Category: Productivity

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Living Productivity Serendipity

In Praise of the Interruption

We live in an era of the hyper-optimized schedule. Every waking minute is categorized, color-coded, and squeezed for its maximum potential output. We download applications to track our sleep cycles, our hydration, our daily habits, and our deep work intervals. We have collectively adopted the mindset of the factory floor, treating our own lives like well-oiled machines, and viewing any deviation from the master plan as a glitch that requires immediate patching.

But in our relentless pursuit of efficiency, we risk engineering the magic out of our own existence. We try to pave over the wilderness of our days with the concrete of predictable routines. In doing so, we forget a fundamental truth about human nature, a truth that author Jenny Odell captures perfectly:

“We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the ‘off time’ that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.”

When we adopt this mechanistic view of our experience, an interruption is viewed as a systemic failure. A delayed train is a disaster. A wandering, off-topic conversation with a stranger is a sunk cost of our valuable time. Yet, when we look back on the broader timeline of our lives, the moments that stand out in the sharpest relief are almost never the ones we scheduled in thirty-minute increments on our digital calendars.

Think about the architecture of your own life. I often reflect on the most vital relationships I’ve formed, the sudden and necessary shifts in my career, or the quietest, most profound moments of personal clarity I’ve experienced. Practically none of them were planned. They were born from a wrong turn taken on a road trip that led to a breathtaking view. They emerged from a sudden downpour that forced me into a crowded, unfamiliar coffee shop. They sparked when a friend called out of the blue on a Tuesday afternoon when I was “supposed” to be doing highly focused work.

These accidents, these beautiful and unscripted interruptions, are the connective tissue of a life well-lived. They are the gentle reminders that we are not algorithms processing daily tasks, but fragile, curious humans experiencing a deeply unpredictable world. When we try to eliminate the “off time,” we are unknowingly trying to eliminate the very environments where serendipity is allowed to breathe.

We need to leave room for the friction. We need to stop seeing the blank spaces on our maps—and our schedules—as terrifying voids that must be filled with productive noise. Instead, we must begin to see them as the fertile soil from which the unexpected grows. Efficiency, routines, and optimization can certainly help build a very productive life. But only the accidents, the interruptions, and the quiet serendipity of “off time” can build a meaningful one.

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Living Productivity

The Architecture of Arete

In the modern landscape of productivity, we are drowning in “how-to” guides and “ten-step” frameworks. We treat our lives like machines that need oiling, rather than gardens that need tending. But David Sparks’ recent work on an updated productivity field guide brings back a much older, more grounded philosophy: the marriage of roles and arete. This is the third edition of his field guide with refinements that he’s made along the way.

To understand why this matters, we have to look at how we usually define ourselves. Most of us operate via a chaotic “to-do” list—a flat, untextured pile of tasks. “Buy milk” sits right next to “Finish the quarterly report,” which sits next to “Call Mom.” This flatness is where burnout lives. It lacks a sense of who we are being when we do those things.

“A role is not just a job title; it is a container for responsibility and relationship.”

This is where Roles come in. When we organize our lives by roles, we stop seeing tasks and start seeing stewardship. We aren’t just checking boxes; we are fulfilling a duty to the parts of our lives that actually matter. But roles alone can become burdensome—mere masks we wear—unless they are infused with arete.

The Greeks defined arete as “excellence” or “virtue,” but its deepest meaning is “acting up to one’s full potential.” It is the act of being the best version of a thing.

However, a warning from the 2026 guide: Do not treat Arete as a yardstick to beat yourself up with when you fall short. Instead, treat it as a compass bearing. You will never perfectly ‘reach’ North, but you can always check to ensure you are rowing in that direction . Success isn’t matching the ideal; it is simply making progress from who you were when you started .

When you combine a defined Role with the pursuit of arete, productivity shifts from a mechanical burden to a philosophical practice. You are no longer just “writing an email”; you are practicing the excellence of a “Clear Communicator.” You aren’t just “doing the dishes”; you are practicing the excellence of someone who “Values a Peaceful Environment.”

