Since February, I am doing coaching about the general topic of productivity — DM me at @theorangealt or email at artyom@artyom.me if you want to book a trial call.
This post is an index of things I am trying to teach the people I am touching in my life (coaching, friends, etc) — either by demonstrating those things by example, or by suggesting them, or by recommending posts/books, etc. Some are general principles and other aren't general enough yet, but all of these work for me.
Feel free to DM me if you want my help with any of that.
The themes I am currently exploring are:
Many problems in life affect each other. If you solve one, nothing will change perceptibly. If you solve five, suddenly you hit the tipping point and things start getting better quickly. I call them Cursed problems.
For example, let's say you go to sleep late. There are five different things (realistically more) that prevent you from going to sleep early: 1) problems at work, 2) nothing to eat at home and you have to go outside late, 3) feeling guilty about not talking to friends enough, 4) feeling unaccomplished by the end of the day, 5) being restless due to lack of physical activity. If you solve one of those, the other four will still prevent you from going to sleep, so you might spend years in a loop: you solve one thing, it doesn't do anything, you revert to the old ways, you solve a different thing, it doesn't work again, and so on. FOR YEARS.
If you want to be able to solve such problems, you have to notice and appreciate 5% improvements. Things like "Giving myself a hug lets me feel better one time in twenty." "I'll buy frozen chicken and it means I won't have to go out one night." "A friend invited me to hike and this doesn't happen often so it won't solve anything permanently but I'll go anyway." Etc.
Most of the techniques on this page are 5% improvements — at least initially.
"Don't ask forgiveness, radiate intent" is a short and great post. It stuck with me.
I don't know how exactly it works, but radiating intent — saying "I want X", etc — improves a lot of things by 5% or more.
First of all, if I keep talking about things I want, sometimes other people make them happen for me. Second, if I keep talking about things I find bad, sometimes people take notice even if they don't bother to tell me. Third, if I keep talking about things I find interesting, sometimes I make new friends this way.
Seriously, I put an idea into somebody's head, or I change something for the better by talking incessantly about it, and I only find out in half a year. Or never. (Another good thing to keep track of evidence for!)
If you can't get a task done, a nice hammer that works in at least 5–10% of the cases is doing it in public. Live-tweeting about it. Or maybe calling a friend and saying "please hold my hand while I'm making this invoice". Etc.
I have talked about something related in the first half of Seek recognition, improve digestion.
You can spend or lose your savings, but you can't spend a relative with a great salary who's willing to host you (or loan you money interest-free) when your house burns down.
You can be at a low point in life, but it's much easier to weather when your friends and acquaintances have their shit together (ideally more together than you have).
This principle can be applied in many different ways. The most basic is "if a friend needs money to get a new skill and land a better job, giving them money will be a good investment".
Buy some Bitcoin or something else that is annoying to withdraw. Forget about it entirely. When you really need it and all other source of money (friends etc) are unavailable, you will remember about it.
Your quality of life depends on how good the people around you are. So you need to know how to improve people around you — teach them to have their shit together, to look for better jobs, to have more resources, etc.
Teaching by demonstrating things, I think, is a good way.
First of all — people might not even attempt to try a thing until you demonstrate that it's possible, so it's important to solve hard things in public even if you don't explain how exactly you did it. Secondly — if they do try the thing, having a role model for it still helps a lot.
This has implications for the workplace, but also in personal life. E.g. the bit from Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic for Tidying Up, where she observes that chronically messy people start tidying up their rooms when somebody else around them does so.
I did a thread on large-scale other-improvement: "It's high time I became a prophet".
...even if they seem daunting or even if they've been stuck for a long time. This is evidence. It's a resource.
If you do that, you will be able to do many more things at the same time without losing motivation, and you will be able to work on bigger and harder projects than before. This is best done by collecting evidence and noticing whenever your belief that "I can't do anything" is contradicted. Writing things down is especially important. See The best self-improvement trick so far: a giant board.