How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter

I think about whisks a lot. Yes, those kinds of whisks. The ones you use to whip eggs and do basic cooking tasks. Did you know that before the 19th century, whisks were basically just a bunch of sticks and thatch bundled together?

Think about how inefficient it would be to use a bunch of sticks to stir ingredients together. It took forever, and it severely limited the types of recipes that could realistically be executed on any given day.

Then, in the 19th century, this magical invention came onto the scene that promised to make cooking significantly easier and lower the bar for kitchen chefs everywhere. Except…that’s not what happened.

Instead of making existing recipes more efficient and making cooking take less time, what actually happened was the bar was raised for what was expected for the average cook to create on any given day. Out with cake, in with souffle.

Since cooking dinner was historically a burden overwhelmingly carried by women, so was this new expectation disproportionally carried by them. That doesn’t really have specific relevance here except it pisses me off every time I hear it. This burden extended beyond the making of the recipe, too, as cooks had to learn how to create these new recipes and test them to make sure they didn’t burn the whole house down in the process. When technology advanced from whisks to mechanical egg beaters onward to electric ones, those demands only increased.

This was not an isolated incident, either. Refrigeration had a similar cost burden, as instead of going to the store every day to find what was fresh and in stock, now cooks had nearly infinite choices at their disposal from around the world, which raised the expectations for the types of cuisine to cook. Even the humble stove made it so that you didn’t have to stand over a flame all day, but still, cooks spent the same amount of time cooking as they had a century before.

I am not a Luddite, but I do think they were onto something. Used as a slur in today’s day and age, the Luddites arose as a reaction to technology threatening their livelihoods.

The Luddites were a secret organisation of workers who smashed machines in the textile factories of England in the early 1800s, a period of increasing industrialisation, economic hardship due to expensive conflicts with France and the United States, and widespread unrest among the working class. They took their name from the apocryphal tale of Ned Ludd, a weaver’s apprentice who supposedly smashed two knitting machines in a fit of rage. - Jathan Sadowski

About once a week I get the overwhelming urge to smash some piece of technology, so I have respect for an organization that saw through the bull promising that technology was guaranteed to improve their lives. Yes, there are some great ways that technology has undisputedly changed the world for the better. Two hundred years ago 80% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today it’s 8%. During that same time, life expectancy has more than doubled.

People suffer less now, even if it doesn’t feel that way. Maybe it’s because of the purple dot problem, which helps explain why we might feel like nothing is better even when it objectively is in many respects.

"When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue," the researchers wrote in the study. Indeed, during the final 200 trials, dots that the participants previously identified as purple now looked blue to them. The participants continued mistaking purple dots for blue ones even when they were specifically warned that the number of blue dots was going to decrease or when they were offered a $10 reward for responding to repeated colors the same way at the end of the study as they did at the beginning of the study. - Brandon Specktor

Still, if everything is better, then why do we have less time than our forefathers? Humanity historically worked 15 hours a week for most of our existence, and yet, with every new advancement, we become more “productive” without gaining any time. Now, we’re working 60-80 hours a week just to keep our heads about water. Part of that is capitalism, silly, but another big part of this is technology promising to save us time when in practice it just raises the expectation and alienates us from everyone around us.

Yet, technology marches on. AI is the new(ish) technology on the block promising to save us time and money by automating much of our lives, but instead of allowing people to work 15 hours a week, employers are expecting exponentially more output from the same amount of time.

This is also true with creative entrepreneurs. They are constantly pulled in a hundred different directions trying to stay afloat, and yet it is never enough. This is in no small part to capitalism feeding off of creatives like a vampire.

Creators literally create the growth mechanism for platforms to turn a profit, and then are shut out of the process after years of work. They are told to toil away for endless hours to create content that can be monetized “eventually”. Meanwhile, they are too fried to actually make the things they love. Then, the owners drive the platform into the ground to extract maximum value for shareholders at the expense of their users, destroying all the goodwill creators have built up over the years.

