The best productivity tool you've likely never heard of.
Read at your own risk...
The things in life that bring you the most amount of progress usually don’t follow the pattern that you think they do.
We’ve been taught for a long time that more is better.
More money leads to more opportunity.
More time leads to more freedom.
More cars leads to more prestige or envy.
More work means a bigger pay raise - more company benefits - a promotion?
More degrees gives you more leverage into furthering your career.
Depending on what your boss is telling you next week Tuesday.
And all of these things are in their own right noble pursuits but in order to free space in your mind,
Practice removing things first.
Intuitively doing more exercise at the gym would make more sense to the mind.
Eating more food if you’re trying to gain more muscle is the conventional way to bulk up and make your gains.
Doing more cardio makes sense for you if you want those chiseled abs and that ripped V-line,
Which is probably what most people want.
Getting there isn’t just about adding more exercises to the point where you can’t physically move your body at the end of the day.
If you do…it would be counterintuitive and you’d actually be killing your gains even more than you’d be helping them.
Removal.
That’s the best productivity tool you have.
Most videos you see from these big creators on productivity have cranked up the wheel for you to do more.
But it’s actually, sometimes okay to do less.
Especially if the job that you have is "creative intensive”.
Removal is the best way to make sense of your thoughts and your mind.
Not just as a creative but as a person.
We expand our thoughts and understand ourselves more when we speak our mind.
That’s why creating something is so cathartic.
Just by putting words on a page or lines on canvas,
Human beings have shifted the paradigm and thus changed the course of the world.
And we haven’t really been around for that long.
Now we’re planning to send people to Mars.
We’re building underwater tunnels.
Side Note: Use this as a reference the next time you think of quitting something without sticking with it for longer than 6 months.
If the body and mind are influenced by the things that we consume then it’s safe to say they will also be influenced by the things that we remove.
This applies to E V E R Y T H I N G.
People.
Food.
Drinks.
Thought patterns.
Beliefs.
Situations.
Jobs.
Your life is a culmination of the decisions that you make on a daily basis and those decisions then lead to converging outcomes.
We like to refer to those outcomes as ‘luck’.
The body is affected by everything we put into our mouths.
The soul is affected by everything that we put into our eyes and ears.
Then by default: why wouldn’t you practice the act of removal?
The things you choose not to do affect your life just as much as the things you choose to do.
Want to do 4 hours of focused work?
Starve all your distractions keeping you from completing the work.
Tired of looking plump in the gym mirror?
Reduce the amount of junk food that you consume.
Tired of anxiously scrolling through Instagram like your thumb is running a marathon?
Don’t go onto the app for an entire day.
Delete it entirely.
These things are easy to do.
They’re also easy not to do.
Our attention spans our so fried as it is that the average person can only pay attention to one thing for 10 minutes without breaking their concentration.
This is because we live in a time where it’s so easy to get distracted.
You have 100 distractions around you every day that directly/indirectly try to drag you back to where you were 3 months ago or 1 week ago.
Productivity thrives where clear thinking meets creativity.
To think clearly - you must remove.
See you in here tomorrow.
Keyur