Productivity Hack: Sweeping Activities

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2 pointsjlong3 comments

My family's pet name for this is "... but first, the perfect playlist!"

It's tempting to promise yourself that you'll start on that project just as soon as you get your desk in order and organize your tools and create the perfect playlist of downtempo instrumental music to enhance productivity... but at the end of the day it's all just justification for putting off doing the thing you know you need to be doing.

I have two such playlists and rarely deviate - one is a spotify playlist simply called 'Work' shared by another user with around 180 hours of mostly instrumental tracks by various artists, and the other is the soundtrack to Portal 2 (released by Valve as "Songs to Test By"), which is mostly ethereal industrial noises and a good rhythm

Typically I know which one I 'need' for a given task, and I tend to find that not needing to go hunting for a new one each time genuinely speeds me along

But of course, sometimes what I really want is to pick juuuust the right album...

There are some activities that make everything else more productive. I call these sweeping activities. The idea is that these activities straighten out the work, make the goals concrete, and make it easier to get everything done.

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