That’s why I literally don’t care what the platform is, I won’t even try it unless I control the data. Maybe I will go and run ads on them to pull my own fans out, but I won’t do any work to add value to them if they are going to charge me to access the very value we help them build.

It’s a problem that goes back all the way to the humble whisk, a harbinger of doom for all technological innovations to come. It doesn’t have to be that way, though. There are many strategies that can help us reclaim our time even as new technology like AI looms large over everything we do these days.

***This is a long article. If you’re reading in your email, eventually it will truncate. For the best reading experience, I recommend going to this page to read all 6,000+ words in full without interruption.***

If you are too busy to do the things you like and can never get ahead, you are overleveraged and in time debt. In order to get out of that debt, you need to find leverage points in your business to exploit.

Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.

This idea is not unique to systems analysis — it’s embedded in legend. The silver bullet, the trimtab, the miracle cure, the secret passage, the magic password, the single hero who turns the tide of history. The nearly effortless way to cut through or leap over huge obstacles. We not only want to believe that there are leverage points, we want to know where they are and how to get our hands on them. Leverage points are points of power. - Donella Meadows

If you are overleveraged, then you are most likely focused on too many low-margin activities, the kind of thing you can train somebody else to do and have nothing to do with your zone of genius. These are admin, customer service, data entry, and other tasks that are required to keep your business functioning, but that you don’t have to personally do for your business to keep running.

These are called $5 tasks because you can hire them out for about $5-$15 (This is an old metric but still works to describe entry-level tasks). These are also the tasks that AI is best poised to handle right now. Whether it is setting meetings, doing tedious research, spell-checking your work, helping with book marketing, or any number of low-level but necessary tasks, there is AI to help you do them better so you can reclaim large swaths of time.

You are probably (mostly) focused on $50 tasks. This is you being a technician in your business. This is the writing, drawing, editing, etc, that turns your ideas into books and articles. You may think you cannot hire these tasks out, but you can probably hire parts of them. AI is much worse at doing this type of work, though corporations seem to believe this is the future because they are stonewalling writers for demanding their work isn’t used to train their replacements.

It’s true that nobody can write quite like you, but you can hire editors, proofreaders, cover artists, etc. As a comic book artist, you may need to do the line work for a project but can hire out flatting, lettering, coloring, and inking. Or you can do your linework digitally and not pencil at all to create more time.

I know this sounds expensive, but it allows you more time to do better work that will pay you more, and it allows you to turn around projects faster, which generates more revenue for your business.

If you don’t want to hire out, then you could increase productivity on each of those tasks. For instance, I increased my daily output from 1,000 words to 5,000 words without decreased quality, so I now finish a book in a fraction of the time, saving more time. You can also use AI to help you flesh out certain aspects of your writing to add things you might miss. This might turn your stomach initially, but programmers have used AI to help them write code for years.

Another thing you can do is get existing clients to pay more. I know people generally hate raising their rates, but if you can double your rates and still retain 60% of your business, you are still ahead of the game. Plus, you have reclaimed half your time without decreasing your revenue.

If you aren't comfortable doubling your rates off the bat, try increasing your rates by 10%-25% every quarter until you start seeing people balk at your new pricing. If you have a good relationship and communicate with your clients, they will generally be willing to pay more for your services to retain you.

Or you can decrease the churn in your business so more people stay year after year. I have talked about churn before, but here’s a definition:

Customer churn refers to the natural business cycle of losing and acquiring customers. Every company — no matter the quality of its products or customer service — experiences churn. Generally speaking, the less churn you have, the more customers you keep.

Churn rate, sometimes known as attrition rate, is the rate at which customers stop doing business with a company over a given period of time. Churn may also apply to the number of subscribers who cancel or don’t renew a subscription. The higher your churn rate, the more customers stop buying from your business. The lower your churn rate, the more customers you retain. Typically, the lower your churn rate, the better. - Salesforce

Most creative businesses are not concerned with churn enough. If you know that 20% of your customers leave every year, and you can find a way to cut that to 10%, you have just removed the need to spend marketing dollars and time onboarding new clients by 50%.

