Stop feeding on productivity tips
A lot of productivity-related blog and X posts nowadays are what I would call “micro-optimization” posts, especially in the tech sphere. For example, posts about: loop engineering, how to prioritize tasks, why you should run Claude Code on a server, why you should run it locally, the best agent skill for ____, etc.
This was especially prevalent in the OpenClaw era earlier in 2026. I remember a day in January when I was just scrolling on Twitter and everyone was saying how OpenClaw is the new frontier of doing a given task. Each new post that I read was like a translucent sheet stacked on top of the previous one in my mind, and the stack kept piling up. When I was done and looked down at the stack, the useful information (if there even was any) was blurred out. What remained was a feeling of restlessness — the feeling that everything is changing, there are now 100 new things that I can optimize about my life and workflow, and I have to get moving. I have to do something.
When this feeling is built up, it always ends with the realization that I don’t actually know what I should be doing. There isn’t anything concrete.
From here I sometimes enter a “trance”. After all that reading, I feel like I’m still missing something, so I keep reading. More and more information piles up. A small part of me feels like maybe this isn’t really getting me anywhere, but I keep scrolling. Eventually my brain just can’t take it anymore. There’s too much nothingness that’s been piled in there, and it’s even drowned out the restless feeling that I had. I have to stop. And the moment I do, giving my brain a moment to breathe, freeing it from the hammering of productive-sounding (likely AI-generated) lists of tips, my brain thinks: “I really shouldn’t have kept scrolling”, and then I move on with my day.
The signal to noise ratio on these platforms is too low. More importantly, if a piece of advice doesn’t slot right into a gap that you’ve been noticing in your workflow, then you’re probably not going to put it into practice. And if it does slot right in, then you could’ve just thought of it yourself, or you could’ve looked up the exact issue you’re having and found it right away instead of slogging through an online swamp to get there. Some examples to illustrate the point:
- My brain gets fatigued after hours of work and even a substantial break doesn’t always “revive” it, so to fix this I wanted to try a timing system with shorter work/break cycles. I looked it up and came across the Pomodoro technique.
- I was wasting time on incrementally correcting Claude Code’s missteps and having to prompt it to do seemingly obvious experiments because I wasn’t fleshing out project specifications in advance. I looked up if there’s a skill which allows Claude to work towards a well-defined goal in a loop and found /goal.
- My home environment invites too much distraction, so I started working outside in the backyard or going to the library.
If I read an X post that said “working in the library is way better for focus than at home/in your dorm,” I would’ve thought “that’s a great point”, without noticing that, subconsciously, I already knew that. It is much more useful to look for such tips after you’ve already found a concrete problem that they could solve.
Pretty much all the productivity gains that I’ve experienced in the last year have come from me setting a goal, working towards it, noticing a point of friction, and either coming up with a solution, looking up the solution, or building the solution. That has been my best method for becoming more productive.