To keep these roles authentic, we must also identify their Shadow Roles. If your Arete is the ‘Present Father,’ you must recognize the Shadow Role of the ‘Distracted Dad’ who is physically in the room but mentally scrolling email. Identifying the shadow doesn’t make you a failure; it gives you the awareness to course-correct before you hit the rocks .

Implementing this requires what Sparks calls the Arete Radar. In a world demanding instant responses, we must cultivate a ‘meditative gap’—a pause between a request and our answer . In that gap, we ask a single question: ‘Does this commitment serve my Arete, or does it distract from it?‘. This turns the act of saying ‘no’ into a strategic ‘yes’ to your deeper purpose.

This framework rescues us from the “productivity for productivity’s sake” trap. It suggests that the goal isn’t to get more done, but to be more present and excellent in the specific seats we have chosen to occupy. In the end, we don’t need better apps. We need a better understanding of our station and the virtue required to fill it.

Finally, we must stop solving for speed and start solving for meaningfulness. Efficiency is the enemy of Arete internalization. Sparks suggests the ‘Blank Page Ritual’: rewriting your Arete statements from scratch every quarter rather than just editing an old file. This intentional slowness forces the values out of your computer’s storage and hard-codes them into your soul’s permanent memory .

Categories
Living Productivity

The Ghost in the Calendar

We have become architects of our own incarceration, building prisons out of thirty-minute blocks and color-coded labels. We operate under a modern delusion: that a gap in the schedule is a leak in the ship. If we aren’t “doing,” we must be failing.

We treat our minds like high-performance engines that must never idle, forgetting that an engine constantly redlining eventually catches fire. Morgan Housel captures this paradox perfectly in Same as Ever:

“The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.”

The tragedy of the “most efficient calendar” is that it optimizes for the visible while starving the invisible. Productivity, in its most common definition, is about throughput—how many emails were sent, how many tickets were closed, how many boxes were checked. But these are administrative victories, not intellectual ones.

When we eliminate “curious wandering,” we eliminate the serendipity required for breakthrough. A breakthrough is rarely the result of a scheduled task; it is the byproduct of a mind allowed to roam until it trips over a connection it wasn’t looking for. By packing every minute, we ensure we are always busy, but we also ensure we are never surprised.

Uninterrupted thinking requires a certain level of inefficiency. It looks like staring out a window, taking a walk without a podcast, or sitting with a problem long after the “allocated” time has expired. In the eyes of a traditional manager—or our own internal critic—this looks like waste. Yet, this “waste” is the soil in which high-leverage ideas grow.

If we lose the ability to wander, we lose our edge. We become mere processors of information rather than creators of value. Real success isn’t found in the frantic filling of space, but in the courage to leave space empty, trusting that the silence will eventually speak.

Categories
AI Living Productivity

The Reality Gap

“I follow AI adoption pretty closely, and I have never seen such a yawning inside/outside gap. People in SF are putting multi-agent claudeswarms in charge of their lives… people elsewhere are still trying to get approval to use Copilot in Teams.” — Kevin Roose

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from scrolling through the “Inside” of the AI bubble while the rest of the world simply goes to work. It is the dizziness of watching a new species of behavior emerge—”wireheading” and “claudeswarms”—while the vast majority of the economy is still asking for permission to use a spellchecker.

The future isn’t just unevenly distributed; it is becoming mutually unintelligible.

Roose notes a “yawning inside/outside gap” that feels distinct from previous tech cycles. In one reality—geographically centered in San Francisco and digitally centered in specific discords—people are operating with a level of agency only sci-fi writers dared to imagine. They are deploying multi-agent swarms to manage their lives and consulting large language models for existential guidance.

In the other reality—the one inhabited by the vast majority of the global workforce—people are still waiting for an IT ticket to clear so they can use a basic productivity assistant.

It is tempting to look at this divide solely through the lens of technical access, but Roose hits on a deeper truth: “there seems to be a cultural takeoff happening in addition to the technical one.”

This is the friction of our current moment. It is not just that the tools are different; the permissions we give ourselves to use them are different. The “Inside” is operating with a mindset of radical experimentation and integration. The “Outside” is operating within legacy frameworks of risk mitigation and bureaucratic approval.

