Successful People Use "Anti-Productivity" to Achieve Extraordinary Results. You Should Too.
Here's what it bizarrely is (without complexity)
Productivity is bullsh*t.
There, I said it. I’ve always thought this. To-do lists, time management, productivity gurus, and morning routines are mostly a waste of time.
If the answer was to be more productive, we’d all be supermodels with massive biceps, 6-packs, and a few million dollars in the bank. Yet we’re not. The average person is drowning in information and can’t keep up with the rising cost of living.
I hang in different circles. I get around elite performers in different fields.
Only recently did it hit me that they believe in anti-productivity whether they know it or not.
Here’s what anti-productivity is and how to use it to become extraordinary. I’m warning you that the ideas in this article are radical – no cookie-cutter sh*t.
“The clever man may work smarter, not harder, they say, but the creative man doesn’t work at all.” — Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
1. I will get canceled for saying this. F*ck it.
Burnout is bullsh*t too.
When you chase obsession and use your creativity & imagination, work doesn’t feel like work. So you don’t burn out from it or need a holiday. In fact, it’s a paradox. When you do work that doesn’t feel like work you want to do more and more of it.
You can’t get enough.
You also don’t need to be disciplined or told what to do by gatekeepers in power. You act because every hour spent is pure joy.
The tasks that need to be completed feel like an orga$m, instead of 9-5 cubicle torture where your genitals feel like they’re being hacked off with a hacksaw.
How to use it:
Never do bullsh*t work again. Choose obsession done in a flow state.
The difference between you and the people out-working you is what you consider work, they consider life – Alex Hormozi2. “If you stay off your phone, you’ll realize you actually do have time for everything”
(@ anuatluru)
This is boring advice most people skip.
I implemented it about 10 years ago. I rarely use phones.
I don’t look at them, especially now that I have a 2 year old daughter. Looking at my phone robs her of time with me. It means I’m not being fully present and that’s worse than chain smoking cigarettes next to her cot.
A phone is full of other people’s obligations. Your mind is full of YOUR obligations. Don’t trade your priorities for someone else’s.
A smart phone doesn’t make you productive, it makes you act dumb.
How to use it:
Throw your phone in another room ( or a lake). Or go radical and swap your smartphone for a kale phone (only makes phone calls and receives SMS text messages).
3. “‘Is that a dream or a goal?’ If it isn’t on the calendar, it isn’t real.”
(Paul Levesque)
The average person is delusional.
They think they have goals or dreams but they’re based on luck, or worse, hope. So they never make progress and keep lying to themselves about their future. They’re too afraid to admit that other people’s obligations run their life.
Without this level of productive self-awareness, it’s near impossible to get off the hamster wheel or escape the corporate ladder rat race to nowhere land.
How to use it:
Turn your dreams into goals.
Add deadlines to your goals.
Back up your goals with habits.
Implement systems to back up your habits.
Add obsession to your goals (not piss-weak passion).
4. Work 7 days a week like a psychopath
You get more done working 8 hours a day 7 days a week than working 12 hours a day 5 days a week – Alex Hormozi
Wait, what?!
Working 5 days a week is for snowflakes. It’s actually the opposite of productivity. When you work 5 days a week your to-do list and email inbox pile up.
By Monday morning, you’re drowning in everything you missed on Saturday & Sunday. So you waste time trying to decode all the mess and end up with more mess.
The internet is 24/7 and it stops for no one. If you truly love what you’re doing you’ll have no problem working on it over the weekend, even if it’s for fewer hours.
How to use it:
Start by scheduling 45 minutes on Saturday and Sunday morning to execute on important actions. Add more time if you need it.
5. “If you can’t hold your calendar in your head, you’re too busy.”
(Naval Ravikant)
Some people’s calendars feel scarier than meeting an alien from Mars.
There are so many appointments, they need a full-time personal assistant to decode them all. The meetings are backed up the way my grandmas’s toilet was after thanksgiving turkey. The anti-productivity movement is all about fewer meetings – or ideally, no meetings.
If you don’t have time you have nothing.
Free time is when you think deeply and can unlock your creativity to solve hard problems, which determines your value, and later, your net worth.
How to use it:
Try declining most meetings and see what happens. Don’t give a reason. Just don’t show up. Become a ghost. Disappear.
6. “You're supposed to feel overwhelmed.”
(Dan Koe)
People who chase productivity and kiss ass with productivity gurus hate to feel overwhelmed. They treat it like it’s a bad thing. Wrong.
Being overwhelmed is the path of growth.
