Simple stupid productivity hack!

Hi Everyone, thanks for joining me!

I’ve recently adopted a simple stupid productivity hack that I randomly thought of that I’ve been loving, and I thought maybe you’d like to hear about too! What I’ve been doing is that I’ve been using my email, specifically my gmail, to write emails to myself containing ideas that pop into my head, tasks that I need to remember to do, or links that I find interesting that I’d like to collect or re-read.

I’ve been loving this hack because it’s made me more creative, less forgetful, and more productive overall, and I’ll explain to you why.

First, it’s made me more creative because I’ve been more spontaneous with documenting my ideas or interesting things that I read. Because email is so ubiquitous in our lives and frictionless to use, I find I can capture things with ease in a natural, unstructured way as they pop into my head without any mental processing, categorizing, or weeding out that we tend to do that takes away from the raw ideas. To me, this process reflects the flow of our stream of consciousness, which I’ve found is where we make the most novel discoveries or connections between concepts that we’ve never thought of before.

Second, it’s made me less forgetful, because we tend to live in our emails, so I get reminded of all the ideas or daily to-do’s I’ve captured sitting right there in my inbox. Moreover, since I’ve written the emails to myself in the first place, some weird cognitive thing happens to me where I can more readily retain these things in my head because I put them in my own words to write the email, if that makes sense.

Third, it’s made me more productive overall because I keep all the stuff I want to follow up with or remember all in one place, so I’m not jumping between different productivity tools, which I find wastes a lot of time and energy from the friction of context switching. Also, because I’ve captured everything in my own words, it’s quite easy for me to use gmail’s search functionality to find what I’m looking for, because I have a good idea of the words or phrases I need to enter to get what I need. Also, when I find that there are unread emails with tasks that I need to get done in my inbox, I somehow feel motivated to do them because I really want to complete them so that I can delete the email.

Now you may wonder, why not use productivity tools or apps, and what took me so long to use email in this way?

The issue I have with productivity tools is something I’ve alluded to at different points already, which is that they introduce friction. We waste time and energy context switching as we open and close different tools, because we may have written an idea in a note taking app, saved an interesting link in a web clipper or reader, and put a task on a to-do app, so there’s no cohesiveness. Also, when we use these apps, I find that I’m forced to have to prematurely categorize or structure my thought in order to write it down, even if I haven’t fully formed it yet. Taken together, I find these friction issues cause me to lose richness in information or outright forget stuff I’ve entered in the apps in the first place.

The reason it took me so long to just use email is, quite frankly, the human weakness of getting caught up in the process of doing something instead of just figuring out how to solve a problem in the most efficient way possible, even if it’s not particularly glamorous, which is ultimately really just a form of procrastination from whatever it is we’re working on if you think about it. 

I feel that we live in an age where there are so many interesting tools to experiment with, that at least for me with my technophile tendencies, they can be quite irresistible to play around with. On top of that, there seems to be this whole productivity industry nowadays with the likes of YouTubers, social media personalities, etc. sharing their own personal routines that may be enticing to follow. It’s easy to get caught up in tweaking the processes instead of driving our desired results, and we forget that for the players in the productivity industry, selling the process is understandably their end unto itself while that’s not the case for the rest of us.

Of course, that’s not to say that productivity tools and apps don’t have a place. They’re great for longer term planning, working on bigger projects, or collaborating with teams, among many other things. Also, productivity gurus do have some great tips we can try. However, when it comes to managing ourselves, at least for me, it turns out we don’t always have to chase bright shiny things to solve our problems when sometimes there are really simple answers that are hidden in plain sight.

So, with that, this productivity hack has been great! If you try it, I hope you find it as beneficial as I do! Thanks again for joining me, and I look forward to catching up again next time!