Still, $50 tasks should not be the end goal of your creative business. When you are stuck at the $50 activities (or even worse $5 activities) in your business, the thing you are definitely not focused on are the tasks that will grow your business, and those are the $500+ tasks.

These are the strategic partnerships you form and the products you launch with better results every single time. These $500+ tasks are ways you can double your income while halving your workload. They are the processes you put in place to offload your work so that you can take on more clients. These $500+ tasks are how you create leverage, by productizing services or creating new products or outsourcing.

If you haven’t read The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, then it has the clearest conceptualization of this concept of leverage points I have yet found.

When you prioritize so you’re focusing on the right thing at the moment, everything after that subsequently falls into place like a progression of dominoes.

Physicist Lorne Whitehead determined in 1983 that a single domino can bring down another domino that’s 50% bigger. Another physicist tested and confirmed this in 2001, using eight dominoes of plywood, each 50% larger than the one before. The first was two inches tall and the last one thirty-six inches tall.

When you pursue your goals by starting with the one, right thing, it leads to bigger things—you build energy in a geometric progression like Whitehead’s progressively larger dominoes. - Shortform

I am not a particularly hard worker. I am just very good at finding leverage points and knocking over dominos. People are often surprised when I tell them how little I actually work because I generally seem so busy. But that is because I am excellent at leveraging myself and creating space to say yes to great opportunities and turning down bad ones.

It is possible to make the same money in 4 hours a day as you can in 16, and it is possible to create massive revenue in a very little amount of time. You just have to leverage yourself properly. It breaks my heart to see how much so many people I know work without getting any gain.

In April 2018, I spent two amazing weeks on a book tour in Spain. During that time, I did many incredible things, but one I will never forget is that I got the opportunity to eat at a couple of Michelin-star restaurants while we were in San Sebastian.

One of them was called A Fuego Negro. Aside from the puppets with penises that adorned the wall, I remember it as the best meal I've ever had in my life. Fifteen courses of amazing food played like a record across my palette. I couldn't believe how good that meal was, honest and true. It was perfection. Honestly, I never knew a meal could be so good.

On the menu, they had the year each course was added to the menu. The restaurant was over 10 years old, and there were pieces on the menu that spanned all of them, like the greatest hits of their past.

I'm sure the restaurant was amazing when it opened, but in order to deliver a world-class meal, it took ten years of refinement. It meant cutting really good menu items and replacing them with something great.

I run my business in a rather similar way. Every year, I take December off to examine everything I tried in the past twelve months..and scrap everything that wasn’t pulling its weight, even if it worked in the past.

Through that process, I've jettisoned some really good strategies for growing my business in order to make ways for great ones. I let go of things that worked well enough to keep me going in order to find ones that were world-class.

Since I only have so much brainpower and bandwidth, I was left asking if it would be okay to stay at the level I was at for the next 10 years, and if not, I was forced to abandon things that were working decently.

Over the last few years, I've been able to construct a suite of world-class tools. There is still refinement to do in order to make it work perfectly, but there's no doubt it's working better than it ever has before.

An ecosystem is fragile. Introduce the wrong animals or vegetation and it could send a perfectly balanced system into chaos. The same is true with any industry, or even in your own practice.

Too often people take on every responsibility thrown at them, whether it's ideas for books or potential partnerships or conventions, or marketing efforts, without any thought as to how it will affect their ecosystem.

Part of this is naivete.

At the beginning of your career, you literally don't know how your ecosystem works. You also don't have the opportunity to turn down much work without setting yourself back.

So, you take on more and more.

Then, you establish yourself, but never take the time to figure out how your ecosystem works, and so you continue throwing junk and trash into your ecosystem until it is on the verge of destruction, leading to burnout or worse.

In order to find equilibrium with yourself, you have to find a balance that is right for you, jettisoning things that don't serve you, doubling down on things that light you up, and having enough space to recover.

The same is true when trying to place yourself in an industry. Whether it's comics, book publishing, magazines, or the world of food trucks, you need to find a way to become a beneficial part of the ecosystem...