The danger of this gap isn’t just economic inequality, though that is a guaranteed downstream effect. The immediate danger is a loss of shared context. When the creators of technology live in a reality where “claudeswarms” run the day, they risk losing the ability to design for, or even empathize with, a world that is still fighting for permission to use the tools at all.

We are living in the same year, but we are no longer inhabiting the same time. The challenge for those of us on the “Inside” is to resist the intoxication of the bubble long enough to build bridges, rather than just building faster escape pods.

Meanwhile, in China (from the Financial Times)…

“I’ve witnessed first hand how China has grown from having zero AI talent 20 years ago to mass producing them,” he said. “Some of our most cutting-edge work is now done by fresh graduates. The real geniuses to change the world soon could well be among them.”

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Books Productivity

Slow News

Over the weekend, I started reading Cal Newport’s latest book, Slow Productivity, and was very pleasantly surprised.

As someone who’s grown jaded from reading too many formulaic productivity books, I expected more of the same. Instead, I found a refreshing departure from the norm.

Given my bias, I initially skipped ahead to the third major topic, “Obsess Over Quality.” But Newport’s engaging storytelling drew me in, and I was hooked. He uses the singer-songwriter Jewel’s story to illustrate the importance of prioritizing quality over quick returns. Jewel’s motto, “hardwood grows slowly,” resonated deeply with me, and I found myself invested in learning more about her journey.

Newport’s storytelling is excellent, and I enjoyed Jewel’s story so much that I went back to the beginning of the book and started reading again from the start. What a delightful experience! Instead of a formulaic productivity book, Newport uses storytelling to great effect, developing and explaining his key points in a compelling and relatable way.

Highly recommended!

Note: also check out this edition of Mike Schmitz’s Bookworm podcast for a review of Slow Productivity where he rates it 5.0 out of 5.0.

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Productivity

Give Your Time a Job: The Power of Time Blocking

On my morning walk I was listening to a recent podcast interview with Cal Newport in which host Andrew Huberman asked him: “Do you wake up in the morning and make lists, decide what are the key items on that list, then cross things off, etc.?”

Newport’s response was revealing: “No, I’m a time blocker. I’m not a big believer in to-do lists. I like to grapple with the actual time available.”

Newport explained that he’s been a proponent of this approach since his undergraduate days. He describes it as “giving your time a job” as opposed to having a list that is somewhat disconnected from the realities of your day. Here’s an article describing his technique.

While most of us rely on to-do lists to keep track of tasks, the magic of Newport’s time blocking approach is taking a few minutes each morning (or the previous evening) to schedule specific time blocks for your priorities. By allocating dedicated periods for important work, you’re more likely to stay focused and resist distractions.

Newport has formalized this concept in his workbook “The Time-Block Planner,” which he subtitles “A Daily Method for Deep Work in a Distracted World.” The benefits, he notes, are that “you can more easily protect hours for deep work, while batching shallow tasks into efficient sprints. The clarity of these blocks also encourages you to focus intensely on one thing at a time, resisting the distracting allure of inboxes, social media, and idle web surfing.”

One of things Newport also talks about with Huberman is a visual benefit from his paper-based approach to time-blocking. When he’s blocked time for one of his “deep work” sessions, he’ll make the box darker/thicker such that at a glance he can look back and see just how much deep work he’s been doing in the recent past. He likes that feedback aspect.

David Sparks, in his recently published “Productivity Field Guide,” also advocates this approach, referring to it as “hyper-scheduling.” He writes, “Scheduling time for important work is one of the easiest, most effective productivity techniques I have ever used. So long as you respect the calendar, it always works.” In a blog post, Jim Eager describes how he’s applying this approach to his daily planning.

Sparks notes that a schedule doesn’t have to be rigid. For him, the only truly locked-in events are appointments with others. Otherwise, time blocks can be adjusted as needed throughout the day.

He also shares a technique for overcoming resistance when it’s time to work on a scheduled task. He employs a “five-minute trick,” telling himself, “First, I’m going to give this just five minutes.” Sparks finds that “nine out of ten times, that five minutes turns into an hour or more.” This reminds me of a quote from author Louis L’Amour:

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”

– Louis L’Amour

So, if you’re a list maker, consider taking the additional step of creating a daily time-blocked schedule to translate your to-do list into a focused action plan. Doing so will not only help you prioritize but also allow you to allocate tasks based on your energy levels and productivity rhythms throughout the day.