It means you’re moving fast, making stuff happen, and going through explosive growth. I’ve felt overwhelmed every day of this year. I crave it. I want more.
How to use it:
Make more uncomfortable decisions. Get in situations where you feel overwhelmed. Watch your growth increase and therefore your results in life.
7. “The answer is not to maximize your productivity, the answer is to do fewer things more deeply and with more presence of mind, body, and spirit”
(@ anuatluru)
The answer to productivity problems is to do less, not more.
Most people lack focus. They’re juggling too many balls inside the circus of their life. The power of only doing one thing is incredible.
When you choose one path and shut off all other paths, the focus you get creates a level of intensity that smashes through any limitations or roadblocks.
How to use it:
Look at your goals. Murder all of them except one.
8. Expect chaos to be normal and embrace it
People plan stuff because they want to avoid chaos.
But the universe is built and exists because of chaos. It’s the same reason we will always have wars. Without adversity and volatility there is no growth. And we’ll never have the resources to reach Mars.
It sounds dire but that’s the way it is. Wanting to eliminate chaos is what victims encourage because they don’t understand the big bang theory or how humans evolved.
How to use it:
Expect every goal to be full of chaos.
Build your resilience by facing the challenges and overcoming them, instead of praying to a fake god for them not to exist.
The first minute of action is worth more than a year of perfect planning– James Clear9. “The formula is: keep going after it gets hard.”
(Codie Sanchez)
Wanting things to be easy or fair is a nightmare.
People fail to execute on their goals because they focus on slow and predictable productivity, instead of hard and unpredictable rocky roads.
Every goal you could ever want to achieve is hard. The solution isn’t to avoid hard but to choose a form of hard that feels like good torture.
How to use it:
Play the video game attached to your goal in hard mode. Fall over. Die. Be reborn. But don’t complain or blame. Ever.
10. Become obsessed with speed
The most successful people I know are all obsessed with speed.
Beginners will obsess over planning and ideas (dopamine).
Pros will want to know how fast they can launch and why it hasn't been launched now.
Speed of execution over planning and procrastinating – Lawrence King (via X)
You can probably go 3-10x faster than you’re currently moving just by having a sense of urgency. One trick I use is to invent a fake deadline or fake motivation.
“My wife will divorce me if I don’t buy her a Tesla.”
“If I don’t get this done by next week my business partner will lose faith and quit.”
“That hospital appointment might go badly. I could die of a bad reaction to a medication just like my aunty did. Better build the legacy hard this week.”
These either sound like the thoughts of a madman or a conversation with a successful person – your mindset determines which one.
How to use it:
Add a sense of urgency to every one of your goals. Stop putting things off. Just start and let the progress be ugly, uncomfortable, and unpredictable.
My entire life changed when I accepted one truth:
You don't plan your future. You plan your actions today, and those actions create your future – Sahil Bloom
11. Become a selfish a-hole
Common productivity advice fails because it’s not selfish enough.
Set aside 1 hour a day for the 2 most important people in your life:
1) You
2) The person you want to become
You can't fill anyone else's cup if you don't have anything to pour. – Dan Koe
The boss, corporation, or social media followers don’t give a fudge about you. So you must choose yourself.
How to use it:
Work on your obsession for the first 2 hours of every morning. Start the day with completely selfish work that makes you feel disgusting.
12.
Sleep for 8 hours, not 6.
Exercise for 1 hour, not 4.
Deep work for 4 hours, not 12.
You're a human, not a machine. – @ hamptonism
Traditional productivity advice sucks because it turns humans into robots.
When you take back your life and implement anti-productivity techniques, you start to feel like a different person. You unlock uncommon potential most never discover.
How to use it:
Work on an obsession for 4 hours a day in a flow state.
Final Thought
Traditional productivity advice needs to die.
Join the top 1% and embrace anti-productivity. Become a maniac. Hang around obsessed psychopaths. Switch off the news, politics, and Netflix. Become so selfish you become successful.
Tell me which of the 12 ideas you loved the most and why in the comments.
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Wow. Great one! Slap me in the face and kick me in the arses to keep moving and never stop.
Thanks Tim!
Tim, the point about hope resonated. A friend was trading a stock last week. The stock is about to be de-listed from the NASDAQ. It's serious sh!t, you probably can't make money on it unless you short it (my friend was long). He was down 50% and asking me what he should do. "Dump it," I said. It was painful but he did it. By the time the US markets opened, it tanked another 20%. My message to the friend: Hoping isn't investing.