...because if you aren't, then the ecosystem will treat you as a cancerous growth to protect itself against and it will be very hard to make headway.

If you want to find your perfect author ecosystem, you can take our free quiz and learn how to build a healthy biome for your work starting today.

As you go about building your career, tasks will arise that threaten to eat into your precious creating time. Meetings, interview requests, guest articles, upcoming launches, and more start to creep into your day demanding your attention.

That is why you must be precious of the time you have to create and hold it sacred above everything else. If you don't make it a habit from the beginning, it becomes nearly impossible to do it when other commitments start to intrude on it.

I’m a huge fan of time blocking and recommend it to any creative looking to protect their time.

The key to this method is prioritizing your task list in advance — a dedicated weekly review is a must. Take stock of what’s coming up for the week ahead and make a rough sketch of your time blocks for each day. At the end of every workday, review any tasks you didn’t finish — as well as any new tasks that have come in — and adjust your time blocks for the rest of the week accordingly.

With days that are time blocked in advance, you won’t have to constantly make choices about what to focus on. All you need to do is follow your time blocked schedule. If you get off-task or distracted, simply look at your schedule and get back to whichever task you blocked off time for. -Todoist

I generally use a time-blocking strategy that involves green time, yellow time, and red time.

Think of your peak 3-5 hours as your Green Zone—when your energy, focus, creativity, and great ideas flow easily and sharpest. When you’re in your Green Zone, you have enthusiasm for the tasks ahead. During those 3-5 hours each day, you’re at your best.

Your Red Zone is the opposite—it’s those 1-2 hours when you’re dragging, need caffeine to stay awake, and can’t focus deeply on anything. In your Red Zone, not only do you not produce your best work—sometimes you struggle to produce any meaningful work.

Your Yellow Zone consists of the hours in between—you are neither at your best nor your worst. You’re in the middle. You’re fine in meetings, you can produce content or plan ahead. It’s not your best work, but definitely not your worst.

Your results will differ, but my Green Zone happens between 7-11 a.m. every day, and (on good days) I get an extra hour between 1-2. My Red Zone is from 4-6 p.m. Everything else is Yellow.

Now that you know when you’re at your best, shift your workload accordingly.

Do your most important work during your Green Zone, your least important work during your Red Zone (or, alternatively, take a break), and do everything else in your Yellow Zone.

If you get your peak hours right, the rest of the hours take care of themselves.

If you don’t get your peak hours right, you almost can’t work enough to make up for mismanaging them. Plus, your stress level skyrockets. - CAREY NIEUWHOF

The bottom line is that not all time is created equal. Some time is used on useless tasks. Some time is used for rest. Some time is used for making money. Some time is used for chores. We make the mistake of equating time equally, but it is decidedly not equal.

Research by Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen suggests that, by being more conscious and intentional about how we use our time, we can free up to 20% of it to spend on tasks that are more worthwhile, meaningful and add value.

Their reasoning sounds simple: we must eliminate or delegate unimportant tasks and replace them with activities that add more value.

Before we can do that, we need to figure out how we’re spending our time now and identify how important these things are for us, our teams and our organisations. Once we’ve identified any lowvalue tasks, then we can take action to shift our focus onto activities that are more value added. -Future Talent Learning

One surefire way to burnout is doing too many low-value tasks and not enough high-value ones. I know, for instance, writing and resting are high-value tasks for me. Writing makes me money. Reading helps me recover.

Everything else in my business is secondary to those two tasks. Notice, only one of them directly makes me money (writing books), but the other is essential for my writing process to exist in harmony.

One of the best ways to reclaim your time is to stop splitting it between lots of different projects. Nearly every writer I know wants to write everything, everywhere, all at once, but if you want to leverage your time then it behooves you to push on one pressure point until you burst through the other side.

The simple fact is that multitasking takes more energy than single-tasking and has compounding negative effects. Suddenly, because your attention is elsewhere, simple tasks take longer than they should, throwing off your daily schedule, and stressing you out because you fall behind.