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iPhone 15 Pro Max Productivity

Using the Action Button on the iPhone 15 Pro Max

Action Button menu for iPhone 15 Pro Max
Action Button menu for iPhone 15 Pro Max

I’ve recently spent some time customizing the Action Button on my iPhone 15 Pro Max to quickly perform actions and invoke shortcuts. This hardware button was a new addition to the iPhone 15 Pro models, allowing you to invoke an action or shortcut with one long tap.

With iOS 17, you can now create a folder of shortcuts that displays as a menu when invoking the Action Button. This is how I’ve settled on using it – a single-purpose shortcut didn’t work for me, but being able to select from eight different actions I’ve set up works quite well.

The setup process is straightforward. In the Shortcuts app, create a new folder (I named mine “Action Button”). Save up to eight shortcuts you might want to invoke into that folder. Then, in Settings, configure the Action Button to show that folder of shortcuts. That’s all there is to it. When you tap the Action Button, a menu of eight shortcuts will pop up, and you can quickly make a selection.

Here are the shortcuts in my Action Button folder:

  • Focus Off – turns off any active Focus mode
  • Reading Focus – turns on my Reading Focus mode
  • Choose Focus – allows me to choose from a menu of Focus modes to enable
  • 20 min Nap Time – sets a 20-minute nap timer
  • Scan Document – opens the Camera app to scan a document and save it as a PDF
  • Perplexity Search – performs a Perplexity web search
  • Today’s Reminders – shows my Reminders for today
  • Log Weight – allows me to quickly log my weight each morning in the Health app

After months of ignoring it, the Action Button has become a useful and frequently utilized tool. I’ve enjoyed customizing it with a set of handy shortcuts.

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Inversion Productivity

Inverting Routines: A Fresh Perspective

“All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” This infamous quote from the late Charlie Munger encapsulates the concept of inversion – a problem-solving technique that urges us to flip our perspective. Munger was inspired by the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, who famously said, “invert, always invert.”

As the team at Farnam Street explains, “It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward. Inversion often forces you to uncover hidden beliefs about the problem you are trying to solve.”

Recently, I stumbled upon an excellent article in the Financial Times by Markham Heid titled “The life-ruining power of routines.” The subtitle alone piqued my interest: “Habits don’t lead to personal optimization. They lead to suffering.” Heid’s words resonated deeply, as many of us seem increasingly trapped in the grind of daily routines, sacrificing spontaneity and joy for the illusion of productivity.

It’s been drilled into us that there are is an allure to the notion of personal optimization, meticulously tweaking our processes in pursuit of a “superior life product.” But as Heid poignantly notes, “I don’t think I have the wrong habits; I think I have too many of them. And they are suffocating me.”

In search of a remedy, Heid discovered the writings of Joseph Mortimer-Granville, an English physician from the 19th century. Mortimer-Granville’s advice struck a chord: “To restore a flagging mind (or spirit), he wrote, a person must shift from ‘aimless automatic routine to activity with a purpose and an end’.”

He continued his exploration of this issue – ultimately focusing on adding novelty back into our lives. He noted that “the more I read and the more people I spoke with, the more I began to regard novelty as a kind of existential tonic. Without it, our interest in the world withers and we turn our attention inward, where all neuroses lurk.”

Breaking free from the shackles of routine requires reconnect with aspects of ourselves that have been neglected or abandoned. Like Heid, we can try to “approach my work in new ways” and “meet friends in unfamiliar places” – small acts of rebellion against the monotony that has come to define many of our days.

Heid’s results were immediate and profound. “The colors of my world [were] brighter, the products of my mind less predictable. I feel a bit like a prisoner who jostles the door of his cell and finds it was never locked in the first place.

Inverting our perspectives allowed us to see the insidious nature of unchecked routines and the importance of embracing spontaneity and novelty. By actively seeking out experiences that challenged our habitual patterns, we can reclaim a sense of wonder and curiosity that has been dulled by the relentless pursuit of optimization and productivity.

