you can’t do more than one novice thing at a time. You can’t do more than three things you’re a pro at in one day. You have to respect your bandwidth limitations. So many of us try to open five novice programs at once and wonder why our system crashes.
Some tasks take a long time even when you’re an expert. If I can write 2,000 words a day and I’m writing a 100,000-word book, that’s still 50 days. That’s still almost a sixth of my year writing that book. Then, I have to edit it.
The key is accepting that mastery takes time, but it does come.
When you’re learning something new, try not to learn other things simultaneously unless you’re already an expert at them. Focus on turning as many novice skills into pro skills, and pro skills into expert skills, as you can. That’s when you start doing these things on autopilot.
If something is exhausting you right now, you’re probably not far enough along on it. You need to at least get to a pro level at it or figure out a way to offload it or delegate it before you can move on to the next thing.
This is why it’s so important to give yourself space. Your speed of creating things will increase with each stage, along with the number of projects you can produce. But you have to respect the process. You have to understand that your capacity grows naturally over time, and you can’t force it.
Even expert-level tasks can take significant time and energy. When I do an expert-level task like giving a presentation, it takes all my focus and energy because I have to be present. The difference is that I know how to manage that energy now, how to prepare for it, and how to recover from it.
This is the reality of sustainable growth. It’s not about suddenly becoming superhuman. It’s about gradually building your capacity, understanding your limitations, and creating systems that work with your natural rhythms rather than against them.
The mindset for success
It’s okay to want attention. It’s okay to be successful. It’s okay to want fandom. If you don’t believe that, lie to yourself until you do.
Sometimes you have to trick yourself into liking yourself before you actually like yourself. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. Here’s what nobody tells you about building a creative career. If you tell yourself you’re bad, you will start to believe you are bad.
But it works the other way too. If you tell yourself you are good, and the things you are doing are good, and you surround yourself with positivity and people that push you forward, then your whole mindset will change.
This isn’t about living in a bubble. It’s about refusing to let yourself talk to yourself negatively. If you wouldn’t let someone talk to your friend that way, you can’t let yourself talk about you that way. If you say something negative to yourself, I want you to say, “Don’t talk that way about my friend.”
One of the big problems with success is that whether you’re going to fail or succeed looks exactly the same in the middle. If they drop you in the middle of an ocean in the dark of night and you start swimming, it’s 50-50 whether you’re swimming to shore or doing worse for yourself. You don’t know in the moment. You just have to keep swimming.
Because if you don’t believe, then you’re going to stop swimming. Then you definitely won’t make it to shore.
You are good. You are valuable. You deserve to be here. Even if you don’t believe that yet, you have to at least say it. You have to say it to yourself all day, every day. Every time something negative comes up, put something positive in its place.
The beautiful thing is that when you stop letting yourself talk negatively to yourself, you’ll stop letting other people talk to you negatively too. Your standards for how you should be treated, both by yourself and others, will rise.
The path is too hard, the journey too long, to survive without building this foundation of self-belief. It’s challenging enough without being your own worst enemy. Build yourself up. Protect your creative spirit. Trust in your journey. The rest will follow.
Everything I’ve shared here comes from twenty years of doing, failing, succeeding, and figuring it out along the way. Some days I still struggle. Some days I still doubt. But I’ve learned that productivity isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing better.
The hard thing about hard things is that they’re hard. That’s their defining characteristic. But we can do hard things as long as we know they’re not supposed to be easy.
Start by understanding where you are in your journey. Learn the fundamentals. Discover your voice. Build your foundation. Then scale what works. Don’t try to rush the process; each phase teaches you something essential.
Most importantly, be kind to yourself along the way. Your body might fight you. Your mind might doubt you. But you have the power to push through, to build systems that work for you, to create success on your own terms.
What do you think?
What’s your ONE thing right now, the single most important goal that would make everything else easier or unnecessary?
When you look at your typical day, what activities fall into your “green time” versus “yellow” or “red” time? Has this breakdown helped you think differently about how you spend your time?
Who is your model for success? Have you mapped out their path and skills? I’d love to hear who inspires you and why.
Share your thoughts in the comments below.