When you fully focus on a single task, however, you feel less stress, and can even enjoy your work.

The simple fact that multitasking takes more energy than single-tasking has compounding effects. Suddenly, because your attention is elsewhere, simple tasks take longer than they should, throwing off your daily schedule, and stressing you out because you fall behind.

When you fully focus on a single task, however, you feel less stress, and can even enjoy your work. - Jory MacKay

This focus extends beyond just your daily schedule, too. The more focus you can put into any one area of your business, the more progress you will make on it.

I’m not talking about just focusing on a format like books or growing your Substack, either. I’m saying you should focus on one genre and hyperfocus yourself on breaking through one little gap in the market.

You might write 100 articles on one topic, or write a 10-book signature series, but you are putting an overwhelming focus on a singular subject until people take notice and recognize you as remarkable.

The more focused attention you can give to one, singular problem, the more likely you will be to break through and push down that big domino blocking your path.

The amplification of the input – the first tiny domino – to the output – the 13th huge domino – is two billion…However, what I like to point out here is the first tiny, 15 millimeters tall, 1-millimeter thick domino.

Putting that into the context of our day to day work and life, the first domino is our state of mind. It’s about our beliefs, our motivation, our faith, our confidence, our emotions, our behavior, and our imagination. It’s about the stories we consistently told to ourselves. -Dean Yeong

When we focus our attention on one problem, everything we do amplifies each other. Otherwise, you will likely disburse your effort to such a degree that it will be hard to get anywhere.

Yes, you can step out of that box, but it's basically like starting your career all over again when you do. Some people will follow you between genres and formats, but most won't, and unless you have a huge audience, it's really hard to have enough of them willing to read your other stuff to make it profitable.

When you write in one genre, everything you release helps market and amplify everything else. When you work in a lot of different genres, your marketing doesn’t really build on each other, or it takes a lot longer to work, because you are not taking advantage of compound marketing.

The better approach is to use the magic of compounding in your marketing. Compound marketing allows you to take small risks in your marketing, learn as you go and grow over time. Compound marketing demands more time than money. That’s one of the reasons it is such a good strategy for small businesses because you don’t need a $10,000 media buy to get started.

To make compounding work for you have to be consistent day-in and day-out. That consistency requires systems…you just can’t do it any other way.

Consistency is your strategic advantage. Very few if any of your competitors will do what’s necessary to take advantage of the compound effect. Even those that start will question whether they are on the right path because compounding starts slow. It takes time to build, but just like with the penny, you hit a tipping point. A point where compounding kicks in and it’s momentum begins to carry you forward. -Steve Gordon

This is a very Grassland-focused marketing strategy, but it can work for every ecosystem.

Deserts are nimble enough to hop between genres, but they would benefit from diving deep into one main genre and getting to know the readers so well that they can predict trends better and spot them earlier.

Tundras can use this strategy to drive audience engagement with each book in a series as they build excitement for a launch.

Forests can use compound marketing to find faster success with one series that they can use to connect readers to all their work.

Aquatics can use it to quickly grow the audience for their overall brand when breaking into new markets.

I recommend always being underleveraged with your time and energy. I believe in an energy-first mentality, which I introduced in This is NOT a Book.

Have you ever heard of a "profit first" mentality?

It's the idea that you take 10% off the top of your revenue for profit, and then you work with the remaining 90%.

I think in authorship, we need an "energy first" mentality, which means before we take on any project, we figure out how to retain 10% of our energy as "profit", so we always have some in the bank, investing and growing for us.

I am as bad at this as anyone (on both the profit and energy fronts). I was just about to go on sabbatical this year, and instead, I started a company with Monica that took all my energy.

I thought this year was going to be about restoration, and it instead became about transformation.

I'm not complaining about this year.

I have done so much, both physically and mentally, that changed me for the better and brought me to levels I've been struggling to get to for years. I've never eclipsed $150,000 in revenue before, and this year we more than doubled that, which is astounding to me.

That's in no small part, thanks to your support.