I’m reminded of the wisdom in Munger’s and Jacobi’s words. By flipping our perspective, we can uncover hidden truths and unlock new possibilities – a invaluable lesson for anyone seeking to break free from the confines of routine and embrace a life of greater richness and fulfillment. And that’s exactly what Heid describes.

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Books Productivity

Slow Productivity – in Retirement

Computer science professor Cal Newport has authored a new book titled “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout“.

In a New Yorker article a couple of months ago, Newport wrote of a climate of “Great Exhaustion” in the workplace – a “vibe of weary disappointment”. He talks about a side effect of the covid pandemic being a greater quantity of digital communication (email, chat, video, etc.) and goes on to relate how recent research correlates an increase in this kind of digital communication with decreased satisfaction.

A big part of the problem seems to be the endless context switching these digital tools can create generating significant fatigue and feelings of overload. Our “work becomes inescapable” to use his words.

Of course, this has its worst impact on us while we’re still working and has its least impact after we are retired. Retirement may introduce other stresses – often creating feelings of guilt from not bringing in an income or grief from a work life left behind. But even in retirement we can become overwhelmed and might benefit from his recommendations on dealing with the issue.

His primary prescription in this article for this problem is to take steps to dramatically reduce these digital communication intrusions into our lives by using techniques as simple as scheduling office hours for dealing in bulk with needed interactions between individuals or small teams. In other words, slow down the impact of the interruptions and batch them up for efficiency. In other words, “slow productivity”. That slowness helping to improve our efficiency thereby producing better outcomes and increase satisfaction.

Of course, even small steps like these require cooperation and common understanding among the participants to make an impact. One of the challenges with email in particular is how someone else can insert themselves into your train of thought completely without your agreement.

As Newport reminds us, “Achievement is most satisfying when it arises from a sense of control and purpose, not from the pressure of constant busyness.” It’s time to reclaim our time and rediscover the joy of getting things done, not just being busy doing them or, worse, constantly having to shift our focus in reaction to the tools in our digital lives.

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Productivity

A Productivity Field Guide that’s all about Living

Recently, blogger, podcaster and teacher David Sparks (aka MacSparky) introduced the latest in his series of Field Guides – the Productivity Field Guide. This one comes in two flavors: a standard edition ($49) and plus edition ($99) – both include a combination of a PDF and extensive videos that walk you through his process.

The plus edition includes an additional twelve part webinar series doing a deeper dive on many of the topics in the course. I signed up for the Plus edition and have been working my way through the course content and attending the Plus edition webinars as they’re being held.

Although I’m retired and wasn’t looking for the latest and greatest set of tips and tricks to maximize my productivity – like I’d be wanting desperately in my younger years! – I’ve really been enjoying this field guide. The reason is that I find it’s less about productivity – although that’s still the focus – and much more about an approach to living that MacSparky has developed over years and years.

In fact, he’s described how he set out to write this field guide years ago but held off on completing and publishing it until he felt comfortable he had fully thought through and could articulate this approach to living.

The foundation for MacSparky’s approach is to orient life around a series of roles – the many different “hats” that one wears as we live day to day. In his case, his roles (which evolve from time to time) include: husband, father, brother/uncle, friend, MacSparky, ex-lawyer, learner, creative human, spiritual human, responsible human, and altruistic human.

These roles are really foundational to living for him and the rest of the field guide builds on them. As a next step after clarifying your roles, he recommends applying a bit of Greek philosophy – specifically the notion of “arete” or excellence and using that to help define living up to one’s potential. (“Arete” is pronounced “ah-reh-tay”.) So for each role, he spends time defining what the notion of arete means to each role. He then uses those refined definitions to help manage everything he has to do in life – including the inevitable prioritizing required to juggle too many tasks.

MacSparky’s approach to productivity is refreshing – and a whole different approach from almost all of the many other productivity approaches I’ve come across. If this kind of approach sounds attractive to you, I’d recommend you explore what he had to say in his introductory video. I really like the way he’s approaching this and recommend this field guide.

If you’d like to learn even more, be sure to check out several recent blog posts by Jim Eager on his blog OriginalMacGuy.com:

Jim does an excellent job in each of these articles walking through how he is applying the lessons and techniques that MacSparky teaches in the PFG.