However, next year, I want to recover and make sure I always keep 10% of my energy just for me, so I'm building up a bank that will never run dry again.

Thinking, "will I be able to run an energy profit after taking it on" seems like a good enough place to start as any.

You can use this “energy first” mindset to analyze what you can do with ease, and then tack your expectations to that.

One of the things that changed my outlook on running a creative business was transitioning from overleveraging myself to being underleveraged, leaving huge gaps in my day for just thinking. This time allows me to find my most highly leveraged activities and double down on them.

Now, when something comes along that’s a “heck yes” I have time for it. Meanwhile, my income hasn’t dipped because I have found successively more leveraged activities that allow me to continuously do more in less time.

Humans are very good at filling out time with things that “might be fun” or “could be interesting”, and then when something comes along that’s a “heck yes!” they don’t have the available time to do it.

Why do we do that? It turns out that humans are also very bad at projecting how they will feel in the future, which leads us to be mean to our future selves.

Put in practical terms, when thinking of yourself in a month or a year or a decade, your brain registers that person in ways similar to how it would register Taylor Swift or the mailman or the lady driving the car in the next lane over. Understood in that way, saving for retirement is the neurological equivalent of giving money away to someone else entirely. Acting in your own self-interest (as your brain so narrowly defines it), it becomes perfectly logical to not save for retirement. - Doist

Chronic illnesses taught me that you have to reserve your spoons for the things that you really want to do, b/c there are only so many hours in a day, and if you spend your spoons on things that are just okay, you won’t have anything left for the stuff that you really want to do. If you don’t know spoon theory, here’s a little primer.

Most people don’t think twice about the energy it takes to shower, get dressed, and drive to work. Most people can go to the grocery store in the morning and make dinner in the evening. Most people can make plans and keep them.

When you have chronic disease, you’re not like most people. Multiple sclerosis (MS), autoimmune forms of arthritis, and many other conditions can cause extreme fatigue. On a bad day, you may not have the strength to even brush your teeth.

In a blog titled “The Spoon Theory,” Christine Miserandino describes how she showed her friend what it’s like to have lupus. (The autoimmune disease often causes fatigue, fever, and joint pain, among other symptoms.) While sitting at a diner, Miserandino handed her friend 12 spoons. These represented units of energy. She then asked her friend to describe the typical activities of a day.

Miserandino took away a spoon for every single task: showering, getting dressed with painful joints, standing on a train. Skipping lunch would cost a spoon, too. When the spoons were gone, it meant there was barely energy to do anything else.

This idea of quantifying energy as spoons, and the idea that people with chronic disease only get a handful of spoons each day, hit home with readers far and wide. “Spoon theory” is now part of the lingo of autoimmune disease. Legions of people call themselves “spoonies,” connect on social media as #spoonies, use spoon theory to explain their chronic disease limitations, and plan their days around the number of spoons they have when they wake up. - Hope Cristol

We are told to do all the things, but doing almost none of the things is way better until they resonate deeply has gotten me further than doing all the things ever did.

So, should you even care about AI? Yes, and no. AI probably will allow us to be more efficient, but will it provide us with more time in our day for enjoyment? Only if we intentionally decide to use it that way. Even now, I hear people talking about using AI to write books 10x faster or deliver bigger, longer, more in-depth articles than ever before.

And yes, that’s all possible, but it sounds exhausting and untenable. I really appreciate Steph Pajones’s work on this subject, because she has limited time and energy as well. So, she uses AI to create a life she loves and make the work that matters to her without overextending herself. I take a more measured approach to AI, but I do tend to remain optimistic about the potential of AI.

That said, the biggest problem with AI is that it is run, funded, and maintained by capitalists, and the hypercapitalism quagmire we find ourselves mired in exists solely to squeeze maximum profitability out of a system. Not to mention that AI doesn’t need to be good to be weaponized against creatives, so I remain hesitant.

Like all technology, AI will only help insomuch as it allows you to gain more control over your life. That is true with anything, though, even the humble whisk.

How to use technology and productivity hacks to reclaim your time for things that matter

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